Surviving The Evacuation (Book 6): Harvest by Frank Tayell Page B

the raft. McInery moved with a quick efficiency that hadn’t come solely from practice since the outbreak. She slammed the oar down on the zombie’s knee, then on its back, and then its head. Tuck leaped forward, stabbing her bayonet through the back of its neck, and into its brain. Together, they hauled the motionless creature over the side.
    Pulling on the twisted sections of rebar and pushing against the broken masonry, they reached the deeper water beyond the ruined bridge.
    Tuck resheathed the bayonet. It could be cleaned later, but the scabbard would have to be destroyed. That was a shame. Like the knife it was an antique, but there were plenty of them, and it would be a waste of wood and water trying to sterilise it.
    “Another mile, another bridge,” McInery said, turning to face Tuck. The soldier didn’t reply. She just picked up the oar and started rowing once more.
     
    They were finally stopped half a mile from the ruins of Parliament at the remains of the Hungerford Railway Bridge. Rails and sheet metal jutted out of the river. Around them, white water danced and dashed against a staircase that, in better times, had led to a floating restaurant. The stairs now lay at right angles to the river, thudding against the broken rails with each surging wave. They secured raft by steps that led up to a giant stone obelisk.
    “Cleopatra’s needle,” McInery signed. “Looted from Egypt, centuries ago.”
    Tuck nodded, but her interest wasn’t in the hieroglyph-covered monument but in a building beyond. The walls of the embankment were high, the river low, and most of the building’s roof and upper floors were gone, but she thought it had once housed the Ministry of Defence. She moved closer to McInery so she could see the map.
    They were on that section of the river that ran north to south from Embankment down to Vauxhall. The M.O.D. wasn’t marked, nor were any of the government buildings except for Downing Street. As she followed McInery’s finger tracing possible routes through the political heart of London, Tuck noticed that it kept hovering on, or close to, Buckingham Palace. For a second, she assumed that was where the woman wanted to go, then realised that it was probably a ploy to distract Tuck from wherever her real destination was.
    “A supply dump would be established in an open space,” McInery signed. “Buckingham Palace, St James’ Park, or somewhere like that.”
    “And those are beyond the drone’s range,” Tuck signed back, and to forestall any further conversation, handed McInery the ‘copter.
    She smoothed down the waterproof cover – a large transparent sack Jay had insisted the laptop stay inside at all times due to the terabyte of sitcoms he’d discovered on its hard drive – turned the rotors on, and flew the drone straight up.
    Tuck fixed her eyes to the laptop’s screen and the small window that showed the image from the camera. Along the road, almost as if they’d been parked, were an odd mix of refrigerated delivery trucks and armoured security vans. The software had two other windows, both blank, that would have shown the drone’s position on a street map had the GPS been working. To navigate, she had to rely on the image from the small camera, the clock, and the battery indicator. From experience she knew she’d be relying on landmarks and guesswork to match the drone’s path to the map McInery clutched in her hands.
    The ‘copter kept rising, and the image changed to that of a broken window surrounded by smoke-blackened stone. Another window, this one unbroken and through which Tuck could see that the floor inside had collapsed. Up again, until the wall was replaced with a rooftop filled with aerials and satellite dishes, except at the northwestern end where there was nothing but a gaping hole.
    Tilting the drone so the camera took in the skyline, she rotated it until she found the Shard. That gave her a position for London Bridge. A few more degrees of a slow turn,