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

supplies and food, but we only saw a small fraction of their total stash. The tunnel must run from the house all the way to the coal mine, and must have been excavated from that direction. I don’t know precisely how many rifles were down there, but we saw no ammunition. They’d stashed a few AT4 anti-tank missiles, so there could be other military supplies down there. Most of what we saw was off-the-shelf survivalist supplies. Solar panels, lights, compact generators, bikes, even a few self-assembly canoes. From the quantity, and almost random nature of it all, I reckon it was bought in panic by someone for whom money was no object, but who’d just learned the world was about to end. Say a senior member of a drug gang with a box of fake credit cards, or a suitcase of laundered cash. It could have been bought online, or in a big-box store. Bought, I think, by that woman we found down in the tunnel.”

“She was a member of the cartel?” Adams asked.

“Yes, she was,” Tess said. “What I don’t know, and what we need to work out, is whether she was left there to guard the place against when the sisters came back, or whether she was abandoned there to die. In either case, she seemed to be living below ground.”

“Because of the VX above,” Leo said.

“The grenade she threw was a dud,” Tess said. “I have my doubts about the detonators attached to the C4 built into the walls of the house, but we left the detonator on the shore with our gear. Would it be safe to return to collect more evidence?”

“Let’s put a pin in that question for now,” Adams said. “What do you think happened here?”

“The zoms arrived after dark,” Tess said. “The locals didn’t have much time to throw up defences. They, or some of them, fought a fighting retreat back to that big house. They must have raided the tunnels for weapons. They recorded that apology and exhortation, and uploaded it to the net, and then the locals attacked. Some survived. And if Leo saw that video before, then this all happened near the beginning of the outbreak. The locals didn’t clear away the bodies, so they made camp somewhere else, but close by. They gathered food from their own houses and ate that before raiding the underground stash.”

“They were terrified of the cartel, even after the outbreak,” Adams said. “Terrified for good reason, judging by that video. There are two large shipwrecks in the bay. It’s possible those brought the infection here. The ships were sunk with portable artillery in an attempt to stop the undead. With the ships sunk, there was no escape by sea. But why didn’t they flee by land?”

“Because they hoped the sisters were dead,” Tess said. “And if they had been, then here was a remote bastion with enough supplies to last until the world began to recover. After the nuclear war began, maybe they thought they really were safe. Except the sisters did come.”

“There are no sixty-year-old women in that footage,” Adams said.

“That doesn’t mean they didn’t come here themselves,” Tess said. “They’d know never to be caught on camera at a crime scene. I saw murders like that in Canberra, and in Broken Hill. People skinned alive. They employed torturers, each of whom was trained to use the same M.O. Back before the outbreak, we thought it was work of an international serial killer, and I think that was the point. It threw us off the scent, while instilling fear in the gangsters who were in the know. You said they used VX?”

“Or a new nerve agent with very similar effects,” Leo said. “But it’s probably VX.”

“Where did it come from?” Tess asked.

“Originally, Porton Down in England in the 1950s,” Leo said. “But it was banned back in 1993. North Korea never signed the Chemical Weapons Treaty, and instead kept a crazy-huge stockpile ready to be deployed in the event of an invasion from the south. VX has a low volatility. It lingers, making it an ideal defensive area-denial weapon. That you aren’t dead suggests a low-altitude dispersal. I’d say they gathered the locals at the pier, together, and clearly packed for travel. It could mean they only had a very limited supply, rather than enough to drench the entire bay.”

“Sir Malcolm Baker mentioned North Korea had a link to the sisters,” Tess said. “But would that living-crime of a government have been insane enough to give a pair of narco-queens a WMD?”

“The Russians poured money into biochemical R&D,” Adams said. “What was the name of their lab? The Kamera. Could it have come from there?”

“It could have come from anywhere,” Leo said. “But it’s most likely to have come from the same lab-network that developed compound-zom.”

“You mean the zombie virus?” Tess asked. “Is there anyway of nailing down some of these theories?”

“Not without risk and time,” Leo said.

“We’ve run out of time,” Adams said. “Commissioner, what is your assessment of the supplies down in those tunnels?”

“The tunnels are extensive,” Tess said. “I didn’t see enough of the contents to form a conclusion. It’s reasonable to assume the sisters laid in enough rifles and food to turn those miners into an army. Say, enough food to keep a thousand alive for a year.”

“Dr Smilovitz, how long before it would be safe to use that pier again?” Adams asked.

“I’d prefer to wait a year,” he said. “A month is probably sufficient. It’s possible that it’s safe now, but I’d want to send in a canary first. Or a flamingo.”

“Let me rephrase the question,” Adams said. “Could the sisters return tomorrow to claim what is down in the tunnels?”

“Sure. They’d have no qualms about using a person to test the pier,” Leo said.

“Ashore, there is a vast quantity of coal, and