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

“You notice what’s missing?” Tess asked.

“Not the guns,” Zach said.

“Missing from the bodies. What the dead aren’t wearing,” she said. “Very few are wearing hats.”

“I’ve not seen many zoms in hats,” Zach said.

“The dead without a head wound must be the immune,” Tess said. “Some of these would be locals, infected here, and I can’t see many hats lying in the dirt, so they left their home after dark. That’s when the zoms came. The locals threw up what barriers they could, and rushed here. To this compound because it had walls.”

“I’ll tell you something else that’s missing,” Clyde said. “There are no dead kids.”

“You spoke too soon,” Zach said.

Just inside the courtyard, lay the body of a boy, shot in the head, but with an AK-47 lying partially beneath his body.

The courtyard was large enough for a dozen cars to be parked, though none were there now. Another row of desiccated jungle-palms separated the car park from the house, a squat two-storey with small windows and white-painted walls. A marble colonnade supported an upper-floor balcony, which had an awning above and flowerpots beneath. The house was big enough for perhaps ten bedrooms, depending on their size. A large house, but not a huge one. The main entrance had wide wooden double doors, which were closed. All of the windows had frosted glass; an odd feature for any room that wasn’t a bathroom. But most noticeable of all were the bodies.

“You okay, Zach?” she asked.

“Mmm,” he said.

“Get on the radio,” she said. “Tell…” She paused, uncertain how to finish the sentence.

At the edge of the courtyard, close to the house, were three bodies. Their eyes had been plucked from their skulls, but that could have been the work of birds. The rest was the work of evil incarnate. Each victim was pinned to a table by a kitchen knife embedded in ankle, thigh, wrist, and forearm. That had only been the beginning of their torment.

The body of the man nearest the house was etched with a root-work of cuts: thin, long, unbroken lines running from scalp downward. Some made it to chest, to groin, to fingers, but only five incisions made it all the way to the toes. It was as if the killer had been attempting the longest unbroken incision.

The second victim had been partially skinned. Squares of skin hung loose from her abdomen and thighs, exposing the muscle beneath. The side of each square measured ten centimetres in length. Tess could tell because the killer had marked the woman’s entire body before they’d begun, using a ruler and marker pen, both of which lay in the blood-soaked sand.

The third victim, by contrast, was nearly unmarked. In addition to the blades wedged in ankle and wrist, more had been hammered into her left arm, but one must have nicked an artery, mercifully ending the terminal ordeal.

“Tell the captain we’ve found three bodies, executed in the fashion favoured by the cartel,” Tess said.

“Empty ammo crates over on those tables,” Clyde said. “A few weapons, too. Assault rifles, RPGs, a few shotguns. No ammo, but there’s a lot of ammo boxes. A lot of spent cartridges. They fought a real battle here.”

“The locals,” Tess said. “After the outbreak, when the zoms came, they retreated here and used the cartel’s arsenal to hold back the undead. At some point, they turned their defence into an attack. Killed the zoms. All the zoms, because we’ve seen none. They gathered the food from the houses and stripped the ammo from the dead.” She turned back to the mutilated corpses. “Then the sisters returned home.”

“You think this was them?” Clyde asked.

“Captain said they’re coming ashore,” Zach said. “We’re not to touch anything. Whoever did that’s sick,” he added.

“They are,” Tess said. “It’s just like we saw in the bunker in Canberra, like I saw in Broken Hill. It’s the work of the cartel’s assassins. Take a look around, Clyde. Don’t touch anything.”

“Understood,” he said.

“I don’t,” Zach said.

“This is a message,” Tess said. “So whom was it left for? The wooden walls are there to make a statement, but this place isn’t really built for a siege. Defence would come from its remoteness, but every luxury would have to be imported, and few could make up for the coal floating thick in the air. The sisters might have come here, but they didn’t live here. Sir Malcolm wasn’t lying. He was brought here, but because the sisters didn’t care if he reported the location, and we came looking. These three victims were left here as a message, and I think that message is intended for people like us.”

“Commish, over here!” Clyde called.

On a trestle table in the shade of the courtyard’s wall was a laptop plugged into a satellite dish transmitter, next to a very old-fashioned, solid stone, domed cake-stand.

“Power cable runs to a generator in that hut,” Clyde said, pointing to a room built into the walls of the palisade.

“What’s under—” Zach began, his hand reaching for the cake stand even as he spoke.

“Don’t!” Clyde said, even as Tess grabbed Zach’s arm.

“What?” the young man said.

“People who skin people alive are the kind who leave traps,” Tess said.

“Oh. Like a bomb or something,” Zach said. “I thought it was going to be someone’s head under there.”

“The termites aren’t interested,” Clyde said, pointing to the industrious column of insects marching from beneath the wood-fronted palisade to the trio of crucified corpses. “So whatever is under there isn’t something they’d call food. Step back,” he said. “Far side of the building. Out of the line of sight.”

“Do you know what you’re doing?” Tess asked.

“This is the work I’ve been doing for a decade,” Clyde said.

“Bomb disposal?” she asked.

“War zone clear-up, because no farmer ever asked for a