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

was when Oakes pushed Zach out of the helicopter. Clyde slid downward, carbine raised.

Head bowed, Tess dropped off the edge, and the helicopter ascended, even as Zach stood up.

“What the hell, Nicko!” Zach yelled up into the swirling black cloud.

“The sarge didn’t want you doing a slice-and-splat impression of a boiled egg,” Clyde said.

The swirling mist of orange grit and black soot, given flight by the rotors’ updraft, slowly settled, revealing a landscape that had been apocalyptic long before the outbreak.

“Who’d want to live here?” Zach said.

“I was just thinking it reminds me of home,” Tess said. “Except for the bodies.”

“Weapon up, Zach,” Clyde said. “Eyes ahead, gate and fence, road and alleys, doors and corners. We’re walking abreast. Those are dead zoms,” he added. “Headshot.”

“Head stab,” Zach said. “That bloke’s still got the knife in his eye.”

“Five shot, four stabbed, one bludgeoned, three uncertain,” Tess said. “That’s just those between here and the road. Gate is down, but so is the fence. Looks like it was for keeping dogs out, rather than thieves.”

“Who’d steal coal?” Zach asked, wiping the sooty dust from his forehead.

“Anyone who wants to boil their billy,” Clyde said. “Rail tracks.”

“There’s a train here?” Zach asked.

“To bring the coal from the mine,” Tess said. “That other set runs to the harbour where the coal would be loaded aboard a ship.”

“Freight cars at four o’clock,” Clyde said. “Single loco. Looks to be diesel.”

“Coal goes out by ship, so the tracks run to the mine, but not back to civilisation,” Tess said. “Ships need diesel, so they’d ship in extra for the people. This place is remote. Very remote. More remote than it appeared on the map, so you know what we should ask? Where’d the zoms come from?”

“Where are we heading, boss?” Clyde asked.

“The houses,” Tess said. “Food’s a priority, and if there’s none here, we’ll be gone before nightfall. Sir Malcolm lied to us, or he was misled. I think this is just a remote coal mine.”

“Zom,” Zach said, pausing by the body. “Or was she? She’s got a shovel next to her. But she was shot in the head. I guess people can get shot in the head, too.”

“First rule of policing, don’t jump to conclusions,” Tess said as they picked their way around the bodies and over to the broken fence.

“You said the first rule was check your boots, and that it was universal,” Zach said.

“Fine. Call that rule-six,” Tess said.

“Nah, you said rule-six was listen more than you talk.”

“That one’s universal, too,” Clyde said. “Bodies here. Guns next to them. Kalashnikovs. No magazines. Skulls intact. Think this one was shot.”

“Died at least a week ago,” Tess said. “Could be two weeks. Hard to tell in this climate.”

“Zoms don’t shoot people,” Zach said.

“No, they don’t,” Tess said.

More bodies lined the road. Mostly zombies. Mostly shot in the head. So many it was easy to overlook the dismembered limbs, the torn flesh, and the clawed corpses of the defenders.

“Was this a fighting retreat?” Tess asked.

“Can’t tell,” Clyde said.

“AK-47,” Tess said, as she pointed at a Kalashnikov. “Old model, but a new stock. The magazine is missing.”

“Let me check that house,” Clyde said and walked up the pair of wooden steps to the broken-open door surrounded by bullet-flecked plaster.

“We’ll wait down that alley,” Tess said. “Cover your mouth, Zach. You don’t want any of these flies hitching a ride.”

“Miners lived in there,” Clyde said, coming out of the back door. “Kitchen is meagre, but it’s been looted. They took the food, left everything else.”

“Someone survived the battle,” Tess said. “After they killed the zoms, they came back for the food and ammo.”

Not everyone living in this working town had been a miner, evidenced by the sun-bleached trike at the alley’s end.

The larger houses were easy to find. A low terracotta-coloured wall ran around the entire block. Just inside the wall, on either side of the road, were two small, but neat, houses, both with squares of front-garden-patio, a shade-covered porch, two storeys, and a flattened roof on which was another sunshade, and where the snipers had stood. On the road, the pavement, the lawn, the low wall, the porch, the doorway, and inside, lay bodies of the undead. Shot, stabbed, bludgeoned; there had been hundreds here. Not because of these two small houses, but what lay beyond: a villa that was ringed with a high wooden palisade, which blocked from view everything inside. The tall gate was open, and filled with more corpses.

“About five hundred,” Tess said.

“Six,” Clyde said. “They spill over behind the watchtowers.”

“What watchtowers?” Zach asked.

“Those two houses by the road,” Clyde said. “The flat roofs are so someone could stand guard.”

“Keeping those trees watered would have cost a fortune,” Tess said.

Four trimmed palms lined either side of the pavement, leading to the mansion. Or was it a compound? Who had wooden walls somewhere without forests? Someone who wanted to display their wealth.

“Whoa!” Zach said as he slipped on a pile of spent brass.

“Got you, mate,” Clyde said, grabbing his arm.

“Rule-one,” Tess said, as she picked her way through the bodies and to the wide-open gates.

The clothes worn by the dead were familiar from the outback. Denim bleached by the sun rather than in the factory, criss-crossed with stitches from where rips had been repaired rather than cherished. They were work-clothes because living in these harsh conditions was labour. Home-tailored to fit rather than some designer’s aesthetically tight and baggy. Practical rather than modest. Affordable rather than cheap. Faded, but not drab. With a scrub, they’d be found in any arid mine or farming town in either hemisphere. Except for the priest, identifiable from dog collar and crucifix, though he still gripped the barrel of an assault rifle