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

by Tayell, Frank

“I’ll take her to her room, let her get some rest,” Erin said. “But I went to the tower earlier. I’ve recorded something we can put out when the time comes.”

  “I think that time is now,” Anna said.

  Chapter 22 - The Fragility of Unicorns

  Australian National University

  It was surreal stepping outside into a magical day where summer’s memory met winter’s promise. A dense bulwark of clouds held back the sun, while the temperature had fled, leaving in its stead the usually glorious prospect of rain. But it was utterly spoiled by the sight of Oswald Owen. He leaned against the police patrol car, a cigar in one hand, a glass in the other, and an octagonal bottle on the car’s roof.

  “Fancy a snifter?” he asked. “It’s brandy. French, sadly. But beggars can’t be picky at the end of the world.”

  “It’s early, but even if it were late, we’re working,” she said.

  “Not yet, we’re not,” he said. “The real work won’t begin for a few hours. When it does, it won’t stop for weeks. I told the factories to double production until further notice.”

  “Production of what?”

  “Everything,” he said calmly, as if he relished the challenges ahead. “I triaged the list, identified the less critical projects. When we need resources or labour, or cannon fodder, we can draw from them. I’ve sent word to increase our output of aviation fuel, but word doesn’t travel fast these days. The planes will run out before everyone can be rescued, but hopefully not before they land.”

  “So what do we do about it?” she asked.

  “Like you said, make more shovels,” he replied, billowing a plume of smoke as dark and portentous as the storm clouds above.

  “I’m fetching Dr Avalon and her assistants from the university,” she said. “They can help with data analysis. But unless you’ve a better suggestion, and as long as information is being flown in, we’re better running the government from the airport.”

  “Give me a chair and a glass, and I can work anywhere,” he said. “You better take this.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small pistol, a government-issue 9mm.

  “No, I don’t need it, and I don’t want it,” she said. “If zombies breach the walls, the sirens will sound.”

  “They didn’t last night,” he said. “Only five of us left, and I don’t know if we can count the prime minister. This is the calm at the eye of the storm. The worst is only a breeze away.”

  To end the conversation, she took the gun, leaving him to wallow. It was only when she reached her car that she remembered there had been an octagonal bottle in the bathroom where Aaron Bryce had committed suicide. Such an oddly shaped bottle couldn’t be a coincidence. A bribe from a lobbyist? Probably. But when she climbed into the car, keeping her hands low, she took out the gun and ejected the magazine. It was loaded. Oddly, that only left her feeling even more unsettled.

  Replaying her conversation with O.O., and his previous comments during the night, kept her distracted as she drove through the near-empty city. Something he’d said, or done, or not done, had caught at the back of her mind. But what?

  As she drove into the university, she was forced to stop by a gang of labourers hauling giant corrugated sheets across the road.

  “Let her pass! Clear the road!” a spry man called to the group, stopping those on the footpath while hurrying on those who’d already begun to cross. The man’s Scottish accent, redolent of the Isle of Skye on which he’d been born, was as familiar as his face. Liam Dalgleish, a union man from the tips of his arthritic fingers to the top of his egg-smooth head, was an increasingly valuable ally in these strange days. As the workers cleared the road, Dalgleish came over to her window.

  “G’day, Liam,” she said, bracing herself for the lecture that was his usual way of beginning a conversation.

  “Good day to you, Minister,” Dalgleish said, both cordially and formally. “A lot of the lads and lasses are talking about a peculiar rumour they heard this morning on the radio. Not on the official channel, but one of those private stations broadcasting from the bush.”

  “There’s been an accident in the Pacific near Hawaii,” Anna said quickly. “We’ll broadcast an official statement as soon as we have more specific details.”

  “What kind of accident?” Dalgleish asked.

  “A tsunami,” Anna said. “There’s been some flooding along our eastern coast, and some ships are without power out at sea. A rescue operation is underway, but we may need to redirect resources later. Until then, it’s work as usual.”

  He nodded, satisfied. “Make sure to keep us informed,” he said.

  She nodded back, and drove on, to the lab.

  As she got out of her car, a Humvee full of black uniformed Special Forces drove slowly by. She gave them a semi-formal wave, and received a salute in return. The sentry wasn’t outside the lab. The conscripts must have already been redeployed, replaced by this roving patrol.

  Inside, as the door swung closed behind her, she paused. The air-conditioning wasn’t on, but the power was. Away from chaos of the Bunker, her mind finally cleared. The lights were still on. There’d been no EMP near Canberra. No bomb. But, broadly, it didn’t matter if there was. During the last three weeks, the loss of their supposedly ever-reliable communications network had forced them to decentralise command. From the reports she’d seen, mostly it had worked. As long as they kept people informed, they would keep working. Keep producing. Keep fighting. Not forever, but for long enough.

  They had planes. They had airports. They had roads. They had a blueprint for housing up to a hundred million refugees. The damage to the coastal harbours would reduce that, while providing them with refugees far closer who now needed a new home. But they still had planes.

  Yes, producing jet fuel and getting it to the airports was a problem, but it was one of logistics and production. They’d lost some airfields, and planes, along the eastern coast, but the major population centres were to the north and west. So, assuming three hundred passengers per plane…

  She jogged over to the reception desk, grabbing a pen and a pad from next to the defunct phone and scrawled a quick calculation. A hundred million people at three hundred passengers per plane required three hundred and thirty-three thousand flights. But they had thousands of planes. Most of the air fleets of the entire southern Pacific. Some would have a larger capacity, some would have less. Some would have been knocked out of the sky by the EMP. How many? She didn’t know.

  But with a thousand planes, managing two flights a day, from airports in Australia to airports across Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, and even beyond, it would take half a year. The one hundred million target had been plucked from the air by Aaron. At the time, when it had just been the two of them in the office, working away at an hour so late it was early, the number had seemed preposterous. Now it seemed inadequate.

  An idea was taking shape. But she needed more information: the number of planes; the number of runways; the amount of fuel which could be processed and delivered; the capacity of the planes. If Captain Hawker had survived, had his parachutists? How many runways could they secure, and how quickly? Where? That last seemed the biggest question, but there were so many others, stacking up faster than she could write, and this was just transport, not food, water, electricity, and basic healthcare.

  Their plan, hers and Aaron’s, had been centred around the idea that refugees would leave Australia in nearly as great a number as they arrived, returning as soldiers or farmers to land retaken from the undead. There would be no return to areas humming with radioactivity. Nor could they save everyone. In fact, they would only be able to save those close to an airport. A hundred million suddenly seemed wildly optimistic, and with it came a sudden awareness of how many people, globally, would certainly die. She shivered. In turn, that made her realise she was sweating. Signs pointed to a public washroom just off the vestibule. She ducked inside, intending to splash water on her face.

  As she entered
, the light came on automatically, and she smiled. Yes, the lights were still on. There was still hope. The thought froze when she saw the body.

  The grad-student with the unicorn t-shirt, Mel, was hanging from the ceiling, inside an open-doored stall, a length of power cord taut around her neck. Even as Anna took in the scene, she drew the pistol. Holding it by the barrel, she hammered the butt into the glass mirror. Leaving the gun by the sink, she ripped off her thin jacket, wrapped it around the largest shard, and ran to the cubicle. Roughly pushing past the swinging scientist, she braced one foot on the closed toilet seat and her free hand on the stall wall. Leaping up, she sliced the shard of mirror at the taut cord above the hanging woman’s head. Two slashes, and the body fell. Anna barely caught the woman, and barely managed to find her footing, as she fell back to the toilet’s floor.

  With speed rather than care, Anna hauled the scientist out of the cubicle, clawing the severed cord loose. Bending over, she attempted resuscitation. Two breaths. Thirty compressions. Breaths. Compressions. Breaths. Compressions.

  She leaned back on her heels. It was too late. The student-scientist was dead. Anna exhaled deep and long, as if she was breathing the last for the dead woman.

  Suicide. Another suicide. Why? There were plenty of reasons, of course, but why had no one else realised? Would Leo have if he’d been here? Why hadn’t Dr Avalon?

  Avalon!

  Anna sprang to her feet. She grabbed the gun from by the sink, and dashed outside, sprinting through the lobby, down the corridors, barely slowing when she heard the music, growing ever louder. She only slowed when she reached the lab. Avalon sat at the same U-shaped desk, in exactly the same position as before. The only difference was that two laptops had been added to the rows of notepads. Her head bobbed in time to the music as her hands typed.

  Anna opened the door.

  Avalon looked up, but didn’t stop typing. “You have a gun in your hand.”

  “Sorry,” Anna said, and pocketed the weapon. “Are you okay?”

  “Define the parameters of your question,” Avalon said, returning her gaze to the screen. “Where’s Leo?”

  “He’s in the Bunker at Parliament House, fixing things.”

  “He’s good at that,” Avalon said.

  “Dr Avalon,” Anna began, and wasn’t sure how to continue. “I… can we turn off the music?”

  “I don’t think that requires collective effort,” Avalon said, but switched off the player. “Is that all?”

  “No,” Anna said. “There’s been a series of nuclear blasts.”

  “You said, earlier. And I told you it’s not my area.”

  “A lot of nuclear blasts. Leo thinks hundreds of warheads were detonated in the Pacific, maybe a thousand. More detonated elsewhere in the hemisphere. We’ve lost the fleet near Guam, and a mushroom cloud was reported in the Himalayas. A tsunami has struck the east coast.”

  “I see,” Avalon said. Her hands had finally stopped typing, but her gaze remained on the screen. Her brow furrowed. “I still can’t help.”

  “There’s more,” Anna said, frustrated with the scientist’s apparent indifference. “One of your students is dead.”

  “What?” Avalon asked, and finally looked up.

  “It was suicide,” Anna said. “I discovered her body in the bathroom near the entrance lobby.”

  “Which student?” Avalon asked.

  “The young woman with the rainbow hair. Mel? She hanged herself with a power cord. I think she’s been dead for hours. Where are the other students?”

  “Asleep. I sent them to bed at dawn.” Avalon stood and walked across the room, pacing back again, stopping in front of the blank wall.

  “It was the pressure, the reality of what we’re all dealing with,” Anna said. “The nuclear blasts must have been the final straw. Every day, we find a few more apartments, a few more houses, with suicides inside.”

  “Why didn’t she talk to me?” Avalon asked.

  Anna didn’t give the obvious reply that Avalon was about the worst person in the world for anyone in their best mind to share their darkest fears. “I need you to come with me. Dr Smilovitz wants your help. You and the other students, and anyone else still here at the university who might know anything about data analysis. We have planes, we have fuel. We’ll rescue as many people as we can. Millions.”

  “Can I see her?” Avalon asked. “Mel. I’d like to see her.”

  “Of course, yes. And then we should wake your other assistants. Let them know.”

  “This isn’t right,” Avalon said, when they were inside the bathroom. She’d taken one look at Mel’s corpse and then turned to stare at the stall above which the cut noose hung.

  “I know,” Anna said. “But grief has to wait.”

  “No, I mean the body is wrong for a suicide,” Avalon said, stepping over the corpse and into the stalls. “Yes. There. Do you see? Rather, do you not see?”

  “Do I not see what?” Anna asked, once again confused.

  “There are no scuff marks on the walls,” Avalon said. “And look at her fingernails, no flecks from the cord. Her hands aren’t tied. Her neck isn’t broken; she suffocated. So, she looped the cord around the beam in the ceiling, then around her neck, stepped off the toilet seat and didn’t kick out? Not once?”

  “Not if she truly wanted to die,” Anna said.

  “That isn’t how physiology works,” Avalon said. “How would she have reached that beam?”

  Anna was a little shorter than the dead scientist, but not by much. Even so, she’d had to jump to cut the cord, one end of which was tightly knotted on the narrow ceiling beam.

  “It was staged,” Avalon said. “Mel was probably sedated before the noose was placed around her neck. Or she was already dead.” She glanced again at the body, but only for the briefest second. “No. Sedated. She was sedated.”

  Anna looked at scientist and corpse, then back to Avalon. “Where are the other students?”

  Uncertain if she was looking for a suspect, or a witness, or more victims, Anna followed Avalon along the corridor, through a set of doors propped open by a cleaning cart, and up a set of stairs to a less frequently visited section of offices. In the corridor, desks and bookshelves had been dragged outside, while a trio of mattresses remained unclaimed. A neat pile of laundered sheets and pillows were stacked next to those. An open door revealed an office turned into a kitchen, complete with camping stove, slow cooker, large fridge, an ice cream machine, and a jungle of extension cables. But the sound coming from further along the corridor cut short her curious inspection. Knocking, as of someone bound and gagged, trying to escape, came from the room ahead and on the right.

  Avalon reached for the door as Anna realised an alternative explanation. The scientist pushed the door inward.

  “No!” Anna said.

  Something pushed the door back, but not completely. A hand was caught in the gap even as its owner pushed and shoved against the door, squeezing the frame on its trapped hand, cutting skin and muscle, oozing red-brown pus.

  “Zombies!” Anna said, grabbing Avalon’s arm and tugging her back along the corridor.

  The door to the office swung open. A student in a star-ship t-shirt staggered out, mouth snapping, arms flailing, gore flying from its self-inflicted, partially severed hand.

  Avalon, grabbed a handful of books from the nearest tall stack and hurled them ineffectually at the un-human student. “So they were wrong about the might of the pen,” she said as Anna pulled her back again, and then drew the handgun O.O. had given her.

  “Get behind me,” Anna said.

  “Ah, we’re experimenting with the sword?” Avalon asked, gamely skipping behind Anna.

  A second undead student, in waistcoat, suit trousers, but no tie, staggered through the office door. The undead sci-fi fan was now only ten paces away. Anna raised the gun, pulled the trigger, and nothing happened.

  “Safety!” Avalon said.

  “It’s off,” Anna said, fli
pping it on and off anyway. She pulled the trigger again, and still nothing happened.

  “Ammo!” Avalon said.

  But Anna turned and pushed the scientist back towards the stairs. “Run!”

  Anna followed the scientist down the stairs. At the bottom, Anna grabbed the fire hose from the wall fitment, snaking it back and forth between the bannister and the railings, buying herself time to think.

  “Are we fighting or running?” Avalon asked, as she rummaged in her bag.

  Above came a thump as the first zombie reached the stairwell.

  “If those three get out, they could infect dozens,” Anna said. “There are farmers outside, building walls and vegetable plots. But one of them will have a gun, or maybe a radio to call the Special Forces patrolling the campus. Go get them. I’ll slow the zombies.”

  “Not yet,” Avalon said. The first of the undead, the student in the waistcoat, had slid down to the landing where the stairs made a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. Thrashing and rolling, knocking hands and feet into the wall, it flopped around the turn, and continued on down the stairs. Except for how its chin slammed into every step, spraying blood, leaving a trail of skin, it almost appeared to be swimming. And it swam right underneath the lower-most coil of fire hose.

  Avalon leaned forward, arm extended, spraying something from a canister. “Pepper spray,” she said. “I was curious as to whether it might work.”

  “Run, go!” Anna said, as the zombie squirmed and rolled. Trying to stand.

  “Evidently not,” Avalon said, reaching again into her bag, this time bringing out a blue-plastic pistol-grip stun-gun. She fired. The zombie jerked as electricity coursed through it. Legs and arms flying left and right, its head and neck bucking.

  “Fascinating,” Avalon said. “Ah, but no.”

  As the current ceased, the zombie’s movement become more normally erratic. It pushed itself to its feet.

  “Here,” Avalon said, holding out a short length of metal. “You conduct the next experiment. I’ll return shortly.”

  “Finally,” Anna muttered, as the scientist ran.