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

by Tayell, Frank

  “Let me be aboard the helicopter,” Tess said.

  “Not a chance,” Hawker said. “This is what we trained for. We’ll set an ambush, grab some wheels, and put the desert between us and them. We’ll reach the Pacific long before you.”

  “I guarantee we’ll destroy any coal power station,” Adams said. “I can predict, with near certainty, we’ll neutralise their runway and the majority of the shipping anchored in the bay. After which, the future becomes murky. I’d have a go reading some tea leaves, but we’re out of even the powdered kind. There’ll be no negotiations, no warnings, no attempt to take prisoners. We won’t wait for them to fire at us, or to wait for a radioed call-and-response. That’s why I didn’t want anyone else here. We’re acting on your intel, Commissioner. This is a coalmine, surrounded by desert. It’s unlikely the undead have reached this far. Perhaps these sisters didn’t, either. We are about to perpetrate a massacre. Is it justified?”

  “Are there no alternatives?” Tess asked.

  “The alternative was coming in with a hundred U.S. Rangers,” Hawker said. “Without them, what we have is a warship capable of obliterating the target.”

  “We’ll destroy their lab,” Adams said. “And we can’t let the scientists go ashore. You understand, I hope.” She sounded genuinely apologetic, and more than a little disappointed.

  “I do,” Tess said, a flash of guilt rushing through her bones. She looked at the map. They’d come this far. They couldn’t simply turn back. But until now, she’d not truly considered what would happen when they arrived. Her primary source was Sir Malcolm Baker, who’d never let the truth get in the way of a great headline. Toppley had confirmed some of it. But not enough for a shoot-first policy. Not in the old world. But this was a new and terrible era where police officers planned wars. An era when absolutely no one would ever condemn her for taking the more violent path.

  “So our warship will appear from nowhere, and shell the shore,” she said. “It won’t be the first time that’s happened since the outbreak.”

  4th April

  Chapter 36 - A Desert Rose

  Puerto Bolivar, Colombia

  Before dawn arrived, everyone was at their station, counting the seconds during the stultifyingly tense period of inactive expectation preceding the battle. For Tess, Zach, and Clyde, their place was on the helicopter deck with Nicko and Bruce. Zach and Nicko were playing poker so badly they seemed to have invented an entirely new game. Clyde was either asleep, or pretending to be. Bruce was reading a pocket-size volume of poetry, though he’d not changed the page for ten minutes.

  The previous evening, Captain Adams had explained the plan to the crew, giving more detail than Tess had expected, though not nearly as much as she’d have liked. The Te Taiki would be used as bait to draw the large ships out of the harbour and into the bay’s entrance. There, those vessels would be sunk, blocking access or egress to all but the smallest ships. To make the warship appear a tantalising prize, the fast-boats would be allowed to approach close, and even board. That should deter portable artillery fire from the shore until said artillery could be neutralised.

  Pirates weren’t zombies; they could shoot back. She didn’t know who the enemy really was. Farmers? Miners? Street-level dealers? Professional mercenaries like Kelly and her crew? What were they armed with? Shotguns, rifles, RPGs? How many were there? What if they were just local survivors, taking shelter on a desolate swathe of coast, hoping a rescue ship might arrive? What if they took prisoners? What if—

  But her musings were cut short by Commander Tusitala sliding down the ladder.

  “Are we a go?” Hawker asked.

  “Cap’n thinks they’re gone,” Tusitala said. “We’re ten kilometres out, and there’s not a squeak on the radar or puff from their power station. We’re going up, but for a recce.”

  “That’s me, kid,” Oakes said. “You can pay up when I get back.”

  “I thought I was winning,” Zach said.

  As the helicopter took off, Tess headed to the bridge.

  “Deserting your post, Commissioner?” Adams said, relief evident in both voice and words. “I’ll have to make you walk the plank.”

  “There’s nothing on radar?” Tess asked.

  “Or radio. Nothing on the horizon.”

  “Radiation?” Tess asked.

  “Lower than Natal,” Adams said.

  Which was an inexact answer loaded with implications.

  “Negative visual on the bay,” Hawker’s voice came amplified through the bridge speaker. “No ships. Repeat, no ships in the bay. Negative on artillery. Pier on the western spit. No ships at the pier. Scratch that. Two sunken vessels. Fifty metres long. Steel hull. Cargo ships.”

  Tess turned her attention to the images being relayed from the helicopter, still showing the view of the empty bay. The sea became the shore. The shallow beach morphed into desert, except in the south where it rose into grey-shadowed mountains. The image lurched as the helicopter pivoted, and she saw a long and battered pier. Ashore, the beach and desert were stained black with a pitch-trail of carbon leading to a towering mountain of coal.

  “Is that the coal bunker?” Tess asked. “Assuming those railway freight cars are a standard size, that’s got to be two hundred metres by five hundred long. That’s a lot of coal.”

  “It is,” Adams said.

  The freight-railway tracks disappeared into the desert, in turn giving a hint as to where the mines themselves lay, but the helicopter had already moved on, buzzing high over a ramshackle company town where a handful of large villas were encircled by at least a hundred concrete block-houses. Metal roofs. Stubby trees. A basketball court. A stalled car. Onshore fuel tanks. A mansion with a high wall. It was a confused snapshot as the helicopter flew low and fast, but one constant was the bodies.

  “They’re all dead,” Tess said, and then corrected herself. “They’re not moving.”

  “There’s a desalination plant,” Adams said. “That type of pipe-work is unmistakable. That could be a large diesel turbine next to it.”

  “Where?” Tess asked, reflexively turning away from the screen.

  “Near the onshore fuel tanks,” Adams said.

  “They weren’t burning coal,” Tess said. “Can you ask the commander to turn around?”

  “Not until they’ve reached the airport. I want confirmation there’s no aerial threat,” Adams said. “That’s it! There! That’s the runway.”

  Three twin-engine civilian island hoppers were parked next to the runway, but there were no helicopters or fighter planes.

  “No cooking fires. No smoke. No people,” Tess said. “Just bodies.”

  They lay clustered near the runway’s edge. A pile of ten, then twelve, then six, almost as if they’d been waiting for a plane. More likely, the survivors killed some zoms, retreated a few paces, killed some more, retreated again, and again, until they’d died.

  “There’s no threat here,” Tess said. “I don’t know what we’ve found, but it’s not a danger to us. Look at this place. It’s nearly perfect for a refuge. Remote. Desolate. With enough coal for a year. But there’s a splash of green beneath those mountains on the southern shore of the bay. There’s water here at the edge of the desert. Oh, it’s perfect, and there’s no one here. Sir Malcolm lied, and sent me to the other side of the world.”

  “Commander Tusitala, return to the ship,” the captain said. “Mr Renton, I want a shore party. Take the boat up to the pier. Commissioner, would you care to assist them?”

  “Could I borrow the helicopter?” Tess asked. “Send Bruce to the airport. See if there’s anything aboard the planes indicating where they’ve come from. But I’d like the helicopter to drop me off near the houses. That’s where we’ll find food, and where we might find the reason Sir Malcolm sent us here.”

  The helicopter’s rotors whipped up a thick black cloud of carbon-stained sand as it slowed its descent to a hover, a metre above the cleared and empty ground adjacent to the coal b
unkers.

  “Stay frosty, Zach!” Oakes said.

  “In this heat, the electricity bill would bankrupt him,” Clyde yelled back. “On three, Zach, but don’t jump.”

  Which was when Oakes pushed Zach out of the helicopter. Clyde slid downward, carbine raised.

  Head bowed, Tess dropped off the edge, and the helicopter ascended, even as Zach stood up.

  “What the hell, Nicko!” Zach yelled up into the swirling black cloud.

  “The sarge didn’t want you doing a slice-and-splat impression of a boiled egg,” Clyde said.

  The swirling mist of orange grit and black soot, given flight by the rotors’ updraft, slowly settled, revealing a landscape that had been apocalyptic long before the outbreak.

  “Who’d want to live here?” Zach said.

  “I was just thinking it reminds me of home,” Tess said. “Except for the bodies.”

  “Weapon up, Zach,” Clyde said. “Eyes ahead, gate and fence, road and alleys, doors and corners. We’re walking abreast. Those are dead zoms,” he added. “Headshot.”

  “Head stab,” Zach said. “That bloke’s still got the knife in his eye.”

  “Five shot, four stabbed, one bludgeoned, three uncertain,” Tess said. “That’s just those between here and the road. Gate is down, but so is the fence. Looks like it was for keeping dogs out, rather than thieves.”

  “Who’d steal coal?” Zach asked, wiping the sooty dust from his forehead.

  “Anyone who wants to boil their billy,” Clyde said. “Rail tracks.”

  “There’s a train here?” Zach asked.

  “To bring the coal from the mine,” Tess said. “That other set runs to the harbour where the coal would be loaded aboard a ship.”

  “Freight cars at four o’clock,” Clyde said. “Single loco. Looks to be diesel.”

  “Coal goes out by ship, so the tracks run to the mine, but not back to civilisation,” Tess said. “Ships need diesel, so they’d ship in extra for the people. This place is remote. Very remote. More remote than it appeared on the map, so you know what we should ask? Where’d the zoms come from?”

  “Where are we heading, boss?” Clyde asked.

  “The houses,” Tess said. “Food’s a priority, and if there’s none here, we’ll be gone before nightfall. Sir Malcolm lied to us, or he was misled. I think this is just a remote coal mine.”

  “Zom,” Zach said, pausing by the body. “Or was she? She’s got a shovel next to her. But she was shot in the head. I guess people can get shot in the head, too.”

  “First rule of policing, don’t jump to conclusions,” Tess said as they picked their way around the bodies and over to the broken fence.

  “You said the first rule was check your boots, and that it was universal,” Zach said.

  “Fine. Call that rule-six,” Tess said.

  “Nah, you said rule-six was listen more than you talk.”

  “That one’s universal, too,” Clyde said. “Bodies here. Guns next to them. Kalashnikovs. No magazines. Skulls intact. Think this one was shot.”

  “Died at least a week ago,” Tess said. “Could be two weeks. Hard to tell in this climate.”

  “Zoms don’t shoot people,” Zach said.

  “No, they don’t,” Tess said.

  More bodies lined the road. Mostly zombies. Mostly shot in the head. So many it was easy to overlook the dismembered limbs, the torn flesh, and the clawed corpses of the defenders.

  “Was this a fighting retreat?” Tess asked.

  “Can’t tell,” Clyde said.

  “AK-47,” Tess said, as she pointed at a Kalashnikov. “Old model, but a new stock. The magazine is missing.”

  “Let me check that house,” Clyde said and walked up the pair of wooden steps to the broken-open door surrounded by bullet-flecked plaster.

  “We’ll wait down that alley,” Tess said. “Cover your mouth, Zach. You don’t want any of these flies hitching a ride.”

  “Miners lived in there,” Clyde said, coming out of the back door. “Kitchen is meagre, but it’s been looted. They took the food, left everything else.”

  “Someone survived the battle,” Tess said. “After they killed the zoms, they came back for the food and ammo.”

  Not everyone living in this working town had been a miner, evidenced by the sun-bleached trike at the alley’s end.

  The larger houses were easy to find. A low terracotta-coloured wall ran around the entire block. Just inside the wall, on either side of the road, were two small, but neat, houses, both with squares of front-garden-patio, a shade-covered porch, two storeys, and a flattened roof on which was another sunshade, and where the snipers had stood. On the road, the pavement, the lawn, the low wall, the porch, the doorway, and inside, lay bodies of the undead. Shot, stabbed, bludgeoned; there had been hundreds here. Not because of these two small houses, but what lay beyond: a villa that was ringed with a high wooden palisade, which blocked from view everything inside. The tall gate was open, and filled with more corpses.

  “About five hundred,” Tess said.

  “Six,” Clyde said. “They spill over behind the watchtowers.”

  “What watchtowers?” Zach asked.

  “Those two houses by the road,” Clyde said. “The flat roofs are so someone could stand guard.”

  “Keeping those trees watered would have cost a fortune,” Tess said.

  Four trimmed palms lined either side of the pavement, leading to the mansion. Or was it a compound? Who had wooden walls somewhere without forests? Someone who wanted to display their wealth.

  “Whoa!” Zach said as he slipped on a pile of spent brass.

  “Got you, mate,” Clyde said, grabbing his arm.

  “Rule-one,” Tess said, as she picked her way through the bodies and to the wide-open gates.

  The clothes worn by the dead were familiar from the outback. Denim bleached by the sun rather than in the factory, criss-crossed with stitches from where rips had been repaired rather than cherished. They were work-clothes because living in these harsh conditions was labour. Home-tailored to fit rather than some designer’s aesthetically tight and baggy. Practical rather than modest. Affordable rather than cheap. Faded, but not drab. With a scrub, they’d be found in any arid mine or farming town in either hemisphere. Except for the priest, identifiable from dog collar and crucifix, though he still gripped the barrel of an assault rifle in his hands.

  “You notice what’s missing?” Tess asked.

  “Not the guns,” Zach said.

  “Missing from the bodies. What the dead aren’t wearing,” she said. “Very few are wearing hats.”

  “I’ve not seen many zoms in hats,” Zach said.

  “The dead without a head wound must be the immune,” Tess said. “Some of these would be locals, infected here, and I can’t see many hats lying in the dirt, so they left their home after dark. That’s when the zoms came. The locals threw up what barriers they could, and rushed here. To this compound because it had walls.”

  “I’ll tell you something else that’s missing,” Clyde said. “There are no dead kids.”

  “You spoke too soon,” Zach said.

  Just inside the courtyard, lay the body of a boy, shot in the head, but with an AK-47 lying partially beneath his body.

  The courtyard was large enough for a dozen cars to be parked, though none were there now. Another row of desiccated jungle-palms separated the car park from the house, a squat two-storey with small windows and white-painted walls. A marble colonnade supported an upper-floor balcony, which had an awning above and flowerpots beneath. The house was big enough for perhaps ten bedrooms, depending on their size. A large house, but not a huge one. The main entrance had wide wooden double doors, which were closed. All of the windows had frosted glass; an odd feature for any room that wasn’t a bathroom. But most noticeable of all were the bodies.

  “You okay, Zach?” she asked.

  “Mmm,” he said.

  “Get on the radio,” she said. “Tell�
�” She paused, uncertain how to finish the sentence.

  At the edge of the courtyard, close to the house, were three bodies. Their eyes had been plucked from their skulls, but that could have been the work of birds. The rest was the work of evil incarnate. Each victim was pinned to a table by a kitchen knife embedded in ankle, thigh, wrist, and forearm. That had only been the beginning of their torment.

  The body of the man nearest the house was etched with a root-work of cuts: thin, long, unbroken lines running from scalp downward. Some made it to chest, to groin, to fingers, but only five incisions made it all the way to the toes. It was as if the killer had been attempting the longest unbroken incision.

  The second victim had been partially skinned. Squares of skin hung loose from her abdomen and thighs, exposing the muscle beneath. The side of each square measured ten centimetres in length. Tess could tell because the killer had marked the woman’s entire body before they’d begun, using a ruler and marker pen, both of which lay in the blood-soaked sand.

  The third victim, by contrast, was nearly unmarked. In addition to the blades wedged in ankle and wrist, more had been hammered into her left arm, but one must have nicked an artery, mercifully ending the terminal ordeal.

  “Tell the captain we’ve found three bodies, executed in the fashion favoured by the cartel,” Tess said.

  “Empty ammo crates over on those tables,” Clyde said. “A few weapons, too. Assault rifles, RPGs, a few shotguns. No ammo, but there’s a lot of ammo boxes. A lot of spent cartridges. They fought a real battle here.”

  “The locals,” Tess said. “After the outbreak, when the zoms came, they retreated here and used the cartel’s arsenal to hold back the undead. At some point, they turned their defence into an attack. Killed the zoms. All the zoms, because we’ve seen none. They gathered the food from the houses and stripped the ammo from the dead.” She turned back to the mutilated corpses. “Then the sisters returned home.”