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

where I was alone in the restaurant. Mick, or one of his relatives, was in every night. A lot of the older miners, who’d retired close to where they’d lived and worked, but who’d done their national service in the other hemisphere, camped out by the windows. I might have been sixteen, but I knew why.

Had to change the menu a bit. Made it more traditionally Australian. These days, you’d call it Outback-Korean fusion, but it was really just finding a balance between what the customers wanted to eat and what Mum knew how to cook.

Mum got better. She didn’t recover. But she was less obviously sick. People kept coming to the restaurant. Ultimately, a few years later, when it was obvious I was on a different path, she was able to sell the business and enjoy a few years of peace.

Meantime, the restaurant was too busy for me to waste the hours doodling in a journal. Mick took to popping in more often. Sometimes with Anna in her pushchair. One night, he left me the book he’d been reading as a tip. I’d have preferred cash. It was Sherlock Holmes. Now, if you ask Mick, he’ll say it was him giving me that book which is why I became a cop. I won’t say it didn’t help, even if it did give me an unrealistic view of the importance of trivial clues in solving a case. But that wasn’t why I picked up the badge.

That was my bad year. Bullied, and then punished for fighting. Spending my nights working, friendless, alone. Worried that Mum’s restaurant was always too empty. Shaken down by a human trafficker. Discovering spies were real. Realising my mum had seen things so dark she could never share them with me. Having my golden ticket away from the desert snatched out of my hands by my selfish mother. Learning she had cancer. Thinking she was going to die.

Yes, it was a bad year, which ended when I pulled my head out of the sand and realised I wasn’t the centre of the universe. Other people mattered. Other people cared. Other people were worth caring about. Those old miners sat down in our restaurant as a way of standing up to that gallows-joke of a regime. When I realised I was one of them, that I belonged, I knew I had to find a way of giving back. Of standing up in my own way. That’s why I became a cop.

 

 

Part 3

 

Forgotten Lessons from Not So Long Ago

 

Cape Town, South Africa

22nd March

 

Chapter 17 - The Cape of Lost Hope

False Bay, Cape Town, South Africa

After she’d watched the helicopter take flight, Commissioner Tess Qwong took a moment to marvel at the view. The captain had parked the ship at the southern edge of False Bay, a massive circular harbour, twenty kilometres deep, twenty wide in the south, and thirty kilometres wide in the north where the city of Cape Town began. To the west of False Bay was the Cape of Good Hope, on which lay Simon’s Town and the homeport of the South African Navy. To the north was the city of Cape Town, and Table Mountain. On the eastern edge of the bay was Cape Hangklip, and the rendezvous point with the African Union convoy.

Cape Hangklip was relatively remote and relatively isolated, while still being relatively close to the city, and so to the highways which led north. It was close to perfect as a rendezvous. So where was the convoy?

Tess turned her gaze from the angry ocean and up to the tranquil blue sky in which the helicopter was already a speck, carrying Colonel Hawker, Clyde, and Nicko, in case the search-mission turned into a rescue.

Taking one last deep breath of the wondrously still, gloriously warm, faintly sweet South African air, she went back inside, and up to the bridge.

Leo and Avalon were analysing stills grabbed from the helicopter, while the captain was watching the live feed. The screen showed a rocky shore beset by craggy slopes, windswept shrubs, and a narrow road.

“Is that Cape Hangklip?” Tess asked.

“Yes. The radiation is rising,” Adams said, her voice low.

“Technically no,” Avalon said. “The reading is rising, but at a rate commensurate with the helicopter’s ascent and journey inland. Extrapolating, there is an increasing level of airborne particulates.”

“Could that be fallout from Port Elizabeth?” Tess asked.

“Yes,” Leo said.

“No,” Avalon said. “The wind direction is wrong.”

“My first captain always said, wait until all the data was hooked before jumping to judgement,” Adams said, ostensibly addressing the bridge crew. “These two are a walking example of why.”

“Thank you,” Avalon said, and sounded sincere.

“Anything on the radio, Mr Kane?” Adams asked.

“Nothing yet, ma’am,” Lieutenant Kane said.

“The convoy could have been delayed by a detour around Port Elizabeth,” Tess said.

“Indeed,” the captain said. “Mr Kane, what of the repeater radio station?”

“As quiet as a kakapo, ma’am.”

“Tell the commander to follow the road eastward,” Adams said. “The people could be anywhere, but the vehicles would be on the road.”

“Movement,” Tess said. “Zoms.”

On the feed, a trio of walking corpses tumbled down a steep escarpment onto the road, angling towards the helicopter. A fourth zombie was already ahead of them, lurching along the road towards the helicopter, but it was on the wrong side of the crash barrier. After five staggering steps, it toppled down a steep-walled creek.

Tess switched her focus to the screen displaying a digital map. It was a two-and-a-half-thousand-kilometre drive from Inhambane. If the roads were clear, that was a two-day journey.

The Cape of Good Hope was not the most southerly point of Africa, as early European mapmakers had assumed. The city of Cape Town began on the northern shore of False Bay, and sprawled northward, curling around Table Mountain, and