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

and secured from the shore by white railings and a heavy gate. Originally, this had been kept closed by a mechanical keypad, but someone had taken a crowbar and sledgehammer to the lock, bending the gatepost far enough to disengage the mechanism. Someone had then secured the gate with a rope, which, in turn, had been cut. Probably with the short-handled axe embedded in the skull of the corpse on the far side of the gate.

“The dents are on this side of the lock,” Tess said. “Whoever forced the gate did so from the quay. Probably someone who came, and went, by boat. This is the first quay inside the seawall. I’d guess this was a sailor who was following the coast.”

“Plenty of brass among the silt,” Hawker said. “About fifteen bodies on the far side. Zoms from the look of them.”

“They killed the zoms before opening the gate,” Zach said. “I mean, I would.”

“They ran out of bullets,” Tess said. “Why else use that axe? But they thought this fight was worth the risk, so must have already run out of food. Colonel, take the lead. That looks to be a hotel ahead. We’ll make that our first stop.”

“A hotel with Table Mountain behind, and the sea in front,” Toppley said. “That takes me back.”

“You’ve been here before?” Tess asked as she stepped over the corpses and through the gate.

“Not Cape Town, no,” Toppley said. “I was thinking of my first attempt at retirement ten years ago, but I can’t see any gun-wielding sentries on any of those balconies. If I were waiting for a ship, that would be a sensible place to station a lookout.”

“If they were waiting here, they’ll have eaten the food,” Tess said. “Pop-quiz, Zach. Where do we look for food now? I should warn you, there’s only one correct answer, and failure to guess it will have you swimming a lap of the warship.”

“If I guess it right, does that mean you have to swim around the ship?” he asked. “You know there are sharks in these waters? Me and Pip saw them. Proper sharks.”

“Great whites,” Sullivan said.

“Yeah, no fooling,” Zach said. “We saw three.”

“Two,” Sullivan said.

“I saw three,” Zach said.

“Fine, no forfeit,” Tess said. “But what’s the answer? Where do we look for food?”

“Dunno,” Zach said. “Supermarkets and groceries would have been looted first so a restaurant, maybe. But not that hotel. It’s too obvious.”

The architect must have regretted being born a millennium too late, and had constructed the hotel in the style of a tiered desert fortress onto which balconies, columns, and covered colonnades had been reluctantly tacked. Like the road, the hotel’s driveway was lined with perfectly trimmed palms. As around the jetty, bodies littered the broken-open gates, though they lay more heavily on the north side, as if at least some of the bodies had been moved out of the way.

“Someone cleared those corpses so they could get a vehicle in, or out,” Tess said. “No, hang back here, Zach,” she added as he took a step towards the gates, and so after Hawker and Oakes who were jogging to the hotel entrance. “You’re right, it’s too obvious. We won’t find food there.”

“So why’s the colonel and Nicko—” Zach began, just as the two soldiers, as one, stopped running and jumped back, raising their carbines. Two shots rang out. Another two. A fifth.

Hawker raised a clenched fist, before returning his hand to his gun. The two soldiers prowled forward.

Tess turned her own attention to the road. “Zach, Teegan, watch the hotel. Everyone else, eyes on the road.”

“They’re coming back, Commish!” Zach said.

The soldiers were running at a quick jog, which wasn’t quite a sprint.

“Trouble?” Tess asked.

“Zoms,” Oakes said, wiping a long machete with a strip of cloth.

“Where did you get that machete?” Zach asked.

“Zoms,” Oakes said again.

“I heard sounds inside the hotel,” Hawker said. “They secured the front doors from the inside. But it’s not people trapped in there.”

“Are they in danger of getting out?” Tess asked.

“They haven’t yet,” Hawker said. “But give it time.”

“Pity,” Tess said. “Let’s keep going.”

“Why’s it a pity?” Zach asked, as they moved off, Hawker and Oakes once again in the lead.

“A big hotel right by the waterfront would have been an ideal place for the African Union to wait until the rescue ships arrived,” Tess said. “There’s even a sign there for a heliport. But if there are still zombies inside… well, either we kill them, or we find a different pier to use.”

“What was the correct answer?” Zach asked. “Where do we look for food?”

“You got it,” Tess said. “Restaurants, hotels, schools. Not farms or grocery stores or homes, but everywhere in between. Places food was stored, but which would have been closed immediately after the pandemic began. Leo, didn’t you say you’d been here before?”

“I didn’t make it further than the university,” Leo said. “I’d been booked for a trio of lectures on non-proliferation and disarmament. I had a week’s vacation planned afterwards, but before I made it onto the stage, I got a call. There’d been another Ebola flare-up in the DRC. The C.I.A. believed it had been engineered. Flo and I got a police escort to the airport, and a fighter escort to the border.”

“The Ebola outbreak was engineered?” Tess asked.

“No, but one of the flare-ups was. A local warlord had the idea of getting into the bioweapons business. Fortunately for the world, that guy had skipped the classes on safety precautions. The bunker he built below ground was so badly ventilated, the victims were mostly him and his people.”

“Wow. I never knew,” Tess said.

“It was never publicised. Didn’t want to give other idiots the wrong idea, eh?” Leo said.

“Huh,” Tess said. Behind her, Sullivan and Zach were chin-wagging away