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

by Tayell, Frank

  O.O. was in the War Room with his back to her. On the table was his bottle. And in front… no, she couldn’t see. If she went in to get Smilovitz, Oswald would notice. Anna’s hand curled around the gun. She could signal Major Kelly, but was the conscript next to Smilovitz one of Oswald’s people? And where were the others? No, it was too great a risk. She’d fetch the prime minister first.

  Ducking slightly until she was beyond the transparent walls of the communications centre, she walked quickly along the corridor. Sliding doors led to a semi-public corridor off which were the small chapel, a slightly larger dining room, kitchen, and a medical room. All were empty, as was the security station at the end of the corridor, and another set of doors, which slid open silently as she approached.

  The corridor bent ninety degrees as it looped behind the communications room. On the inside was the private accommodation of senior personnel. On the outer side, doors led to washrooms and casual offices which could double as overflow executive dorms. Beyond those, on the other side of their exterior wall, and accessed through the other looping corridor, were the bunk house and mess hall used by the staff, the electrical infrastructure, and pump rooms.

  The prime minister’s room was at the far end of the corridor. Anna supposed one of the others had been allocated to her, though she’d never bothered to ask. For that matter, she wasn’t sure whom she was supposed to ask. But since the outbreak, she’d decided if the disaster reached the point where they had to retreat to an underground bunker, there was nothing a politician could do to fix it. Certainly not from below ground. An opinion vindicated by recent events.

  She knocked on the prime minister’s door, mentally searching for the words to explain the situation to Bronwyn Wilson, and quickly discarding them all in favour of a lie, that she was needed at the temporary broadcast studio at the Telstra Tower.

  Inside, something heavy fell over. Anna opened the door, pushing it inwards. The room was pitch-dark, the corridor’s second-hand light only adding depth to the weird shadows.

  “Ma’am? Prime Minister? Bronwyn?” she asked, and then she saw her. The prime minister lay on the floor. She’d collapsed, her breath a hissing whisper that rose to a rasp as she tried to stand. As Anna stepped inside, the prime minister abruptly bucked backwards, onto her knees, throwing out her arms in a near windmill-wave. From the corridor’s dim light, Anna saw the face. Drawn, stretched, contorted by taut muscles drawing eyebrows up in surprise, eyelids wide in blind fury, and mouth open exposing fiercely biting teeth.

  “Ma’am?” Anna said, even as Wilson’s undead hand swiped out again, this time curling around Anna’s ankle, tugging her off balance, and from her feet. She fell, hard. The bandage offered little padding when her head hit the carpet, and for a second, she was stunned. Long enough for the undead prime minister to pull on her leg. Unintentionally grabbing the ankle holster, Wilson pulled herself forward and closer until the clasp on the holster snapped, and Anna, already kicking, was able to roll free.

  Anna pushed herself upright, backing away as the zombie-PM thrashed on the floor, now between her and the door. Anna looked for a weapon, and saw the flag behind the desk. The pole was made of ash and brass and had a barely pointed tip. Not a spear, but better than nothing. Wrenching the flag from its stand, she levelled the staff.

  Bronwyn was on her knees, mouth open, neck twisting left and right, while her eyes twitched up and down. Anna lunged, spearing the flagstaff forward. The weight of the unfurled banner dragged the blunt tip downward so it impacted against the politician’s stomach rather than sternum, but as Anna thrust, the zombie lurched forward. Knees scuffing against the thick carpet, arms batting against the polished ash-wood, Bronwyn Wilson slowly impaled herself on the flagpole. But the banner acted as a bandage, a stopper, preventing the dull spear from penetrating too deeply. The zombie kept pushing. So did Anna, but her hands slipped on the glazed wood, while the monster’s fingers clawed ever closer to her face.

  With a roar of furious fear, Anna pushed down on the pole with her left hand while lifting with the right, slowly raising the spear tip, and also the zombie, from her knees and to her feet. Wilson’s sensible flats scrabbled on the floor, but Anna didn’t give her time to find her balance. She charged, pushing and screaming as she shoved the zombie backwards, through the door, and outside. With another furious roar, she tugged the flag free, dropped it inside, and slammed the door closed.

  Outside, an undead hand thumped against the reinforced wood. Another clawed. But Anna was safe. Relatively speaking. In the dark. She allowed herself time to exhale, and inhale again, then searched for the light switch. The room lit up, far brighter than she’d been expecting. She picked up the ankle-holster, drawing the weapon even as she looked around the room.

  A pair of sliding doors concealed the double-bunk bedroom, while a door on the other side hid the airplane-style toilet. The main room, with its desk, chair, small sofa and table, had no photographs, no mementos. A temporary clothes-rack held a neat row of dress-carriers, above an identical number of shoe-pouches, but those were the only personal touches. Everywhere else, on the desk, on the chair, on the shelves, but mostly on the floor where they’d been knocked after the prime minister had been infected, were books. Strips of paper or cloth marked the pages found to be potentially useful. Histories and agricultural texts, medical books and military memoirs; the prime minister had been seeking answers in books. She clearly hadn’t found them.

  As Anna took a step towards the bedroom, something cracked beneath her shoe. Glass. A small vial. Of course. How else would the PM have become infected if not deliberately by Oswald Owen?

  She checked the pistol’s magazine, the safety, and then she walked over to the door. She knew what she had to do. Steeled herself and reached for the door handle.

  The lights went out.

  But were replaced almost immediately by a soft red flash from the recessed LEDs at the base of the wall. After three one-second flashes, the lights turned a soft amber.

  No sirens blared, but the lights were an indication the Bunker had just entered lockdown. Had the Special Forces just made entry? Or had O.O. locked them outside? A thump against the panelled frame reminded her of the pressing danger immediately outside the door. Would it hold? Could she wait? One-handed, Anna raised the gun, reached for the door handle, and paused.

  Bronwyn Wilson had been deliberately infected. The previous prime minister had committed suicide. And so had Aaron Bryce. They weren’t the only suicides, and other politicians had simply disappeared. When Anna had gone to collect Dr Smilovitz, and then to get Avalon, O.O. had known where she was going. He’d given her a gun which didn’t work. He had that bottle, the same type he’d given to Aaron. Whether he wanted the scientists dead or not, she had been his target, not them. He had been killing his rivals, the politicians standing in the way of his life-long ambition to rule. Maybe, before this was done, she’d ask him why.

  She raised the gun. Again, she hesitated. The zombie did not, slowly battering the wood.

  If the Special Forces had made entry, the undead prime minister would have been shot by now. The lockdown had been initiated a few seconds after she’d pushed the PM out into the corridor. There probably weren’t any security cameras in the prime minister’s private office, but there must be in the hall. O.O. was watching. Remember rule one. It was a saying of her father’s to which he’d given many different meanings over the years, but it amounted to not rushing to action before you’ve had time to think. Check your boots, so she checked hers, reaffixing the ankle holster, and making sure it was concealed.

  Quickly, she unclipped the flag from the staff. The top corner was sodden, drenched, glistening in the dim emergency glow. Leaning the flagstaff against the wall, she grabbed the desk. It was far lighter than she’d expected. She laid it on its side, with the legs either side of the door, the table top facing into the room, facing her. The low barrier wasn’t much of a barricade, but she didn’t want to keep the zombie at
bay.

  Gripping the flagstaff, she leaned forward, and pulled the door inward, stepping back even as the zombie staggered inside. The zombie prime minister lurched inward, knees slamming into the edge of the upturned table’s top. Wilson fell, as Anna had hoped, but landed far further forward than she’d expected, slamming her stomach on the lip of the table. As the undead prime minister thrashed, red-brown gore spilled from the wound in its stomach. Wilson’s legs kicked, her head bucked, even as Anna thrust the flagstaff forward, ripping through hair and skin as she tore a ragged gouge through the zombie’s scalp. She pulled the flagpole back, and thrust again, putting her entire weight into the blow. Bone cracked, brain oozed, and the prime minister stopped moving.

  Chapter 25 - The Treachery of the Opposition

  The Bunker, Parliament House

  Anna took a second to catch her breath, another to tame her thoughts, and a third to check the gun was concealed. Regardless of risk, it was time the Special Forces came inside and she got out. The corridor was dimly illuminated by the emergency lights. Assuming an undead threat behind each door, she padded quietly down to the junction. And found her way blocked.

  The executive rooms were separated from the chapel and other communal spaces by a set of mostly transparent, sliding, airtight doors, which were now closed. To her right was a keypad above which a display read Code-Three Lockdown. Unsurprisingly, since the Bunker had been designed for biological hazards, there was no obvious emergency door release. There was an intercom, but she’d be shocked if it worked. When she tried, she wasn’t disappointed. Waving her hands at the sensor above the doors did nothing. She appeared to be trapped.

  Beyond the sealed doors, down the corridor, a large figure ambled through the door of the small kitchen, a cardboard box of individually wrapped Anzac biscuits under his arm. Oswald Owen.

  When he saw her, he grinned, walked over, carefully put the box down, then began miming. He pointed towards the side of the door, while motioning for… for her to do what? Open the doors? Surely not. He saw her puzzled expression, and correctly guessed a quarter of the cause, so took out a notepad on which he wrote, “Open the panel below the keypad.”

  She let puzzlement deepen her furrowed brow. He actually wanted her to open this set of doors? Obviously, he didn’t know she suspected him.

  The panel was badly concealed, and easily opened. Behind it was a small screen, currently showing a CCTV image of the inside of the main airlock, but she was more interested in the small text command prompt saying Emergency Override. Beneath that, two buttons, a Yes and a No, with the Yes glowing a darker shade of blue. She pressed enter on the keypad. The lights switched from emergency-amber back to overhead-white, and the door slid open.

  “Not that!” O.O. finished, the first half of his yelled sentence lost behind the soundproof doors.

  “Don’t take another step!” she said, dragging the pistol from its holster and aiming the barrel at his face.

  “What?” O.O. asked, confusion replacing frustrated anger. “Why are you pointing that gun at me?”

  “I know you tried to kill me,” she said. “Three times now. Congratulations on failing.”

  “I did what now? And why did you open the doors? Didn’t you look at the monitors?” he added, taking another step towards her.

  “Seriously, don’t,” she said, taking another step back. “I mean it. I will shoot you.”

  “Why? You can’t hate me that much. Where’s Bronwyn?”

  “In her room,” she said.

  Ignoring her raised gun, he ran down the corridor to the room at the far end, pushing the door open before stepping back. “What happened?”

  “What do you think happened?” she said. “Why did you do it? Power, right? Money’s not worth anything.”

  “Why did I do what?”

  “Kill Aaron. Kill Bronwyn. That’s what this was about, wasn’t it?” she said. “You wanted us dead. Your rivals. You weren’t trying to kill Leo and Flo, you wanted me dead.”

  “Why would I want you dead?” he asked, walking towards her, though his eyes were on the long corridor beyond. “But you might just have killed us both. I knew how to initiate the test protocol, not a proper lockdown, and you just overrode it. All the internal doors were locked, the sections sealed. You just opened them.”

  “Shut up. Stop moving,” she said. “We’ll wait for the Special Forces, and you’re—”

  “Too late,” he said, pointing behind her. “Take a squiz at that and tell me you still want to hang about here.”

  She didn’t want to look, but she heard something moving in the corridor behind her. A dragging footstep. A thump of a person-sized weight slamming into the wall. She knew what caused the sound, and now understood why Oswald wasn’t scared of her gun; it was because he was utterly terrified of the approaching undead. Still, she didn’t want to turn, didn’t want to shift aim from him.

  “Ah, shoot me if you like,” he said. “It’d be better than being torn apart.” He walked back to the doors. Ignoring the gun aimed at his head, he reached under his coat and drew a handgun from his twin shoulder-holster rig. He raised his gun, aimed, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He drew the other gun. Still, nothing, except the zombie dragged itself closer.

  Dressed in camouflage green, but with a red t-shirt beneath and white-soled sneakers on his feet. She knew him. He was one of the conscripts who’d been helping Leo.

  “They don’t bloody work!” O.O. said, dropping one gun, then ejecting the magazine from the other. “It’s got bullets. But it doesn’t work.” He reinserted the magazine, aimed at the zombie, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

  Was he faking? He didn’t seem to be, but what O.O. lacked in morality was substituted with an overabundance of animal cunning. She didn’t, couldn’t, trust him. But she could shift her aim by an arm’s width and fire her own gun at the approaching zombie. So she did.

  Nothing happened. She pulled the trigger again. Still nothing. She checked the safety, but it was off.

  “It’s not you,” she whispered. She grabbed his arm, hauled him back, looked again at the control panel. The message had changed to Secure Door, with the same Yes and No options. To her, it was no option at all. She closed the door.

  “Not that!” O.O. said, pushing her aside, so he could see the control panel “Why did you do that?”

  “Because there’s a zombie there,” she said, pointing at the walking corpse staggering towards them, “and our guns don’t work.”

  “I know there are zombies. I can see there are zombies. But now I can’t see what else is going on in this tomb.”

  “Stop shouting, take a breath, and explain,” she said.

  “I know the test-code,” he said. “Got that a couple of weeks ago, the first time I came down here. The protocol shuts the doors, but sets the camera images to rotate, to cycle from one room to the next. You can view that on the screens behind the emergency panels. That’s how I knew you were here.”

  “And where were you?”

  “In the chapel,” he said.

  “Why?”

  In the corridor beyond, the zombie stumbled on.

  “Because at this point, I didn’t think it could hurt,” he said. “What happened to Bronwyn?”

  “She was infected,” Anna said. “Deliberately. With a syringe of infected blood taken from Dr Avalon’s lab. So were Avalon’s assistants, and a guard on duty at Geoscience Australia. Who gave you those guns?”

  He looked down at the one gun he’d not dropped, still in his hand. “The shoulder rig was a gift from a constituent,” he said. “She’s a leather worker. Was a jillaroo before a fall from a horse broke her back. Makes holsters, primarily for export to the American market. I asked her to gift me one so I could declare it and get the other mob to ask why a bloke like me would have a shoulder rig if he didn’t have a pair of guns to go with it. That set up me up to talk about small-enterprise, and how the little people could take advantage of globalisation
if we just gave them a fair go.”

  “The guns, O.O.,” she said.

  “Erin Vaughn,” he said.

  “Vaughn? Mine came from Ian. It’s them. They’re in it together.”

  “In what?”

  “This. The murders,” Anna said. The zombie slammed its fist into the transparent door. “The coup.”

  “Those two? If it was one, it was both of them. Inseparable they are. Vaughn and Lignatiev. You know they’ve been dating longer than they’ve been married to other people? It’s why I never trusted them.”

  “That door’s solid. That monster won’t smash its way in here,” Anna said. “But Leo’s still out there.”

  “If they’re infected, so is he,” O.O. said. “They’ve been stabbing people with a syringe full of zombie-blood?”

  “I think one of the students stole samples from Avalon’s lab. Probably Mel. You were talking with her after Avalon and Leo summoned us all to the lab. Why?”

  “That’s a crime now, is it?”

  “You hung around after the meeting to chat up the students?” Anna asked.

  “It’s not like that,” he said. “She reminded me of my daughter. My son’s autistic.”

  “He is? I didn’t know.”

  “The kid’s mother is… out of the picture. My daughter basically raised him. I keep the press sweet, and the deal is they leave my family out of the papers.”

  “Oh,” she said, seeing the man in different light, which added shade to his sinister shadow. “What about the octagonal bottles of Cognac? I found one by Aaron’s corpse, and another with the students.”

  “I gave it to Aaron,” O.O. said. “Seemed appropriate since Sir Malcolm gave me the crate as a birthday gift. Said they were worth fifty thousand dollars a bottle. What’s a bloke supposed to do with that? Can’t drink them. Can’t insure them. Certainly can’t sell them.”

  “Sir Malcolm Baker, Aaron’s father-in-law?”