“Eighteen to twenty-six metres, at most,” Avalon said.
“Commander Tusitala, return to the ship,” Adams said, speaking into the radio herself.
“Are we going ashore?” Tess asked.
“Not here,” the captain said. “Do you see the colour of the water around the broken seawall? The way that foam is cresting? Something is submerged just below the waterline. It would be too dangerous to approach. We need to refuel, and it’s unlikely the fuel depot survived the impact. We’ll try the commercial harbour in the north, around the Cape. The ship will anchor between Robben Island and the mainland. Boats will explore both the island and the harbour, while the helicopter can continue its survey of the ruins, and act as a beacon for the African Union. We’ll have it fly back towards Cape Hangklip before dusk, and again after dawn. Commissioner, can you take charge of the search of the city? Find out the level of the threat, and identify how thoroughly the city was looted before it was abandoned. If we can’t find fuel or provisions in the harbour, we will have to discuss how long we can wait here for the African Union to arrive.”
“I didn’t know Africa had mountains,” Zach said as they waited for the order to board the fast-boat.
“Haven’t you heard about Kilimanjaro?” Pippa Sullivan asked.
“Of course,” Zach said a little too quickly. “Is that what it is?”
“That’s Table Mountain,” Tess said. “Kilimanjaro is in Tanzania.”
“Right. Sure. Of course,” Zach said. He turned around and pointed at the bulkhead wall. “Behind us, is that the island where President Mandela was imprisoned?”
“Yeah, Robben Island,” Sullivan said. “I hope we can go ashore there.”
“President Mandela was a gardener,” Zach said. “When he was in prison. He kept a vegetable garden. So maybe they kept the garden going. It’s a museum now, isn’t it? If they kept the garden alive, we could find some fresh food.”
“Here’s hoping,” Tess said.
“How do you know so much about President Mandela?” Sullivan asked.
“Read a book,” Zach said with a shrug.
“At school?” Sullivan asked.
“Nah. In the library, of course.”
Before Sullivan, or Tess, could ask more, Dr Smilovitz came out of the water-lock door, a bag in each hand, another over his shoulder.
“Take this,” Leo said, thrusting a bag at Zach. “And this,” he said, dropping another at Sullivan’s feet. “Those go on the boat, and stay there until we have time for data collection. Flo isn’t coming,” he added, turning to Tess. “She’s analysing the data the helicopter collected, combining that with prevailing wind patterns.”
“What for?” Zach asked.
“That’s a question you can ask her when we return,” Tess said, who didn’t have space in her brain to worry about radiation as well. “You’ve got the Geiger counter, Leo?”
“Yes, and two spare dosimeters,” Leo said. “We should look in the hospital and university for more.”
“Tomorrow,” Tess said. “Give one dosimeter to Sullivan, and Bruce, you take the other.” She looked over her landing team. In addition to her three soldiers, Leo, Toppley, and Zach, four sailors were attached to her team: Sullivan, Mackay, Baxter, and Fairburn. Over their navy blues, they wore body-armour marked with the word Police in the hope this would make them appear less like looters to any survivors still in the city. The other two landing parties were similarly labelled.
“Team Stonefish has some new faces, eh, Zach?” Tess said. “Listen up. We’re sending three teams ashore. Robben Island, the beach to the north of Cape Town, and we’re taking a look at the marina just the other side of that harbour wall. The helicopter’s going to be flying back and forth, looking for the convoy, and maybe some survivors. In a city this big, there have to be some. Remember, just because it’s got two arms and two legs, doesn’t make it a zom. But this is an infected city. The helicopter will lure out the undead, so expect some to come lurching our way. We’re looking for food and a base ashore, and for clues as to what happened up in the north that’ll explain why the convoy has been delayed. Got it? Got weapons and water? Mackay, you’ve got the radio? Then let’s go for a boat ride.”
The small boat sawed through the gently cresting waves. The speed was a shock, the wind refreshing, washing away doubt, and subduing false hopes. As they drew nearer to the shore, she better understood the images the camera had recorded. Cape Town was a dead city, abandoned weeks ago. Everyone on the boat saw it, felt it, understood it, except for Sullivan and Zach who were shouting at each other about sharks.
Inside the seawall, Fairburn cut their speed, following Hawker’s direction to take their boat to the nearest pier. Tess turned around, looking for other boats. But by the time they bumped into the tyres slung below the jetty, she’d only seen wrecks, aground on the distant beach.
Before Baxter and Sullivan secured the boat, Oakes and Hawker were on the quay, sprinting towards the shore. By the time Tess clambered onto the concrete jetty, they were at its end.
“Why’s the ground moving?” Sullivan muttered.
“Your brain’s adapted to the motion of a ship, now it has to reset,” Leo said.
“Sea-lubber!” Zach said, bouncing up on his heels.
“Focus,” Hawker said. “I want safeties on, and fingers clear of triggers. Tess?”
“The marina’s bigger than I thought,” Tess said, looking at the neighbouring pier, and the scores of smaller jetties closer to shore. “Baxter, Fairburn, stay with the boat. If we get into trouble, you might have to pick us up from a different pier. Maybe that beach.”
“Aye-aye, ma’am,” Baxter said.
“Mackay, you’ve got the radio?” Hawker asked. “Take the rear with Sullivan. Zach, Leo, stick close to Clyde. Teegan, you stick close to the commissioner. Sergeant Oakes, you’re on point. There should be people here, but there certainly are zoms.”
Chapter 18 - Too Old for Toys
Cape Town, South Africa
At the end of the quay, a concrete concourse was bracketed by a score of small service huts, and secured from the shore by white railings and a heavy gate. Originally, this had been kept closed by a mechanical keypad, but someone had taken a crowbar and sledgehammer to the lock, bending the gatepost far enough to disengage the mechanism. Someone had then secured the gate with a rope, which, in turn, had been cut. Probably with the short-handled axe embedded in the skull of the corpse on the far side of the gate.
“The dents are on this side of the lock,” Tess said. “Whoever forced the gate did so from the quay. Probably someone who came, and went, by boat. This is the first quay inside the seawall. I’d guess this was a sailor who was following the coast.”
“Plenty of brass among the silt,” Hawker said. “About fifteen bodies on the far side. Zoms from the look of them.”
“They killed the zoms before opening the gate,” Zach said. “I mean, I would.”
“They ran out of bullets,” Tess said. “Why else use that axe? But they thought this fight was worth the risk, so must have already run out of food. Colonel, take the lead. That looks to be a hotel ahead. We’ll make that our first stop.”
“A hotel with Table Mountain behind, and the sea in front,” Toppley said. “That takes me back.”
“You’ve been here before?” Tess asked as she stepped over the corpses and through the gate.
“Not Cape Town, no,” Toppley said. “I was thinking of my first attempt at retirement ten years ago, but I can’t see any gun-wielding sentries on any of those balconies. If I were waiting for a ship, that would be a sensible place to station a lookout.”
“If they were waiting here, they’ll have eaten the food,” Tess said. “Pop-quiz, Zach. Where do we look for food now? I should warn you, there’s only one correct answer, and failure to guess it will have you swimming a lap of the warship.”
“If I guess it right, does that mean you have to swim around the ship?” he asked. “You k
now there are sharks in these waters? Me and Pip saw them. Proper sharks.”
“Great whites,” Sullivan said.
“Yeah, no fooling,” Zach said. “We saw three.”
“Two,” Sullivan said.
“I saw three,” Zach said.
“Fine, no forfeit,” Tess said. “But what’s the answer? Where do we look for food?”
“Dunno,” Zach said. “Supermarkets and groceries would have been looted first so a restaurant, maybe. But not that hotel. It’s too obvious.”
The architect must have regretted being born a millennium too late, and had constructed the hotel in the style of a tiered desert fortress onto which balconies, columns, and covered colonnades had been reluctantly tacked. Like the road, the hotel’s driveway was lined with perfectly trimmed palms. As around the jetty, bodies littered the broken-open gates, though they lay more heavily on the north side, as if at least some of the bodies had been moved out of the way.
“Someone cleared those corpses so they could get a vehicle in, or out,” Tess said. “No, hang back here, Zach,” she added as he took a step towards the gates, and so after Hawker and Oakes who were jogging to the hotel entrance. “You’re right, it’s too obvious. We won’t find food there.”
“So why’s the colonel and Nicko—” Zach began, just as the two soldiers, as one, stopped running and jumped back, raising their carbines. Two shots rang out. Another two. A fifth.
Hawker raised a clenched fist, before returning his hand to his gun. The two soldiers prowled forward.
Tess turned her own attention to the road. “Zach, Teegan, watch the hotel. Everyone else, eyes on the road.”
“They’re coming back, Commish!” Zach said.
The soldiers were running at a quick jog, which wasn’t quite a sprint.
“Trouble?” Tess asked.
“Zoms,” Oakes said, wiping a long machete with a strip of cloth.
“Where did you get that machete?” Zach asked.
“Zoms,” Oakes said again.
“I heard sounds inside the hotel,” Hawker said. “They secured the front doors from the inside. But it’s not people trapped in there.”
“Are they in danger of getting out?” Tess asked.
“They haven’t yet,” Hawker said. “But give it time.”
“Pity,” Tess said. “Let’s keep going.”
“Why’s it a pity?” Zach asked, as they moved off, Hawker and Oakes once again in the lead.
“A big hotel right by the waterfront would have been an ideal place for the African Union to wait until the rescue ships arrived,” Tess said. “There’s even a sign there for a heliport. But if there are still zombies inside… well, either we kill them, or we find a different pier to use.”
“What was the correct answer?” Zach asked. “Where do we look for food?”
“You got it,” Tess said. “Restaurants, hotels, schools. Not farms or grocery stores or homes, but everywhere in between. Places food was stored, but which would have been closed immediately after the pandemic began. Leo, didn’t you say you’d been here before?”
“I didn’t make it further than the university,” Leo said. “I’d been booked for a trio of lectures on non-proliferation and disarmament. I had a week’s vacation planned afterwards, but before I made it onto the stage, I got a call. There’d been another Ebola flare-up in the DRC. The C.I.A. believed it had been engineered. Flo and I got a police escort to the airport, and a fighter escort to the border.”
“The Ebola outbreak was engineered?” Tess asked.
“No, but one of the flare-ups was. A local warlord had the idea of getting into the bioweapons business. Fortunately for the world, that guy had skipped the classes on safety precautions. The bunker he built below ground was so badly ventilated, the victims were mostly him and his people.”
“Wow. I never knew,” Tess said.
“It was never publicised. Didn’t want to give other idiots the wrong idea, eh?” Leo said.
“Huh,” Tess said. Behind her, Sullivan and Zach were chin-wagging away like the teenagers they were. Mostly about shark movies, from what she could hear. But since she was chatting with Leo, she could hardly complain. “So you were lecturing, but Flo was with you?”
“She’s happy working anywhere, but I hoped we might have a few days R&R. Guess which guy thought it was a smart move to book tickets to every activity in advance? Lost three months’ salary. Still, could have been worse.”
“You mean there could have been another major Ebola outbreak?”
“That, sure, and the government was able to get our hotel and airline tickets refunded.”
Every interrogatory fibre of her detective soul wanted to say: are you sure you two aren’t a couple? But Tess let it go. For now. “How’s the radiation reading?”
“Stable,” he said, “which is the answer we want.”
The road led towards what, once, had been an affluent shopping precinct, built on either side of the road. A road which, now, was blocked to traffic by a charred aircraft engine.
As big as a truck, the engine must have belonged to a mega-jet. The impact had scattered the parts across the road. A rain of burning shrapnel had set the roadside palm trees ablaze. Four cars, which had been mid-commute, had been blown to scrap, their passengers turned to pulp on which flies still buzzed.
“There’s a shopping mall ahead,” Hawker said. “Stores on the ground floor, covered parking above. Entrance is up that ramp ahead. That upper-floor walkway crossing the road must give access to more stores behind the car park, and on the other side of the road.”
“Stores have stockrooms,” Tess said. “We should confirm they’ve been looted.”
“Agreed,” Hawker said. “But we’ll check a selection, then head towards that smoke.”
“Hey, I can see Table Mountain again,” Sullivan said.
“Uluru’s better,” Zach said.
But between them and the plateau-peak, the air was hazy from thin, grey-black plumes.
“Could that be the convoy?” Tess asked.
“You know what they say,” Hawker said. “Seeing is believing.” He held up a hand. “Gunfire! Single shots.”
“North,” Oakes said. “Single-shot rifle. One klick out.”
“Mackay, call it in,” Hawker said. “Everyone keep moving, but be ready to retreat.”
Detouring around the plane wreckage, passing an optician’s with a broken window, a clothing store with charred mannequins, a pet-supply shop where Tess crunched across the glass to look through the window. “Partially looted. Worth checking on the way back.”
“What for?” Zach asked.
“Antibiotics work as well on people as pets,” Clyde said. “Small-arms. Single shots. From the north. It’s over a kilometre away, but the rate of fire is increasing.”
A rasping hiss came from the far side of a wrecked car, abandoned outside the pet shop. A row of three airplane seats had fallen from the sky, leaving a V-shaped crater in the car’s engine before tumbling to the roadway. Three passengers had been buckled in their seats at the time the missile had blown the plane out of the sky. The first had been obliterated on impact with the ground. The second corpse was missing from the chest upward. The third had a thigh bone wedged through her stomach. This didn’t stop her shattered arm from undulating as she limply reached towards them.
“She can’t be alive,” Zach whispered.
Clyde fired. “No.”
Tess brushed the flies away from her face. “Move on. Just to the end of the block, and the end of these stores.”
Two small figures jumped through a broken glass window to their left, sprinting across the street.
“Guns down!” Hawker barked. “Hold fire!”
The children, a boy of about thirteen, a girl a year older, stumbled to a halt. Both carried matching hatchets in their hands, and other tools at their belts, all with black-rubber handles, all surely recently looted. On their backs were matching red backpacks, both sagging a
nd empty.
“African Union?” the girl asked.
“Yes,” Tess said. “We came by ship.”
“The Australian ship?” the boy asked.
“New Zealand,” Sullivan said.
“Yes,” Tess said quickly, hoping to cut through any further confusion. “We sailed from Mozambique on a warship, here to meet the African Union soldiers. Are you with them?”
“Now, yes,” the boy said with a broad smile.
“Monsters!” the girl hissed. “They’re following.”
Even as she spoke, a clatter came from inside the shop.
“And now they are not!” the boy said with triumph.
“Nicko, Clyde! Clear that store. Mackay, up front!” Hawker said. “Sullivan, watch our six.”
“Wait here,” Tess said, both to the children and to Toppley, Zach and Leo, and followed Clyde to the store, a jeweller’s. Three zombies were tangled in a back-and-forth net of thin chains rigged behind the counter, and in front of a doorway to the stockroom.
“Fishing hooks!” the boy said with pride, having followed them over. “I added fishing hooks! We can crawl underneath, but they do not learn.”
The zombies were shredding skin and fingers as they reached and pushed at the hooked chains. Gore dripped to the floor as, inch by peeling inch, they ripped their way through the obstacle.
“Finish them,” Tess said.
Clyde fired. Tess turned back to the boy. “Is the African Union convoy that came from Mozambique here, in the city?”
“Yes. But they are hungry,” the girl said. “We were getting them food. We can take you to them.”
“Can you tell us where they are?” Hawker asked.
“At the airport,” the boy said.
“Near where the airport was,” the girl said. “Too many planes exploded.”
“The international airport?” Hawker asked.
“You came here to collect food, yes?” Tess asked, forestalling anyone else’s questions with a raised hand. “Where from?”
The girl pointed across the road to a toyshop with a window partially barricaded on the inside. “From there. We hid it there weeks ago.”
Life Goes On | Book 4 | If Not Us [Surviving The Evacuation] Page 18
