Surviving The Evacuation (Book 8): Anglesey Read Online Free PDF Page B

a field with five people hacking at the ground with pick-axes. “You want to stop and ask them to come along?”
    “Is that Willow Farm?” George asked. “No. Best not. They swore off violence, didn’t they? There’s no time to persuade them.”
    “What about the Parsons?” Gwen asked. “It’s the next turning.”
    George leaned forward. “No. It’s five miles to their farm, and then there’s that dirt track. They’ll be tending the fields, won’t they? Call it another couple of hours for them to get their gear and get ready. No, it’ll take too long, and we’ve wasted too much time. Just get us to the boat.”
    “You said the people at Willow Farm swore off violence, what do you mean?” I asked.
    “It’s a long story,” George said. “And not a pleasant one.”
    “And one that can wait,” Sholto said. “Why isn’t the rescue being left to the Special Forces?”
    “In short,” George said, “because most of them aren’t here, nor is anyone else I’d usually rely on. Heather Jones works out of the town of Menai Bridge at the northern edge of the strait. With the news of Quigley’s death and his submarine’s destruction, she took her boats out to survey the nearby coast. They won’t be back until tomorrow at the earliest. Leon and half his soldiers have gone with her, spread out on the various ships, along with the handful of other military personnel who’d usually be good at this sort of thing. Francois and the other half of the Special Forces are going to Svalbard with Miguel and his crew. Mister Mills, Sophia Augusto, and their crews are somewhere in the south Atlantic. Chester and Bran are out on the mainland checking on the safe house along with most of my railroad people. When you discount the doctors, the vets, the engineers, and all the others who can’t be spared, there’s not many left. I tried to recruit a few people from the boats in the port, but no one stepped forward.” He gave a bitter laugh. “Most ducked back into their cabins, or simply didn’t step out of them.”
    I mulled over the implications of that as we passed the skeletal ruins of a wind turbine.
    “What happened there?” Sholto asked.
    “Cluster bombs,” George said. “Don’t know if they were aiming for the island, for the bridge, or trying to drop them in the sea. Hundreds of them fell. You must have seen the damage? They got the turbines, and it’s a miracle they didn’t hit the power plant. Got the bridge, too.”
    As we drove across the island, I was less interested in the bomb damage than the empty farmland. I saw smoke from a chimney and what I was almost sure was a horse and rider. Otherwise, Anglesey was empty of everything except birds, erupting from hedges and rooftops, lampposts and trees, abandoned cars and a half-collapsed electricity pylon.
    “Menai Bridge coming up,” Gwen said.
    “I thought you said the bridge was destroyed,” Sholto said.
    “It’s a town,” I said. “On the Anglesey side of the bridge that crosses the Menai Strait. Had a population of around three thousand. The principal employer was the University of Bangor, which ran a campus on Anglesey. It was a battleground constituency during the last election,” I added.
    My first impression was that the small town was somehow different from the area around Holyhead, though I couldn’t immediately place why. Some of the broken windows had been boarded up, some front gardens dug over, but just as many had been left to weeds. Abandoned cars had been pushed onto pavements. Smoke drifted from a few chimneys, though most were still. As Gwen pulled the minibus to a halt at the edge of a car park, just short of the quay, I realised what was different.
    “It’s clean,” I said.
    “What?” George asked.
    “Nothing.”
    I hadn’t realised how filthy Holyhead had become until I had this town as a comparison. In fairness to the ferry port, it was in better condition than the ruined cities in the wasteland, but other than