Life Goes On by Tayell, Frank (large ebook reader txt) 📗

“Restoration,” Clyde said. “We’ll go through the garage. If there’s a door at the far end, it’ll be close to the house.”

“Hang about,” Tess said, bending over the corpse. “I want to check… no. No tattoos on the arm. Which doesn’t mean anything. Four bunks in that place, but it’s not their permanent quarters. Four guards on duty, so call it a minimum of eight on-site. One here, one in the doorway, and two dead outside. We might find another four inside.”

“Four hostiles?” Zach asked.

“Four witnesses,” Tess said. “Or four zombies.”

It was a garage, not a hangar, and it contained twelve cars, each on its own raised stand, six on either side of the long chamber, parked diagonally as if they were ready to be driven away.

“Now that’s a beaut,” Zach said.

“She’s a Ferrari,” Bianca said.

“It’s hideous,” Clyde said, moving light and rifle from one vehicle to the next.

“What’s that yellow one?” Zach asked, walking over to it.

“A waste of steel and rubber,” Clyde said.

“And polymers and rare metals,” Tess said. “Must cost more than my house.”

“More than my school,” Elaina said as their team fanned out, moving along the rows of vehicles, and towards the far end. “You don’t approve, Clyde?”

“They’re built to reach maximum efficiency at a velocity higher than the speed-limit,” Clyde said. “How are you supposed to enjoy the countryside when you’re driving at two hundred kilometres an hour with a police helicopter buzzing overhead?”

“Yeah, but that’s not why, is it?” Elaina said. “Didn’t you go to a race track for your honeymoon?”

“I had to,” he said. “I didn’t want to, but that’s the sacrifice you pay for love.”

“Strewth, mate, I’d love a turn in one of these,” Mick said, angling around an olive-green Bugatti.

“Where are you going, Mick?” Tess asked.

“The fuel tanks,” he said, aiming his light ahead.

A clatter echoed around the room. Tess spun.

“Hostile!” Clyde barked. “Watch your six.”

They’d spread out as they entered the garage. Unintentionally. Unconsciously. Unprofessionally, like the amateurs they were.

Tess was still trying to identify where the sound had come from when Elaina yelled. Her light dropped, spinning and turning, flashing in every direction.

“Hold fire!” Clyde yelled. “Hold fire!”

Tess’s light found Elaina. The teacher had been knocked from her feet. Now weaponless, on the ground, she rolled from her front to her back, kicking at the curled, cold, lifeless hands coiling around her leg.

Bianca grabbed Elaina’s arm, pulling. Toppley stamped on the zombie’s wrist before firing her shotgun, point-blank, into its skull.

“You okay?” Tess asked as the echo of shot and scream died away.

“Fine,” Elaina said as Bianca helped her up. “Wait, is that my blood?”

“Nah, that’s its brains,” Zach said.

“Oh, don’t, Zach,” Elaina said.

Tess shone her light on the corpse. “Green overalls, not body-armour. Could have been a mechanic, a gardener, or an infected refugee. We’ll assume he brought friends. Stay close together from now on.”

At the far end of the garage, they found another door, and another corpse in body-armour.

“It’s locked with a mechanical keypad,” Mick said. “But they got through using a Kalgoorlie bump-key.”

“What’s that mean?” Zach asked.

“An acetylene torch,” Mick said, shining his light on the burn marks around the door where the lock-plate had been burned through.

It was a relief to step through the door, and back outside into the warm summer’s air, but that relief only lasted long enough for a trio of flies to land on her neck. On the road, she’d been aware of the insects, but her focus had been on the bodies. Here, the flies swarmed in an infestation two hatchings away from becoming a plague.

“Ah, gerroff!” Zach snapped, ineffectually swatting at the haze.

“Insects aren’t too interested in zombie corpses,” Tess said. “Expect to see a lot of bodies ahead of us. Clyde, take point. We’re going to the house.”

A square of courtyard narrowed into a path. To either side, the plots of lawns were raised by a metre, bordered by a wilting hedge. All together it created the effect of a sunken walkway, which felt increasingly like a death trap with every step she took. Through the withered hedge she saw a trio of bodies, and a winged cloud slowly recycling the dead.

Through a white-panelled gate, just beyond a white-panelled shed from which white-painted pipes rooted into the ground, a buzzing cloud hovered above what had been a swimming pool. Four decomposed skeletons lay in the bloody soup of the mostly evaporated pool. A fifth, in a shimmering purple suit and with a knife through its eye, lay poolside, almost ignored by the buzzing swarm.

No order had to be given for everyone to hurry on to the relative calm of another sunken walkway, which abruptly became a raised path through lowered squares of lawn, then a patio outside the house itself. The slabs, made of marble rather than anything so common as granite, occupied a plot big enough for a manageable house. The furniture, again all white, was piled outside the wall-sized sliding-glass doors. That glass was dented rather than cracked, and nearly as thick as a brick. Inside the room, more furniture, this mostly old wood, had been haphazardly stacked, blocking the view.

“You’d need a miner to hack through that lot,” Mick said.

“Do you see that bookshelf on top of this table?” Tess said. “That was used as a ladder up to the balcony. We can try to get in up there.”

The table was white, except where insect effluvia lay field-thick, and made of wood-effect plastic. The bookcase, however, was hand-carved mahogany.

“Me first, Commish,” Clyde said, jumping onto the table. Placing one foot on the bookcase, he jumped up, testing his weight. “Balcony. Door’s open. Think it’s a bedroom.” As