Life Goes On | Book 4 | If Not Us [Surviving The Evacuation]

by Tayell, Frank

  “The word better not be run,” Mick said.

  The door led into a windowless waiting room with three other doors, four leather armchairs, a broken glass table, and a body atop the fractured shards. The cleaver in her skull definitely wasn’t military issue, while the tactical gear and body-armour spoke of another private mercenary. On the wall opposite the entrance, near the door leading into the compound’s gardens, was a control box which had been broken open, revealing wires and switches inside.

  “Try that door,” Tess said, turning to the door to the right.

  “Locked,” Clyde said.

  “This one’s not,” Tess said. “In here’s a security station. CCTV monitors. Coffee pot. A couple of other doors. Probably staff quarters. Yep,” she added, opening a door. “Bunk room. Four bunks. Curtains pulled back. Beds made. The other door is… it’s a bathroom.”

  “This door’s unlocked,” Clyde said, having crossed to the final door, nearest to the hangar-garage. “Oh, this is very definitely a garage. Was there a weapons locker in the office?”

  “Nope,” Tess said. “Everyone inside!” she called. “Teegan, look for some tape in that office-room. The locks are electric and the power is out. I don’t want us trapped in here.”

  “Here,” Clyde said, pulling a roll from a pouch. “Far more versatile than zip-ties.”

  “What kind of charity work did you say you did again?” Elaina asked, as she used the tape to cover the lock-mechanism.

  “Restoration,” Clyde said. “We’ll go through the garage. If there’s a door at the far end, it’ll be close to the house.”

  “Hang about,” Tess said, bending over the corpse. “I want to check… no. No tattoos on the arm. Which doesn’t mean anything. Four bunks in that place, but it’s not their permanent quarters. Four guards on duty, so call it a minimum of eight on-site. One here, one in the doorway, and two dead outside. We might find another four inside.”

  “Four hostiles?” Zach asked.

  “Four witnesses,” Tess said. “Or four zombies.”

  It was a garage, not a hangar, and it contained twelve cars, each on its own raised stand, six on either side of the long chamber, parked diagonally as if they were ready to be driven away.

  “Now that’s a beaut,” Zach said.

  “She’s a Ferrari,” Bianca said.

  “It’s hideous,” Clyde said, moving light and rifle from one vehicle to the next.

  “What’s that yellow one?” Zach asked, walking over to it.

  “A waste of steel and rubber,” Clyde said.

  “And polymers and rare metals,” Tess said. “Must cost more than my house.”

  “More than my school,” Elaina said as their team fanned out, moving along the rows of vehicles, and towards the far end. “You don’t approve, Clyde?”

  “They’re built to reach maximum efficiency at a velocity higher than the speed-limit,” Clyde said. “How are you supposed to enjoy the countryside when you’re driving at two hundred kilometres an hour with a police helicopter buzzing overhead?”

  “Yeah, but that’s not why, is it?” Elaina said. “Didn’t you go to a race track for your honeymoon?”

  “I had to,” he said. “I didn’t want to, but that’s the sacrifice you pay for love.”

  “Strewth, mate, I’d love a turn in one of these,” Mick said, angling around an olive-green Bugatti.

  “Where are you going, Mick?” Tess asked.

  “The fuel tanks,” he said, aiming his light ahead.

  A clatter echoed around the room. Tess spun.

  “Hostile!” Clyde barked. “Watch your six.”

  They’d spread out as they entered the garage. Unintentionally. Unconsciously. Unprofessionally, like the amateurs they were.

  Tess was still trying to identify where the sound had come from when Elaina yelled. Her light dropped, spinning and turning, flashing in every direction.

  “Hold fire!” Clyde yelled. “Hold fire!”

  Tess’s light found Elaina. The teacher had been knocked from her feet. Now weaponless, on the ground, she rolled from her front to her back, kicking at the curled, cold, lifeless hands coiling around her leg.

  Bianca grabbed Elaina’s arm, pulling. Toppley stamped on the zombie’s wrist before firing her shotgun, point-blank, into its skull.

  “You okay?” Tess asked as the echo of shot and scream died away.

  “Fine,” Elaina said as Bianca helped her up. “Wait, is that my blood?”

  “Nah, that’s its brains,” Zach said.

  “Oh, don’t, Zach,” Elaina said.

  Tess shone her light on the corpse. “Green overalls, not body-armour. Could have been a mechanic, a gardener, or an infected refugee. We’ll assume he brought friends. Stay close together from now on.”

  At the far end of the garage, they found another door, and another corpse in body-armour.

  “It’s locked with a mechanical keypad,” Mick said. “But they got through using a Kalgoorlie bump-key.”

  “What’s that mean?” Zach asked.

  “An acetylene torch,” Mick said, shining his light on the burn marks around the door where the lock-plate had been burned through.

  It was a relief to step through the door, and back outside into the warm summer’s air, but that relief only lasted long enough for a trio of flies to land on her neck. On the road, she’d been aware of the insects, but her focus had been on the bodies. Here, the flies swarmed in an infestation two hatchings away from becoming a plague.

  “Ah, gerroff!” Zach snapped, ineffectually swatting at the haze.

  “Insects aren’t too interested in zombie corpses,” Tess said. “Expect to see a lot of bodies ahead of us. Clyde, take point. We’re going to the house.”

  A square of courtyard narrowed into a path. To either side, the plots of lawns were raised by a metre, bordered by a wilting hedge. All together it created the effect of a sunken walkway, which felt increasingly like a death trap with every step she took. Through the withered hedge she saw a trio of bodies, and a winged cloud slowly recycling the dead.

  Through a white-panelled gate, just beyond a white-panelled shed from which white-painted pipes rooted into the ground, a buzzing cloud hovered above what had been a swimming pool. Four decomposed skeletons lay in the bloody soup of the mostly evaporated pool. A fifth, in a shimmering purple suit and with a knife through its eye, lay poolside, almost ignored by the buzzing swarm.

  No order had to be given for everyone to hurry on to the relative calm of another sunken walkway, which abruptly became a raised path through lowered squares of lawn, then a patio outside the house itself. The slabs, made of marble rather than anything so common as granite, occupied a plot big enough for a manageable house. The furniture, again all white, was piled outside the wall-sized sliding-glass doors. That glass was dented rather than cracked, and nearly as thick as a brick. Inside the room, more furniture, this mostly old wood, had been haphazardly stacked, blocking the view.

  “You’d need a miner to hack through that lot,” Mick said.

  “Do you see that bookshelf on top of this table?” Tess said. “That was used as a ladder up to the balcony. We can try to get in up there.”

  The table was white, except where insect effluvia lay field-thick, and made of wood-effect plastic. The bookcase, however, was hand-carved mahogany.

  “Me first, Commish,” Clyde said, jumping onto the table. Placing one foot on the bookcase, he jumped up, testing his weight. “Balcony. Door’s open. Think it’s a bedroom.” As he was about to leap up again, shards of white plastic erupted from the stone-effect balustrade as, from inside, someone opened fire.

  “Police!” Tess yelled, while Clyde ducked down, and got another burst of automatic fire in response.

  “I could have told you that wasn’t going to work,” Mick said calmly.

  “Tell me what would work?” Tess hissed back.

  “Get ready to follow me!” Clyde hissed, before pulling a spare magazine from his be
lt. “Someone give me a grenade!” he yelled, at the top of his lungs before flinging the magazine over the balcony. “Fire in the hole!” he yelled, flinging himself up the bookcase and over the balcony.

  As Tess clambered up onto the table, she heard glass shatter, and plaster erupt as Clyde fired a suppressed burst into the house.

  “Clear!” Clyde called, even as Tess rolled over the rail.

  The man lay inside the room beyond the glass doors, by a pushed-aside bed with crumpled, blood-stained sheets.

  “Jeans. Bullet-proof vest,” Tess said, taking in the corpse, while keeping her finger close to her trigger.

  “Carrying a B&T APC submachine gun,” Clyde said. “Swiss. It’s not military. Not our military, anyway.”

  “Get everyone else up here,” Tess said, crossing to the door. It was polished wood with a wooden frame rather than the white plastic panels covering everything outside. She tried the handle. The door was closed, but not locked.

  “An APC9,” Toppley said, making a beeline for the gun.

  “What can you tell me about it?” Tess asked.

  “That this man had a rich benefactor,” Toppley said. “It’s the kind of weapon you pick from a catalogue. Showy rather than tried-and-tested.”

  “But still deadly,” Clyde said. “What do you want to do, Commish?”

  “Wrong question, mate,” Mick said. “Why aren’t we running back to the plane?”

  “I’m giving them a chance to steal it,” Tess said. “Elaina, Bianca, watch the windows, but stay out of sight.”

  “You’ll let them nick my plane?” Mick asked.

  “Yes, because we know what it looks like, and exactly how much fuel it has in the tanks,” Tess said. “We’ll borrow a couple of those cars, drive to the refugee camp, commandeer another plane, and then start scouting the outback for that Beechcraft. Mick, you and Teegan watch the gardens. Elaina, Bianca, Zach, watch this door. Clyde and me will flush them out. We don’t want a gunfight, understand? Let them run.”

  “You know what happens when people split up in movies,” Mick said.

  “That’s why I’m glad I’m not wearing a red shirt today,” Zach said. “What’s the call sign so we know it’s you?”

  “Remember rule-one,” Mick said. “Rule-two is the counter sign.”

  Reflexively, Tess looked down at her boots before she reached for the handle, and pulled the door open. Silently, Clyde pivoted outside, ducking into a crouch. Tess followed, keeping her back to him, her gun raised. They were in a wide and long corridor with walls covered in minimalist monochrome abstracts set in ostentatious gilt frames. Four doors were on the garden-side of the property, with a fifth at the far end of the corridor.

  “On me,” Clyde said.

  Tess pivoted around, taking up position behind and above Clyde as he ran in a crouch towards a set of glass doors. Beyond, the corridor opened, became lighter, brighter, airier. Just before the glass-fronted doors was an open doorway. Clyde slowed as they neared.

  Tess kept her aim on the glass doors at the far end. Beyond them, she could make out a gold-coated bannister, a wraparound staircase mirrored on both sides of a large hall.

  “Clear,” Clyde whispered, moving on, and beyond the open doorway.

  Tess glanced inside. A sitting room, judging by the green-leather sofa and five matching chairs.

  Without warning, Clyde pushed her sideways, into the room, even as he fired, and someone else fired back.

  Bullets shattered the glass doors, slamming into the corridor’s wall, splintering the gold picture frames, shredding the artwork.

  Clyde eased his gun-barrel around the door, firing a pair of shots which she heard thud into a wall. Half a magazine tore down the corridor in reply.

  They had taken refuge in a large room, sparsely furnished. The chairs were arranged in a circle in the middle. In the near corner stood a bar dotted with glasses and bottles. An ill-hidden projector faced the other, blank wall. On the far side were tinted glass windows, all closed. There was no other door.

  Outside, the second half of that magazine shredded plaster and paintings.

  “Hope you’re a good shot,” Tess whispered. “I’ve got an idea, but it’ll only work once. Be ready.” She holstered her gun, and stepped closer to the door. “Hold your fire! We’re friendly! Hold your fire!”

  No shots came in return, which she took as a step in the right direction, but she didn’t take one of her own out into the corridor, not yet.

  “We’re friendly,” she called again. “We’ve come from Canberra.”

  “Why are you here?” the man called back.

  Tess nodded. Pick a name, and she had a fifty-fifty of it being the right one. Pick the wrong one, and she’d never know. “Kelly sent us,” she said. “I’m coming out. Unarmed.”

  Empty hands first, she stepped around the door and out into the corridor, but stayed close to the wall as she took a step, then another towards the now-shattered glass doors.

  She saw the gun, the man’s eye close to the barrel, the top of his head, and the spray of blood as Clyde’s bullet smashed bone and scrambled brain.

  Even as she breathed out in relief, he overtook her, dashed past, and to the doors, pushing them open.

  “Clear,” he said. “Don’t do that again, Commish.”

  “Here’s hoping,” she said.

  “Main doors are barricaded,” he said. “That’s the front entrance. Looks like more rooms on the other side of the hallway. Down or along?”

  “Along,” Tess said. “Quick, though.”

  The other end of the hall was marked by another set of glass doors. Unlike the first set, these weren’t broken, though they were dented, marred, scratched by heavy blows from the sledgehammer lying next to them. In the centre, scorched and burned, a handprint-lock dangled loose.

  With his boot, Clyde pushed the door open.

  “Found it,” he said, pointing with his rifle’s barrel into the first room on the other side.

  “Found what?” she asked.

  “The panic room,” he said.

  It was a library of leather-bound tomes, shelved according to colour. Not a single spine was cracked, not a single cover was creased. In the room’s centre, far more worn than any of the books, was a snooker table. Against the far wall, one bank of shelves had been pulled out. Built on a hinge, it had concealed the vault-like door, at the base of which, along with an acetylene torch, were chisels, drills, and another sledgehammer. Despite the scars, char, dents, and abrasions, the vault-door remained firmly closed.

  “Considering who owned this house, and how he got rich, I’m going to say jackpot,” Clyde said. “But we’ll need a professional to get into this. Is it Toppley’s area?”

  “She was more into fencing what was inside a safe than cracking into it,” Tess said. “We’ll send Mick, Zach, and Elaina up to the refugee camp, and get them to come down here by road with an engineering team.”

  “Worth checking whether there’s some diesel in the garage,” Clyde said. “Maybe bring down a few earth-movers to clear those bodies. This place was supposed to have its own well, wasn’t it? It’d make for a decent fortified farm after it’s had a bit of a clean-up.”

  “Good plan,” Tess said. “First, we better check there’s no one else here. So we’ll clear downstairs, then—”

  She was interrupted by an off-key buzz coming from the door itself.

  “Who are ya?” a man asked. Through the small speaker, his voice was spidery, but it oozed a malicious superiority familiar to anyone who kept abreast of taunting courthouse-step press conferences.

  “My name is Tess Qwong, Australian Federal Police, and you, Sir Malcolm Baker, are under arrest.”

  “Press the button!” Baker said. “You’ve got to press the button to speak. Who are ya!”

  Tess sighed.

  “Kinda loses the effect when you’ve got to take a do-over,” Clyde said. He pressed the button.

  “Police,” Tess said. “The co
up’s over, Baker. You lost. You’re under arrest. Open up, or—” Before she could finish the threat, the door clicked, and a malignant miasma wafted out.

  “Strewth,” Clyde said, stepping back.

  The door opened further, the stench grew worse, and was followed by a sewer-scarecrow spotted with effluent.

  “One more hour!” Sir Malcolm Baker said. “One more hour and I’d have given up. Didn’t plumb it in!”

  “Who didn’t plumb what in?” Clyde asked.

  “The dunny!” Baker said. “Half a mil, I paid for that panic room, and they didn’t plumb the bloody toilet in. It’s just a pipe in the wall!”

  “Sir Malcolm Baker,” Tess began, “you’re under arrest for insurrection and treason, and for—”

  “Yeah, I know all that,” he said. “I might have been locked in the syphilitic circle of Hell, but I know what’s going on. That’s why those bastards turned on me. What happened to Aaron?”

  “He’s dead,” Tess said.

  “Ah, pity,” Baker said, with just a hint of emotion in his voice, enough to show that, beneath seven decades of ruining other people’s lives, there was a memory of humanity. It was gone in a flash. “Well,” he snapped. “What are you waiting for? Aren’t you taking me in? Prisoners get clothes and a shower, right?”

  “How many hostiles are here in the house?” Tess asked.

  “Two. But you got ’em both,” Baker said. “Watched you plug them. Better than front row seats, that was. Still got my cameras. Every room. Every angle. They run on battery in case thieves cut the power. Smart, right?”

  “Clyde, get the others,” Tess said. “Baker, sit on the floor.”

  “I won’t,” he growled.

  “You misunderstand your value,” Tess said, “and you overestimate my desire to bother with a trial.”

  “I don’t,” Baker said. “On either count. I know everything, and you want to know it, too.”

  “You mean about the coup?” Tess asked.

  “Nah, that’s old news,” Baker said. “Aaron’s dead. Vaughn’s dead. Lignatiev’s dead. Is Kelly dead?”

  “She is.”

  “Good. Then the coup’s finished. I can give you bank accounts, but that’s not going to do you much good. Nah, it’s over except for the history books and no one ever made a profit out of them. O.O.’s not a bad sort, though, so it’s not worked out too badly.”