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

a civilian. Just another person. The mouth opened. The arms thrashed. The shallows foamed as hands splashed. Just another zombie. She fired. The figure slumped. Finally, utterly, eternally motionless. She kept her light on the corpse, watching the body drift with the waves, forth, then back, then forth, until it snagged on a semi-submerged spar.

She scanned the waves for the next patch of reflected light, then lowered the carbine as she realised it would take another minute before it was in range.

At first, it was easy. Surprisingly so. The blinking lights and reflective strips grew more distinct as the floating bodies approached. As some became entangled with sunken wreckage, those same lights gave her a distance-marker by which to judge her aim. From beyond their section of beach, the gunfire rose to a frenzy, but more quickly slackened as ammunition was expended. But the neighbouring gunfire didn’t entirely cease. As long as the other defenders held the line, as long as they had ammunition, as long as they didn’t flee, they could control this beach. But for how long would that be?

When her trigger clicked on an empty chamber, it came as a surprise. She slotted a new magazine into place, forcing herself to pocket the empty before raising the carbine and firing her thirty-first shot at what had to be nearly the same number of dead. A quick glance up and down the beach, and she saw a star-field of lights decorating the wreckage, illuminating the carpet of reflective-red in the nearby shallows. Her confidence fled.

The ships which had arrived in Australia, and those which they had sent back to sea, had been crammed ten times beyond capacity. Here, the number of passengers was irrelevant. How many life jackets did a cruise ship carry? Hundreds of corpses had already washed onto an already toxic shore. By mid-day, this beach would be uninhabitable. No matter how hard they fought, this beach was lost. But they had no method of organising a retreat, and nowhere to escape to, so she fired on, until she heard a scream, then a burst of automatic fire from behind. The light from the dim headlamp vanished.

“Hold the line!” Tess yelled as she spun around.

The restaurant’s grass roof had collapsed. Zach’s belly was balanced on the roof beam, his legs on one side, his arms on the other. Beneath him, the fallen roof shuddered and broke as a zombie punched and kicked through the withered grass. Only its cumbersome red life jacket prevented the creature from reaching high enough to grab Zach’s legs.

“Hold on, Zach!” she said.

“Yeah, you think?” Zach yelled back.

A second zombie rose like a volcano from under the collapsed grass roof. She fired, but it stumbled. Her shot missed. A second bullet blew the ghoul’s skull apart, but that shot hadn’t come from her weapon.

“Drop, Zachary!” Laila called.

“Get him out of here, I’ll secure the street,” Tess said.

“Of course,” Laila said.

“No,” Hawker said.

Tess half-turned. She’d not heard the soldier following her.

“The zombies are behind us,” Tess said, as Laila hauled Zach through the collapsed branches.

“An unknown number of hostiles, in an unlit town, in unfamiliar terrain,” Hawker said. “We’ll form a square on the beach, where any stray bullets are unlikely to hit our transport. As long as our ammo lasts, we’ve nothing to fear.”

“It won’t last forever,” Tess said. “I’m down to two magazines.”

“When we’re down to one, that’s when we’ll retreat,” Hawker said.

16th March

Chapter 11 - Prayer for the Living

Inhambane, Mozambique

 

Never had dawn taken so long to arrive, though when it did, and Tess looked around, she found that no one had died. In fact, their numbers had grown. Either not understanding Colonel Hawker’s orders, or pretending not to, the nurses had dashed into the darkness, returning with one or two survivors, again and again. While a running figure was the best indication in near-darkness that a person wasn’t undead, it had still been nearly impossible not to shoot the figures charging in from every direction.

“We need a better way of telling zombies from the living,” Tess said, as Laila jogged back to their beachfront square beside a rotund man struggling to keep up. “How’s your arm?”

“Almost as alive as I am,” Laila said. “I worry the wound has become infected. We must locate more antibiotics.”

“The sun’s rising,” Tess said. “We’ll find some this morning.”

“There are none here,” Laila said. “Before you arrived, we had searched for as far as the helicopter can reach. We must look elsewhere.”

“The helicopter has been flying off in search of supplies?” Tess asked, getting another clue to the nightmare existence for these refugees hoping help would come with the new dawn. But this dawn had only brought clarity as to the extent of the destruction.

“Never understood why they called dawn a cold light,” Clyde said. “Feels pretty warm to me.”

“It’s a massacre,” Zach said.

The sand was covered in red-vested corpses. The life-vests’ emergency lights still flashed, though they were barely visible against the rising sun. More bodies, some still moving, were snagged on the semi-sunken debris littering the shore. Even more dotted the now calm sea.

“The tide’s going out, isn’t it?” Tess asked.

“We’ve got a few hours respite,” Hawker said. “My advice—”

But before he could give it, four-engined salvation lumbered through the sky, shredding the stillness twice over as a cheer erupted from among the refugee-defenders.

“That’s a C-5 Galaxy,” Clyde said. “She’s the plane which should have brought us here.”

“Better late than never,” Tess said. “Bruce, what do we do?”

“I’ll clear the beach,” Hawker said. “Pick up survivors. Eliminate any hostiles. But this position won’t hold. We’ll fall back inland, and away from the shore. I need to know how many planes are inbound, and a timeframe for a complete evac.”

“Laila, could you come with me