Life Goes On | Book 3 | While The Lights Are On [Surviving The Evacuation]

by Tayell, Frank

  “Put that down, mate,” she said, waving her hand at the sentry. “It’s over.” She stepped forward and knelt by the dying woman’s side.

  “We all pay in the—” the judge whispered, but choked on blood before she could finish her final words.

  Tess breathed out. “That wasn’t how I wanted this to end, but it is an end. Canberra doesn’t know about the gallows, so get rid of it. Over the next few months, thousands of workers will come here. Production’s got to come first if we’re to save the planet. What happened here will be another sad story of the nightmare-times which no one will want to remember.”

  “Commissioner,” Toppley said, holding up her own wrists, tied rather than cuffed. “I originally arrived with two hundred and twenty others. When I was led from the… let’s call it a cell, there were four others still alive.”

  “There’s only five of you left?” Tess turned to the sentry with the shotgun. “Go fetch the other four. Take them out to the car park. Move!” She turned to the clerk. “Untie Toppley.” She turned to the receptionist. “That was self-defence. No charges will be filed. I’d suggest you pick up that sidearm. You might need it.”

  The sunlight seemed far brighter, but the air not as hot, as she stepped outside, followed by the receptionist, the clerk, and Teegan Toppley. Talya Bundeson waited by her truck, while the gate-guard sheltered beneath his awning.

  “The judge shot herself,” Tess said, loudly. “She was under arrest for her involvement in the theft of cattle and for the murder of their drovers. A new management team will arrive tomorrow.”

  Talya nodded. “Renee Jenson,” she said.

  “You know her?” Tess asked.

  “I gave her the truck,” Talya said.

  “Yes, she made it to Jackson,” Tess said. “And she is one of the witnesses, one of the reasons I’m here. This woman has the arrest warrant. You should give it a read.”

  The gate-guard turned on his heel, walking away in a direction opposite to the airport.

  “And you’re giving anyone who wants to run time to do so?” Talya asked.

  “There will be no further reprisals,” Tess said. “No more repercussions. We don’t want people running off into the outback where they might become infected.” That last part was true. The other was not. She turned to Toppley. “You were given those clothes here, right? PZ199.”

  “I assume the Z stands for zombie, the P for prisoner,” Toppley said. “It’s a touch gauche, don’t you think?”

  Before Tess could reply, the sentry appeared from a side door with four tied and chained convicts following behind. One of whom Tess knew. Personally.

  The first convict to step outside was a woman. In her early twenties, her frazzled hair matched her confused expression as the eyes behind the taped-together glasses darted left and right, calculating whether this change of events implied safety, or more danger. Thin, five-five, but she’d be taller if she stood straight. Her corporate uniform, on which was stamped PZ197, hung loose on her frame. Behind her came PZ209, a tall man, late forties or early fifties, with short grey hair and three weeks of white stubble on his chin. His head was bowed, his shoulders squared, his muscles tensed. Behind him, PZ194, a wiry twenty-something, had rolled up his sleeves revealing arms with as much sunburn as tattoos. A beak nose jutted out between strands of his long, lank hair which partially hid his rabbit teeth and matching eyes that darted this way and that.

  But slouching along at the rear came the familiar frame of PZ201, a man with a barrel chest and a crate gut. As a boy, and with the girl he’d gone on to marry, he’d tormented Tess, the foreign girl with the mistake for a name. As a man, he’d delighted in pestering the copper he’d envied and feared. She’d locked up him more times than she could remember, often after a fight to put on the cuffs. The last time she’d seen him was in Broken Hill, after the outbreak, when he and his wife had been scamming foreign students billeted in some chalets the self-serving couple owned. He was a petty crook with petty desires, consumed by equally petty jealousy. It was no surprise to see Stevie Morsten in chains, but it was odd to see him out here. And as he saw her, his smile widened.

  “Hello, Princess,” he said loudly. “It’s Princess Wrong. Ha.”

  “What did you do to end up here, Stevie?”

  “Done nothing,” he said. “Got lost.”

  “My name’s Commissioner Tess Qwong,” she said, addressing the prisoners. “You’re all coming with me to a refugee camp on the coast.”

  “What if we don’t want to, Princess?” Stevie Morsten asked.

  Tess pointed to the noose, swinging in the barely perceptible wind. “Do you really want to stay?”

  Chapter 6 - Con-Air

  Above Queensland

  In the car park, she had the convicts’ hands untied, and their heavy chains removed. During the procedure, in sight of the gibbet, no one spoke, not even Stevie Morsten, though his lips moved in silent calculation. Toppley kept her eyes on Tess, while PZ209 kept his on Talya’s truck. But though the convict looked, he didn’t bolt. Tess trusted her instinct, and that warned her the grey-haired man was far more dangerous than Stevie Morsten, but like Toppley, PZ209 had realised the plane was the fastest way away from the gallows.

  “We’re flying in that?” Stevie asked, as he climbed down from the back of the fire-service truck when it stopped thirty metres from the Beechcraft Super King Air.

  “Like I said, Stevie, you can always stay here,” Tess said.

  “My mates call me Steve-O, Princess,” he said. “But you can call me Mister Morsten.”

  “Stevie Morsten?” Mick Dodson asked as he climbed out of the Beechcraft. “Is that you?”

  Stevie looked down, suddenly cowed. Clearly remembering a night twenty years ago when he’d had his first, and only, confrontation with Mick, whose pledge to do no harm hadn’t extended to the alley behind a pub.

  Tess nodded to Mick, and they walked around the plane, out of earshot of the prisoners and Talya who was now conferring with the other ground-crew worker, Rob-O Hansen.

  “What’s going on, Tess?” Mick asked. “How’d Stevie Morsten end up here? Is that young woman the judge?”

  “The judge is dead, Mick. It was worse than the evidence led us to believe. The judge was hanging the convicts. About two hundred were here, and these are the survivors. Don’t ask me what crimes they committed, but we’ve got to get them out of here, and get word to send in the army. Maybe the air force as well.”

  “That’s Teegan Toppley, isn’t it?” Mick asked. “Well, I know what she did. You want to bring them all with us?”

  “If we leave the convicts behind, they might be killed by those who want to eliminate the evidence, and it won’t stop with these five. It’ll be a bloodbath. But if we take these people away, maybe the guilty will stay their hand.”

  “I’ve got her balanced and loaded for one passenger,” Mick said. “Blame the engineer’s storage system. She’d be heavy, but manageable. With five passengers, I’ll have to unload all the crates by the wings.”

  “Will weight be a problem?” Tess asked.

  “Only for the bits of the flight that involve defeating gravity,” Mick said. “But look at it this way, I guarantee we’ll be able to land.”

  Again confounding Mick’s criticism of the engineer, it barely took three minutes to slide out the crates he’d loaded in the front half of the plane. Within ten, the convicts were all aboard. As Mick gave the plane one final inspection, Tess walked over to the airport service-truck where Talya and Rob-O stood, nervous and expectant.

  “The new management team will arrive tomorrow,” Tess said. “What happened here is over. It’s done. What matters is how we face the dark days ahead. Pass the word.”

  She headed back to the plane, knowing her words wouldn’t be enough. There might be reprisals by those who considered themselves victims. There might be desertions into the outback, and so more zombies unless the unforgiving landscape killed them first. The hands at the cattl
e station, and perhaps even the roughnecks down at the Jackson Oil Refinery, would demand a reckoning for their dead mates. But those weren’t her problems today. They almost certainly would be in the days ahead, but first she still had two more warrants to serve.

  She climbed aboard the plane, closing the door even as Mick powered up the engines.

  The fold-down benches ran along the cabin, opposite each other. Rather than seatbelts, webbing harnesses were bolted to a sprung rack on the fuselage. Though all the convicts were now buckled in, none were cuffed or otherwise secured. Toppley, PZ209, and the young woman sat on the starboard side. The younger man sat next to Stevie, who sprawled with his legs splayed across the aisle.

  “Princess! Princess!” Stevie called with the enthusiasm and wit of a toddler. “When are you serving drinks, Princess?”

  “We’re flying to the coast,” Tess said, addressing them all. “To a small town where we’re building canning factories for fish, other factories to make the cans, foundries and metal recycling centres, power stations, and desalination plants. In short, there’s work. There’s a bed. Clothes. Meals. There’s life. There’ll even be pay.”

  “And our crimes will be forgiven?” Teegan Toppley asked.

  “Forgotten,” Tess said.

  “In my case, I find that hard to believe,” Toppley said.

  “I spent last night shooting zombies attacking the wall around Canberra,” Tess said. “So believe it or not, but I’m looking forward to seeing the sea.”

  “What about some nuts?” Stevie asked, laughing uproariously.

  “Quiet, Mr Morsten,” Toppley said. “Never kick a gift horse, because it has twice the legs to kick back.”

  “Eh?” Stevie asked.

  “Buckle up, Tess,” Mick called as the plane began to roll down the runway.

  She pulled herself to the cockpit, strapped herself in, and put on the headset.

  Five minutes later, they were in the air, heading west, and she relaxed, but only a fraction. “How long until we land?” she asked.

  “Around dusk,” Mick said. “Three hours. Maybe four. Maybe less.”

  “Did I ever tell you how reassuring I find your rigid devotion to precision?” she said.

  “What happened back there?” Mick asked.

  “You should ask what went wrong,” Tess said. “The survivors of that cattle raid correctly identified the logo on their ambushers’ vehicles. That pilot from the 737 correctly identified the cattle trucks. The escapee who made it to Jackson identified the judge, and our attorney general was able to find the name among the records of court staff. All well and good, and which gave us just cause to charge them with the cattle raid and those murders. But that’s only a third of the story.”

  “You mentioned hanging,” Mick said.

  “She was executing convicts,” Tess said. “According to Toppley, there were two hundred plus, and those five are the only survivors. But that’s only a third of the story, too. At the refinery, the wrong vehicles were in the car park. Only one didn’t sport the company colours, not counting the two stolen during the cattle raid. Inside, the air-conditioning wasn’t on. I could hear the fans turning, but no cold air blew out. There simply aren’t enough experienced crew to run that place. So what happened to the old hands?”

  “Do you think they got the colonial neck-tie?” Mick asked.

  “Or a bullet,” Tess said. “We’ll have to interrogate the survivors. Maybe dig up the graves.”

  “Do we?” Mick asked. “And does it have to be us?”

  “It has to be done. Erin Vaughn’s covering letter says she wants to make a public announcement of the arrest of the ringleader behind the theft of the cattle and those who are so poorly administering the refugee camps. She wants to demonstrate the federal government is still in charge, still administering the old laws. So there has to be an investigation. Quick rather than thorough. But it’ll have to be done, and I reckon it has to be done by me. I just wish we’d had more information going in.”

  “Speaking of that, maybe you should find some backup for the next two warrants.”

  “Defo,” Tess said. “I needed backup back there, but there were no coppers in Canberra. Not enough soldiers to secure the suburbs. There’s no one but you to fly the plane, and no one but me to serve the warrants. Blame the lack of satellite communication, blame the confusion, but it’s a bloody mess, Mick. That woman wouldn’t have come quietly. If the gun hadn’t accidentally discharged during the fight, I’d have shot her. It would have been a summary execution of someone guilty of carrying out summary executions. That’s not how we should run a country.”

  “Sounds like the right level of hypocrisy to me,” Mick said. “Each of us, and all of us together, we’ve got to hold on one more day, and then one more, until the days become weeks, the weeks become months, and we look back and realise we’re through the worst of it.”

  Tess said nothing, but watched the landscape cycle from pink to crimson, with an occasional splash of green from a stubborn tree. An even rarer plume of smoke marked a small settlement. Miners? Soldiers clearing the outback? Refugees fleeing the city? The plane flew on before she could tell.

  “Those convicts, do you think they know how to fly a plane?” Mick asked.

  “Toppley might. Maybe PZ209. The others? Doubt it. You’re worried they’ll hijack the plane?”

  “I wouldn’t say worried,” Mick said. “But do you remember that movie we watched on Saturday?”

  “Which movie?” Tess asked. “And which Saturday?”

  “Had that fella who’s in everything. The movie about the plane full of convicts,” he said. “I thought we could change our call-sign.”

  “You’re not renaming this flight Con-Air,” she said. “And that was Tuesday, not Saturday.”

  “Was it? I’m losing track of the days.”

  “I’m losing track of the hours,” Tess said. “There’s far more of them in a day than there used to be.”

  “You’re getting old, that’s all,” Mick said.

  “Says the bloke whose footsteps I’m following,” she said. “What was the airfield like?”

  “In Durham? Efficient. Under-crewed. Low on supplies.”

  “Did you refuel?”

  “I only managed to get us a top-up,” Mick said.

  “Should we detour south to Jackson?” Tess asked.

  “No, we’ll reach the coast,” Mick said. “And I’d rather spend the night by the sea. Been a while since I last saw it.”

  “Can’t you fly higher?”

  “With the weight in the tail, if I try to ascend, every degree I rise, the tail will add another, and we’re liable to switch from a plane to a sail boat. Not very aerodynamic, your average boat.”

  “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” Tess said.

  “Better to enjoy it than the other thing,” Mick said. “Up here, I can appreciate the full depth of time, the breadth of the future. I can see the weight of the past and how lightly we ever brushed the soil.”

  “I can see a mountain ahead of us,” Tess said.

  “Nah, can’t be,” Mick said, even as they raced their shadow towards the dusty promontory. “That’s just a hill.”

  As they flew over it, she saw it wasn’t as high as she’d first thought, but she also saw the plane’s shadow far, far too close. But the landscape below was morphing from the emptily expansive outback into the deceptively barren bush. Trees were more numerous, with an occasional ring marking a house, or line marking a road, though those all appeared to be running north-south, and disappeared behind as quickly as she spotted them.

  “I tell you what we’ll do when we get back to Canberra,” Tess said. “We’ll watch that movie about Capone.”

  “Capone, why?” Mick said.

  “Tax fraud. That’s what they caught Toppley for, wasn’t it?”

  “This is the Flying Doctor, I’ve received your Mayday. Can you receive me, over?” The urgency in Mick’s voice woke Tess up.

/>   “Mayday?” she asked. “Where are we?”

  “Five hundred kilometres east of Durham, by the clock,” Mick said, before returning to his radio. “This is the Flying Doctor. Are you receiving me, over?”

  Below, the rolling bush was every shade of red from ochre to umber, but full of long shadows cast by shallow hills, dotted with more frequent clumps of pale scrub, desiccated during the long summer, now waiting for the ever elusive rains.

  “They’re transmitting, but not receiving,” Mick said. “And now they’ve stopped sending. Look for smoke.” He brought the plane into a slow turn.

  “A wildfire?” Tess asked, still waking. “Not out here?”

  “Nope. Car fire,” Mick said. “It’s a bus of kids, surrounded by zombies. Car ahead of them is on fire. Car behind is dead. They’re trapped with some of their infected mates outside. It was a bloke on the radio, so they’ve got some adults with them, but you could hear the kids in the background.”

  “Can we find them?” Tess asked.

  “He didn’t know where he was,” Mick said, “but he could see a helipad, so there might be a runway.”

  “Out here, must be a mine,” Tess said. “There. Smoke. Two-o’clock.”

  “Got it,” Mick said, straightening the plane. “If we can land, we’ll have to,” he added.

  “Yes,” Tess said. And she knew what would have to be done then.

  Below, a curving dust track cut through the gently rolling shadows, turning and twisting around dry creek-beds, but leading to a rising pillar of sharp grey cloud. Nearer still, the track abruptly became a ruler-straight, quadruple-width, recently tarred, five kilometre stretch of highway running a few degrees off north-to-south. At the southern end, a helicopter squatted on a perfect square of tarmac, and near it billowed smoke from the lead vehicle in a car-bus-car convoy.

  “Zombies surrounding the bus,” Tess said. “Twenty to thirty. Probably at the lower end.”

  “No telegraph poles. No lights,” Mick said. “They’ve turned the road into a temporary runway for a new mine. Must be that place up ahead. What do you think of the bus?”