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

by Tayell, Frank

  “And given it to Britain?” I asked. “Theoretically. But why only Britain?”

  “Exactly,” Adams said. “Britain would have been destroyed in the nuclear war. It’s an obvious target for Russia. A small target, yes, but impossible to miss.”

  “But the targeting went rogue,” I said.

  “No one knew that would happen before the missiles were launched,” she said. “I’m correct in assuming that, yes?”

  “As far as I know, yes,” I said.

  “After the outbreak, the traitors would have known the nuclear war was coming. Is that why they made up a story about a vaccine? Because they knew their population was about to die? In which case, those leaders would have fled. How? Aboard a nuclear-powered submarine. Going where? The Southern Hemisphere, to a naval base on some remote island.”

  “Let’s hope it was Diego Garcia,” I said.

  “It is as likely to be Ascension,” she said. “We will not assume the submarine is friendly, but nor are they hostile, and so we shall leave them in peace, and hope they repay the favour. You know what? Forget the wrench. Let’s find a drill.”

  21st March

  Chapter 16 - Sherlock Holmes

  The surface-level radiation has been rising since we left Inhambane. Slowly. Steadily as radioactive fallout settles from the upper atmosphere. Nuclear winter is a disputed theory, rather than a scientific fact. Something I’d not realised, because, until last month, I’d not given it much thought. Of course, there was only one way of testing this theory, and fortunately, a large portion of the bombs detonated in the ocean. This will present challenges in the medium term, defined by Leo as being from six months to ten years. How insurmountable a challenge is something we’ll learn in time. For now, we can only monitor the levels, and they’re currently still low. The oceans are vast. I tell myself that over and over. But as we were passing Port Elizabeth, a southerly wind caused the atmospheric sensors to spike. We detoured out to sea, and at maximum speed.

  We’ve passed Cape Agulhas, the most southerly point of the African continent, and so have left the Indian Ocean behind. We are now in the Atlantic, only a hundred and fifty kilometres from Cape Town. Night has fallen, and our speed has been cut. We’re as close to shore as the captain dares bring us. Close enough to spot electric lights. Tonight we watch. We listen on the radio. Tomorrow, we should be reunited with Laila and the African Union. What happens next is impossible to predict.

  Leo is certain the radiation spike was caused by a crater, inland of Port Elizabeth. So at least one nuclear bomb detonated in South Africa. One from which radiation still plumes into the air, is caught by the wind, and dragged seaward. Leo suggested the plumes were caused by ground-based fires. From his tone, I got the impression that grim explanation was the best possible explanation. The wind has changed direction now, meaning that radiation is heading inland, and so across the path of Laila and the African Union, and there is absolutely nothing we can do to help them. It’s frustrating. It’s not that I long for action, but I hate simply being a spectator. Always have.

  Growing up, everyone has a bad year. Sixteen was mine. That was the last time I kept a journal. I tried after Sydney, but the grief was too raw to express with a pen. Age sixteen was when I began to grasp how simultaneously vast, and small, the world was. How repetitive the problems. How reluctant the world was to embrace change. How, even in the far-off places where the grass was evergreen, life was little better.

  Did the journal help? Perhaps. It kept me occupied during the long evenings, working in Mum’s restaurant, until Mick gave me a copy of Sherlock Holmes. Can’t have been long after his wife died. Once a week, he’d come in for a meal. Not sure who was looking after Anna. She can’t have been more than a few years old. One of her aunts, I suppose. But once a week, Mick came to the restaurant, always with a book for company. He’d sit by the window, eat, and read. I’d stay by the register, occasionally writing. Mostly the same few words over and over. Occasionally synonyms. More often doodles.

  One night, a man came in looking for my mum. Except he used her old name. The name she left behind when she crossed the Yalu River. I froze. Mick noticed.

  The stranger stood there. Wouldn’t leave. Said he was waiting for my mum. Mick told him to go. Bloke ignored him. Mick… By then, he’d already lived a life. He knew how the world was, and he must have known what kind of world Mum had escaped. Mick threw the bloke out into the street.

  That was the first time I witnessed real violence. Not the schoolyard stuff. Fist and foot. Fast and bloody. Mick had the bloke in the dust in seconds, and kept him there while he called the police. Me? I was frozen with fear.

  The stranger wasn’t a North Korean agent, just one of the human traffickers who’d smuggled Mum from the North Korean border to the Chinese airport where she’d caught the flight to Seoul. He was on the run from the Chinese authorities who, by then, were cracking down on the trade, and he’d come to shake my mum down.

  Afterwards, and after the police had gone, a woman from the South Korean consulate visited. She was young, but wise. Kind as wool, yet hard as diamond. Strikingly beautiful and my instant role-model. Yep, I spent many a night re-doing my hair and wasting make-up trying to copy her look. I always assumed she was a spy. She suggested Mum move to South Korea. I’d get a place at school, and language lessons so I could catch up.

  The spy stayed for a week, talking with Mum nearly twelve hours a day, in the kitchen, while they both cooked. I was not allowed to listen. Mum never told me what they talked about. After a week, the spy left. Mum announced we weren’t leaving. She liked her restaurant. She liked Broken Hill.

  I hated her for making us stay in that baking, nowhere city. My misdirected anger should have been aimed at that terrorist government who abused its people to an inhuman degree. But I blamed Mum because she was nearby and I was sixteen, bullied at school, and then punished for fighting back.

  Mum had cancer. A result of the forced labour she’d done as a child. That’s why she didn’t want to leave. She didn’t want me to be orphaned and friendless in a country whose language I barely spoke.

  She survived it. That time.

  You know the weird thing? Afterward, business boomed. There wasn’t a single night where I was alone in the restaurant. Mick, or one of his relatives, was in every night. A lot of the older miners, who’d retired close to where they’d lived and worked, but who’d done their national service in the other hemisphere, camped out by the windows. I might have been sixteen, but I knew why.

  Had to change the menu a bit. Made it more traditionally Australian. These days, you’d call it Outback-Korean fusion, but it was really just finding a balance between what the customers wanted to eat and what Mum knew how to cook.

  Mum got better. She didn’t recover. But she was less obviously sick. People kept coming to the restaurant. Ultimately, a few years later, when it was obvious I was on a different path, she was able to sell the business and enjoy a few years of peace.

  Meantime, the restaurant was too busy for me to waste the hours doodling in a journal. Mick took to popping in more often. Sometimes with Anna in her pushchair. One night, he left me the book he’d been reading as a tip. I’d have preferred cash. It was Sherlock Holmes. Now, if you ask Mick, he’ll say it was him giving me that book which is why I became a cop. I won’t say it didn’t help, even if it did give me an unrealistic view of the importance of trivial clues in solving a case. But that wasn’t why I picked up the badge.

  That was my bad year. Bullied, and then punished for fighting. Spending my nights working, friendless, alone. Worried that Mum’s restaurant was always too empty. Shaken down by a human trafficker. Discovering spies were real. Realising my mum had seen things so dark she could never share them with me. Having my golden ticket away from the desert snatched out of my hands by my selfish mother. Learning she had cancer. Thinking she was going to die.

  Yes, it was a bad year, which ended when I pulled my head out of the sand and rea
lised I wasn’t the centre of the universe. Other people mattered. Other people cared. Other people were worth caring about. Those old miners sat down in our restaurant as a way of standing up to that gallows-joke of a regime. When I realised I was one of them, that I belonged, I knew I had to find a way of giving back. Of standing up in my own way. That’s why I became a cop.

  Part 3

  Forgotten Lessons from Not So Long Ago

  Cape Town, South Africa

  22nd March

  Chapter 17 - The Cape of Lost Hope

  False Bay, Cape Town, South Africa

  After she’d watched the helicopter take flight, Commissioner Tess Qwong took a moment to marvel at the view. The captain had parked the ship at the southern edge of False Bay, a massive circular harbour, twenty kilometres deep, twenty wide in the south, and thirty kilometres wide in the north where the city of Cape Town began. To the west of False Bay was the Cape of Good Hope, on which lay Simon’s Town and the homeport of the South African Navy. To the north was the city of Cape Town, and Table Mountain. On the eastern edge of the bay was Cape Hangklip, and the rendezvous point with the African Union convoy.

  Cape Hangklip was relatively remote and relatively isolated, while still being relatively close to the city, and so to the highways which led north. It was close to perfect as a rendezvous. So where was the convoy?

  Tess turned her gaze from the angry ocean and up to the tranquil blue sky in which the helicopter was already a speck, carrying Colonel Hawker, Clyde, and Nicko, in case the search-mission turned into a rescue.

  Taking one last deep breath of the wondrously still, gloriously warm, faintly sweet South African air, she went back inside, and up to the bridge.

  Leo and Avalon were analysing stills grabbed from the helicopter, while the captain was watching the live feed. The screen showed a rocky shore beset by craggy slopes, windswept shrubs, and a narrow road.

  “Is that Cape Hangklip?” Tess asked.

  “Yes. The radiation is rising,” Adams said, her voice low.

  “Technically no,” Avalon said. “The reading is rising, but at a rate commensurate with the helicopter’s ascent and journey inland. Extrapolating, there is an increasing level of airborne particulates.”

  “Could that be fallout from Port Elizabeth?” Tess asked.

  “Yes,” Leo said.

  “No,” Avalon said. “The wind direction is wrong.”

  “My first captain always said, wait until all the data was hooked before jumping to judgement,” Adams said, ostensibly addressing the bridge crew. “These two are a walking example of why.”

  “Thank you,” Avalon said, and sounded sincere.

  “Anything on the radio, Mr Kane?” Adams asked.

  “Nothing yet, ma’am,” Lieutenant Kane said.

  “The convoy could have been delayed by a detour around Port Elizabeth,” Tess said.

  “Indeed,” the captain said. “Mr Kane, what of the repeater radio station?”

  “As quiet as a kakapo, ma’am.”

  “Tell the commander to follow the road eastward,” Adams said. “The people could be anywhere, but the vehicles would be on the road.”

  “Movement,” Tess said. “Zoms.”

  On the feed, a trio of walking corpses tumbled down a steep escarpment onto the road, angling towards the helicopter. A fourth zombie was already ahead of them, lurching along the road towards the helicopter, but it was on the wrong side of the crash barrier. After five staggering steps, it toppled down a steep-walled creek.

  Tess switched her focus to the screen displaying a digital map. It was a two-and-a-half-thousand-kilometre drive from Inhambane. If the roads were clear, that was a two-day journey.

  The Cape of Good Hope was not the most southerly point of Africa, as early European mapmakers had assumed. The city of Cape Town began on the northern shore of False Bay, and sprawled northward, curling around Table Mountain, and along the shores of Table Bay on the far side of the Cape of Good Hope. In Table Bay lay the most famous prison in the world: Robben Island. She remembered that much from the practical lesson in history, equality, and hope as she and her mother had watched apartheid crumble on their restaurant’s rabbit-eared TV set: her mother had cried for a week and smiled for a month.

  “Mr Renton, ask the commander to make her way along the bay to Simon’s Town,” Adams said.

  “Is that where the naval base is?” Tess asked.

  “Yes. It’s an obvious place for the convoy to seek refuge if they arrived yesterday,” Adams said.

  Avalon tapped her screen, which relayed a wide-angle view of the city’s southern suburbs. “A selective blaze swept through that suburb. Those shadows suggest more fires half a kilometre north, and a kilometre to the northwest. To the west is smoke. Something is still smouldering.”

  “A cooking fire?” Tess asked.

  “The smoke haze is too large,” Avalon said.

  “More zombies on the shore,” Adams said, watching the live-stream. “But fewer than Inhambane. Fewer shipwrecks, too.”

  “They’re small craft,” Tess said. “Are they fishing boats?”

  “Pleasure yachts,” the captain said. “The shape of the hull gives it away. Larger ships would have been drafted into the evacuation fleet.”

  “Some zoms, but no barricades on the shore-road,” Tess said, looking at the images, trying to piece together a picture of what had happened. Windswept. Storm-rinsed. Sun-baked. Ash-coated. Soot-dusted. Dotted with charred ruins. Filled with walking corpses now following the sound of the copter’s rotors. Compact townships. Low-rise apartments. Single-storey homes. Neatly planned subdivisions with scrubby brown gardens. A junction blockaded by cars, ringed by corpses.

  “Hold there, Commander,” Adams said. “Rotate ten degrees port. Thank you.”

  Leo pulled up a still of the battlefield. “Over a hundred dead zoms,” he said.

  “They’ve fallen in a ring around those vehicles,” Tess said. “It’s not a last stand, is it? The survivors fought a battle, won, and left. Why fight there? Can you bring up the footage shot before this?”

  “I can,” Leo said, tapping at the keyboard. “How much do you want?”

  “Just that cluster of apartment buildings. Okay, now go back a bit more to the housing development. Lots of low buildings. One-storey, built close together. A township, I think. Yes, there it is! Huh.”

  “What is it?” the captain asked, coming to look.

  “Very few cars,” Tess said. “Almost none. It’s low-income housing, but there should still be some privately owned vehicles. After those zoms were killed around that junction, no one went to salvage the vehicles from the barricade. The survivors of that battle didn’t need the wheels. Where exactly is this?”

  “About level with the mid-point of the bay,” Leo said.

  “Leo, can you find the footage of the road nearer to Cape Hangklip? Yep. Good. Stop. There aren’t any cars at all. There’s nothing south of here until you reach penguins, so where are all the cars?”

  “Which cars?” Leo asked.

  “All the cars from Africa,” Tess said.

  “They went east to join the evacuation,” Adams said.

  “Not everyone on this continent,” Tess said. “Not everyone could have heard of the evacuation. Not everyone would believe it. Some people would have fled south. Not everyone would have had the fuel to reach this far, but surely some would.”

  “It would be counter-instinctual to leave the security of one’s home,” Avalon said.

  “Human beings are nothing if not counter-instinctual,” Tess said. “That’s about a thirty-kilometre sweep of road, with no cars at all. Some would have had the fuel to reach this far, but no further. There should be at least one. But there’s not.”

  “They must have stalled on the far side of the city,” Leo said.

  “Sure, exactly, but why?” Tess said. “I was thinking about Port Elizabeth. If the radiation stopped people from getting this far, did it stop them from
leaving, too?”

  “That is your answer,” Adams said, pointing again at the live-stream. “It’s a plane.”

  Technically, it was an engine and one quarter of a wing, which had torn through a subdivision of beachfront villa-houses.

  “Where’s the other wing?” Leo asked, tapping at the keyboard, and bringing up a still of the charred engine.

  “It wasn’t attempting a landing,” the captain said. “The plane was shot out of the sky. An A380, I think. Have the commander continue south to the naval base with all haste. I believe the majority of the local population departed here soon after the outbreak. If they used all lanes of the highways, no vehicles would be able to travel in a counter direction. Who would wish to come to a city everyone was fleeing? The roads to the north would become clogged with out-of-fuel cars. That’s why there are no cars here.”

  “The convoy were driving earth-movers,” Avalon said. “Stalled traffic would be a temporary impediment to them.”

  “Wait, there!” Tess said, now watching the live feed. “In the shallows. Another wing. Two engines, jutting out of the water. Two engines on one wing, so it was a different plane.”

  “You said it yourself, Commissioner,” Adams said. “There’s nothing south of here but penguins. The planes arrived first, hoping to land, hoping for salvation, but bringing the infection. They were shot from the sky. Ah, but that wasn’t caused by a crashed plane.”

  The helicopter had moved on, and was now hovering above three large craters. Offshore, the seawall had been breached in two places. On land, the craters were surrounded by debris and charred ruins.

  “That’s the naval base,” Adams said, checking her charts. “Yes. I’m certain.”

  “The craters are too small for a nuclear detonation,” Leo said. “The diameter is about twenty metres on the smallest, thirty on the largest.”