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

and raised her carbine, firing into the nearest walking corpse. One shot, then the next. One target, then the next, until her magazine was spent.

“Commish!” Clyde called. “Ready.”

Tess used the butt of her carbine to knock the pin loose, grabbed it, and pulled it free. That left only the bayonet. She gripped the knife’s handle, took a breath. The gate creaked as another two undead pushed against it, while five behind pushed against them. Along the bridge, drills whirred as the new wall was still being built.

“Now!” Adams yelled.

The creaking was growing louder. The sound didn’t come from the gate, but from below, from the pier itself. She tugged the bayonet free, and ran, looking for the rope. Behind her, the gates swung open. Flesh smacked into the metal road-plates as the undead fell forward. Bones cracked as more pushed forward, falling over that first rank. She saw the rope. One end was looped around the edge of a support post where the fencing had been removed. She wrapped it around her left hand, turned, and saw the horde approaching. Teeth snapping, hands grasping, hundreds, with more coming from the shore, and now only metres away.

She’d intended to walk-climb-haul herself around the outside of the fence, but with death approaching so fast, she jumped. Fell. The rope went taut, sending a jolt through her shoulders, and down her spine. Her feet entered the water, nearly ankle-deep. Bending her legs at ninety degrees, she raised them up as V-shaped ripples dashed towards her. A metre-long croc rose out of the water, mouth open, snapping closed on air a whisker shy of her heel.

Behind came a splash as the first zombie hit the water. Another. But her rope was being pulled upwards, and to a gap behind the new wall.

“Lost your bayonet,” Tess said. “Sorry, mate.”

“No worries,” Clyde said.

“You didn’t lose the rope,” Avalon said. “So no harm done.”

“Fall back!” Adams called. “We’ll build another wall here.”

“There!” Zach said, pointing upriver. “Look up there at the river bank. The crocs are crawling away.”

“Says it all, really,” Clyde said. “It really does.”

2nd April

 

Chapter 34 - Evidence at Sea

Guyana

“Croc. Croc. Bug. Croc,” Zach said, swiping left through the photographs downloaded onto the tablet. “Croc attacking a zom. Bug. Croc. Doc Flo took a lot of photos of animals.”

“Check them all, and check them again,” Tess said. “Right there is perfect for the desk, Clyde.”

“I’ll bolt it down,” he said, and picked up the drill.

With the gym off-limits, Tess had requested permission to claim it as a temporary investigation centre. In practical terms, that involved bringing in a desk and a couple of whiteboards from the galley.

“If we’re not moving any of the workout machines, does that mean we can use them?” Zach asked.

“Absolutely not,” Tess said. “If coppers don’t obey the law, you can’t expect anyone else to. Back to those photos.”

“Yeah, but what am I looking for?” Zach asked.

“You won’t know it when you see it,” Tess said. “Not at first. There won’t be a perfectly timed eureka moment where everything slots into place. You have to build up a mental picture of what the scene was like before, and what happened next. From that, eventually, you’ll work out who committed the crime.”

“But there wasn’t a crime at that French refuelling base,” Zach said.

“Not that we know of,” Tess said. “But it’s still part of the wider crime which brought about the end of the world. When we return to Australia, there will be an inquiry with questions from parliament, and the U.N. Probably televised. Definitely published. Everyone will want to know what we’ve seen.”

“Beats doing homework, right?” Clyde said.

“I guess,” Zach said, and sounded unsure.

Tess picked up a pen, and began copying the names of the ships listed in the refuelling log onto the board.

It always took a while for the clues to slot into place. On this occasion, it had taken about thirty hours. There was a certain kind of copper, the worst kind of copper, for whom the first rule of policing was: everyone can be charged with something. That kind of rule belonged in the world her mother had escaped, and it was not going to be the foundation of the new world they were trying to create.

Avalon and Smilovitz had deliberately lied to the prime minister. That wasn’t a crime, or else every session of parliament would be held behind bars. As the Canadians’ avowed goal was to avoid production being diverted from essential logistics and medicine production, it would be ridiculous to charge them with wasting governmental resources. Treason was a possibility, though it would set a dangerous precedent if refusal to rush to production a WMD were to become an offence.

Not that she was in a position to arrest them. Not while aboard ship, when the captain and crew would ask why. She’d destroyed every entry in her diary mentioning the weapon, and was debating disposing of the rest, too. Not to cover up the crime, but to avoid any of the sailors learning the truth. The crew believed the mission was vital to constructing a weapon to end the undead, and so they’d given up a chance to head for home. Revealing the lie probably wouldn’t lead to a lynching, or even to the scientists being stranded on the first stretch of rocky shore, but it would dent cohesion when they were sailing through very troubled waters.

When they returned to Canberra, she’d have to tell Anna. The Canadians didn’t want their new society to begin with the deployment of another WMD, but she didn’t want it to begin with a conspiracy and cover-up, so she’d have to tell O.O. too. It was difficult to predict what would happen afterwards. Probably, publicly, nothing.

The outcome depended on just how dire the