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

by Tayell, Frank

  “Back to the road!” Tess called as she crossed to Shane, now lying on his side, hand curled around his bleeding shoulder. “Shane, mate, let me have a look. Some people are immune, remember?”

  But even as she spoke, Shane coughed and spasmed. His arms jerked. His legs kicked. Rolling onto his back, arms and legs kicking like a beached turtle, his dead eyes filled with insatiable bloodlust. His mouth snapped, and Tess stepped back.

  “Sorry, mate,” she said. She fired, and her gun had an echo.

  Tess stepped back, turning to look for the new danger, but the second zombie was dead. Shot by Bianca, the slug having smashed through its skull. A metre to the left, and it would have slammed through Tess’s back.

  “Good shot,” Tess said. “Zach, you okay?”

  “He’s… He’s…” Zach stammered.

  “Bianca, take Zach back to the middle of the street,” Tess said. “Wait for me there.” She walked around Shane’s corpse and that of the zombie who’d infected him, over the zombie Bianca had shot, and into the garden. The two dead zombies wore non-descript clothes which could have come from the back of any wardrobe, but the soles of their boots were so clean they’d been found very recently in a shoe shop’s stock room. In the rear garden, a set of shattered plate-glass sliding doors led into a sunroom. Beyond was the looters’ stash: dozens of bulging bags and twice the number of stuffed suitcases.

  “Zach, mark the footpath with an L and a Z,” Tess said when she returned outside. “Those zombies were looters, and they’ve been living here for at least a week. That’s their stash house, filled with supplies scavenged from a dozen properties. At least a dozen.”

  “They must have thought other looters wouldn’t search a building site,” Bianca said.

  “Probably,” Tess said.

  “What do we do about Shane?” Zach asked.

  “His body will get a burial,” Tess said. “That’s why we mark the kerb.”

  “He’ll be buried with the other zombies?” Zach asked.

  “They were all people a month ago,” Tess said. “But I’ll have a word with the coroner. Make sure Shane gets a plot of his own.”

  She wouldn’t. All the bodies would be cremated in a recently expanded industrial furnace, Shane’s with them. Hers, too, if that was her fate. But Zach didn’t need to know that.

  With Shane’s sudden death, she merged the two squads into one. Calling it Team Stonefish didn’t cheer up Zach. Nothing would, except time. The next six houses were locked. At the seventh, Tess let Bianca enter first, but she came back outside almost immediately.

  “Suicide,” Bianca said, swiping away the flies following her.

  Tess pulled her scarf around her mouth and went in.

  The house was nothing unusual: a three-bedroom one-storey shared by a couple, their five-year-old daughter, and their dog, judging by the photographs dotting the wall. The body was in the en-suite bathroom, off the master bedroom. The tub was full, but he lay on the floor. Polished shoes. Dress shirt. Tie, but no jacket because he’d wanted to have easy access to his left wrist on which a fifteen-centimetre-long incision ran along the artery. In the sink was a bloody scalpel. On the sink-counter, a dusty octagonal bottle of Cognac kept company with an open bottle of sedatives.

  Yes, it was suicide. Just another suicide. Tess didn’t breathe out in relief only because she’d then have to breathe in just as deeply, and the flies were already buzzing around the blood on the floor. She’d lost count of the number of suicides she’d attended since arriving in Canberra. With each report of a newly discovered corpse, she still expected to find a mutilated body, tortured by the serial killer from Broken Hill. But no, this was just another sad tale of someone who couldn’t accept the new reality.

  But then, in the floor-to-ceiling mirror next to the bath, she saw the reflection of his partially hidden face.

  Carefully, she opened the cupboard beneath the sink. A few bottles of shampoo kept company with a lone bottle of shower gel, but there was no sign of the toothbrushes missing from next to the sink. The owners of this house must have taken them when they left because this dead man didn’t match the picture in the photographs. In fact, Tess was certain this man owned a mansion over in Redhill.

  As she walked back to the front door, she took out a notebook and pen, and quickly jotted a note. “Clyde, Zach,” she said, handing the note to Clyde. “Go back to the wall. My police car is parked on the other side, next to the major’s ute. The keys are beneath the seat. Drive to Parliament House. Tell the sentries there, and anyone who stops you, that you’ve got a message for Anna Dodson from Commissioner Tess Qwong. Then drive back here with the minister. Run.”

  “It’s bad news?” Bianca asked as Zach and Clyde jogged down the street.

  “It’s a friend,” Tess said. “So the minister will want to see for herself. Keep watch here, while I take a proper look around the house.”

  Chapter 3 - And Then There Were Five

  Bonner, Canberra

  “Yes, that’s him,” Anna Dodson said. Once a teacher, very recently an unexpectedly elected protest candidate, she’d been appointed Minister for Wellbeing in the first post-outbreak cabinet. Now she was Minister for Housing and Agriculture. “That’s Aaron. Senator Aaron Bryce. Will that do for a formal identification?”

  “More than enough for these times,” Tess said. “I thought I recognised him, but with someone so high profile, I needed to be positive.”

  “Was it suicide?” Anna asked. “It looks like suicide, Tess, but was it?”

  “I have a few questions before I answer that,” Tess said. “Let’s talk in a different room.” She pointed at the doorway, and then followed Anna back into the main bedroom, the hall, and into the living room.

  Being a decade older than Anna, while they’d crossed paths in Broken Hill while children, it was Mick Dodson whom Tess had grown to know first. As a new constable, while he was already an experienced flying doctor, they’d attended many a remote emergency together. But since Tess had returned to Broken Hill, she’d grown to know Anna, then a teacher.

  “Whose house is this?” Anna asked.

  “That’s one of my questions,” Tess said. “The senator had a house in Redhill, right?”

  “Not just a house,” Anna said. “It’s a mansion. His father-in-law paid for it.”

  “Sir Malcolm Baker, who got rich from coal and pokies, yes?”

  “By owning the company that made the gambling machines,” Anna said. “I don’t think he’s ever put a coin into a slot himself.”

  “And Aaron’s wife, she’s not here in Canberra?”

  “She’s at their place near Brisbane,” Anna said. “Has been since before the outbreak. The marriage was in trouble.”

  “Genuinely in trouble?” Tess asked.

  “You mean was it a come-on?” Anna asked. “No, he is truly miserable. But he’s seemed— I mean he was getting happier. I thought it was because of the distance between him and his marriage, and his father-in-law.”

  “And since the outbreak, he’s been your assistant?” Tess asked.

  “He was offered my job,” Anna said. “I got it because he turned it down.”

  “He didn’t want it?” Tess asked.

  “He didn’t even want to be Minister for Water,” Anna said. “But I made him accept it, and kept him close. He was good with figures. Good at seeing the whole picture, thinking ahead. But he didn’t want responsibility for people’s lives.”

  “I thought he wanted to be prime minister one day,” Tess said. “It was in all of the papers.”

  “Because his father-in-law paid them to print it,” Anna said. “His wife had ambition, but he didn’t. Not really. Certainly not since the outbreak.”

  “Beyond a good night’s sleep, a good meal, and a long shower, who does?” Tess said. “He was thirty-nine years old, in an unhappy marriage, and in a stressful job. Add in the apocalypse, and suicide isn’t a surprise. Except this isn’t his house. Do you recognise the peopl
e in those photographs?”

  Anna looked at the pictures. “They’re strangers to me,” she said.

  “Are you sure?” Tess asked. “When did you last see the senator?”

  “Yesterday morning,” Anna said. “We were working on the Murray-Darling problem. Even reducing cotton production to ten percent, and felling all of the almond groves that aren’t mature enough to produce nuts this season, we’ll still be two thousand giga-litres short. But we can’t reduce cotton any further because we need it for so much more than just clothing, so production will have to be scaled up next year. No matter what Oswald Owen says, Australia won’t be a one-month rest-and-reequip stopover for the refugees. We have to assume a population increase of one hundred million by the year’s end, with the increased water consumption that goes with it.”

  “That sounds like a tough problem to crack,” Tess said.

  “Yes, but we were close to a solution,” Anna said. “We’d developed an agricultural strategy to see us through the winter, and which would provide enough water for Oswald Owen’s industrial expansion. I thought that was enough of a victory for one week so I sent Aaron to bed.”

  “At what time?”

  “Early. After dawn, but not too long after.”

  “And you thought he went to his mansion in Redhill?” Tess asked.

  “No, he’s been sleeping in the hotel, just like us.”

  “In the same hotel?” Tess asked.

  “He’s two floors down,” Anna said. “In a single without a view. He gave up his suite to a couple of families. The ones whose kids race their bikes up and down the halls. Now, I’m playing my cabinet-minister-card and ask why are there so many questions?”

  “Because he came here to kill himself,” Tess said. “He didn’t go to his hotel room where he’d be found by you when he failed to show up to work. He didn’t go to his mansion where you’d have sent me to look for him. He came here. An unassuming house in an unassuming street in an abandoned suburb. Take another look at those photographs.”

  “Why do— Oh,” Anna said. “You mean the girl.” Anna stood and walked to the shelf and picked up the family portrait. “I suppose she looks a little like Aaron. Or as much like Aaron as she looks like the man in this picture. That’s what you’re saying?”

  “Asking,” Tess said. “I heard the rumours.”

  “They were just stories,” Anna said. “I suppose it’s possible she’s his daughter, but I’m sure he would have said something. Does it matter?”

  “I don’t think so,” Tess said. “Not now. There’s no car outside, so Senator Bryce walked here in smart shoes and a suit and tie, with a scalpel, sedatives, and a bottle of Cognac almost as old as Sydney. He ran the bath, took a drink and a fistful of pills, and then he slit his wrist. Lengthwise, so he knew how to do it properly. But he didn’t get into the bath. I think he might have changed his mind, might have stood, grabbed for a towel to stem the bleeding, but the sedatives kicked in, and he collapsed. It would have been painless.”

  “And he came here because of the girl in this picture?”

  “Perhaps. Or perhaps not. But I’ll write this one up as suicide.” Tess checked her watch. “Strewth, it’s not even ten o’clock.”

  “Did you think it was later?”

  “I’ve lived a lifetime this morning already,” Tess said. “And last night wasn’t much better. Mick and I did a turn on the walls.”

  “You brought Dad here?” Anna asked.

  “He brought himself,” Tess said. “But I kept an eye on him, and he on me. And he went back to the airport at dawn. They were still short-handed so I stayed to help. Trouble found us just before we found Aaron. Lost one bloke to zombies down the street. There’s enough time to write this up to include it in today’s prime ministerial broadcast.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Anna said. “Unless you do.”

  “People will have to know at some point,” Tess said. “This is the seventh parliamentary suicide since the outbreak, and the first since the old prime minister died last week. Not counting Maggie Lee.”

  “No, I’m sure she went to find her family,” Anna said. “She was talking about it for a week. Maybe she’ll return. But that’s why we sent so many to Hobart. It’s hard to go walkabout when you’re stuck on Tasmania. We’ll have to recall some. I always thought it was a mistake sending so many away like that.”

  “You mean, you’ll have to recommend to the prime minister that some be recalled,” Tess said with a thin smile. “How are things on Tassy?”

  “Better than here,” Anna said. “And they’ll hate to be back, but it has to be done. Can this be kept quiet for a few weeks?”

  “Two at most, but don’t hope for more than one,” Tess said. “The coroner will be discreet. My team will stay quiet if we buy their silence with some lighter duty. I was thinking we could send them to the airport where your dad can keep an ear pricked for whispers.”

  “A week is more than long enough,” Anna said. “By then, General Yoon will have crossed into the U.S., the fleet will have reached Hawaii, and we’ll have reinforced Singapore.”

  “A week,” Tess nodded. “And how are you doing?”

  “Me?”

  “We haven’t had much time to talk,” Tess said. “We share a hotel suite, but the rare times we’re all there, your dad insists on watching movies.”

  “Bad movies.”

  “I know, right?” Tess said. Both women smiled.

  “I’m tired, Tess,” Anna said. “Fraying at the edges, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. There’s still unrest in some cities, zombies in the outback, and bandits in the bush. But the problems are getting smaller, more manageable. With the quarantine zones at the airports, we’re controlling the infection. Thanks to the draft, everyone is working, even if they’re guarding a wall rather than fixing our communications problems. It’s possible that not having satellites has actually helped. No one’s waiting for orders from us, but getting on with running things locally. Medically, our biggest challenge is disease in the refugee camps. Instead of worrying about starvation, we’re dealing with logistical problems, so things could be a lot worse.”

  “Like twenty thousand head of cattle being driven to Canberra a month before their time?” Tess asked.

  “Exactly,” Anna said. “General Yoon now has more recruits than she can equip. All refugees are being sent to farms, new and old, across the American Plains. But until harvest, they’ll require food. I don’t know how much food is in storage across America, or how much is accessible, and I doubt General Yoon does, either. Soon, the ships and planes arriving with refugees will return with food aboard, not soldiers. Which is why the slaughter of those cattle is so deeply frustrating.”

  “Because of how much is being wasted, you mean?” Tess asked.

  “Because of how small things have these huge knock-on effects,” Anna said. “We just pushed two million refugees onto ships, and sent them away because we don’t have the resources to keep them here. Some are soldiers, yes. But most are civilians. I won’t even call them conscripts. Most of the million who sailed from Brisbane won’t even have firearms unless they collect them from Samoa. Which is assuming the Americans have flown them in like they promised. We’re also assuming they’ll be able to get more ammunition from Hawaii once the island has been secured, otherwise I don’t know what they’ll be fighting with when they get to the Baja California Peninsula. We’re moving fast because we’ll starve if we move slow. But I wanted to speak to you about the cattle.” She reached into her bag and took out a large envelope. “The attorney general has three warrants for you to serve. Dad will fly you.”

  “Arrest warrants?” Tess asked, opening the envelope. “And they’re printed. This must be serious. I don’t recognise the names.”

  “You’ve got a summary of the evidence, and the witness statements. Eight in total.”

  “But for three separate suspects and three separate crimes,” Tess said, glancing through
them. “This isn’t sufficient to press charges, let alone take to trial. It’s why we shouldn’t have an attorney general running the police.”

  “Let’s not have that argument again, Tess,” Anna said. “The packet includes some background information culled from the databases we could access. It’s enough to arrest them and bring them back to Canberra. What happens at trial doesn’t matter. The key goal is to arrest them, publicly. We want to announce their detention on the broadcast later this week.”

  “As an example to everyone else?” Tess said, quickly scanning the sheets. “Five of the statements are connected to the cattle. This one, Bradley Metzger… Where’s Camp 23?”

  “Ballina,” Anna said. “Two hundred kilometres south of Brisbane. It’s a refugee camp with three desalination plants, a coal power station, and the usual coastal factories to make the parts. I think there’s canning and a pipe manufactory. Or there should be by now. There’s been an outbreak of dysentery.”

  “It says. And we’re to pick up some meds at the airport on our first stop.” Tess tapped the page. “What’s the crime in Ballina?”

  “The first shipment of coal has arrived at the coast. The turbines have already been there for two days. Without the new power station, the desalination plants can’t run. Without them, there’s not enough water for the other eight camps nearby and inland. That’s nearly seven hundred thousand refugees. In a month, it’ll be three million. It’s why we dispatched the fleet from Brisbane four days early. We can move people to the city to inhabit the rooms those conscripts were billeted in. We’ll buy ourselves two more weeks, but it’ll be a month before those ships return. We’re trying to house hundreds of thousands in towns of tens of hundreds. The infrastructure can’t cope. Without water, we’ll get more riots, and we’ve barely got a lid on the trouble in Melbourne.”

  “Got it. Metzger’s being removed for incompetence, and charged with criminal negligence. Who do you want running the place? Mick?”