While the Lights Are On (Surviving the Evacuation) Read online

  While the Lights Are On

  Life Goes On 3

  Surviving the Evacuation

  Frank Tayell

  Reading Order & Copyright

  Life is never quite as simple as fiction. The good are never quite as kind. The bad are rarely as evil. But sometimes they are.

  Surviving the Evacuation: While the Lights Are On

  Life Goes On, Book 3

  Published by Frank Tayell

  Copyright 2020

  All rights reserved

  All people, places, and (most) events are fictional.

  Post-Apocalyptic Detective Novels

  Work. Rest. Repeat.

  Strike a Match 1. Serious Crimes

  Strike a Match 2. Counterfeit Conspiracy

  Strike a Match 3. Endangered Nation

  Surviving The Evacuation / Here We Stand / Life Goes On

  Book 1: London

  Book 2: Wasteland

  Zombies vs The Living Dead

  Book 3: Family

  Book 4: Unsafe Haven

  Book 5: Reunion

  Book 6: Harvest

  Book 7: Home

  Here We Stand 1: Infected

  Here We Stand 2: Divided

  Book 8: Anglesey

  Book 9: Ireland

  Book 10: The Last Candidate

  Book 11: Search and Rescue

  Book 12: Britain’s End

  Book 13: Future’s Beginning

  Book 14: Mort Vivant

  Book 15: Where There’s Hope

  Book 16: Unwanted Visitors, Unwelcome Guests

  Life Goes On 1: Outback Outbreak

  Life Goes On 2: No More News

  Life Goes On 3: While the Lights Are On

  Book 17: There We Stood

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  Synopsis

  Save Australia, Save the World.

  Three weeks after the outbreak, most nations have collapsed. An ever-increasing number of refugees flee, by boat and air, to the perceived safety of the remote Pacific nations. In Australia, every able body is conscripted, local and newcomer alike. The lucky few are put to work in the new factories, farms, and mines. The unlucky many are given tools for weapons, put aboard cruise-ships and cargo freighters, and returned to the ever-moving frontline. But even though the death toll rises, victory is still within reach.

  The recordings made in North America by Pete and Corrie Guinn contained more than the siblings realised. The footage from Canada and Michigan is further confirmation the outbreak was no accident. The Canadian scientist, Dr Avalon, can prove it.

  As Commissioner Tess Qwong takes justice to the increasingly lawless outback, Anna Dodson brings order to the chaos of Parliament House, and Dr Avalon works on a weapon to finally destroy the undead. But no plans can survive the impact of a nuclear bomb.

  From a lawless natural gas refinery in Queensland to the once golden coast of New South Wales. Behind the barricaded streets of Canberra and in the bunker beneath Parliament House, there is still hope for Australia, the Pacific, the world, as long as the lights remain on.

  Table of Contents

  Part 1: Zombies Can’t Run

  11th March

  Chapter 1: The Conspiracy So Far

  Chapter 2: Team Stonefish

  Chapter 3: And Then There Were Five

  Chapter 4: Frankenstein’s Mistake

  Chapter 5: Judge, Jury, and Executioner

  Chapter 6: Con-Air

  Chapter 7: Trapped in the Never-Ever-Again

  Chapter 8: Old Mine, New Tricks

  Chapter 9: Million Dollar Rocks

  Chapter 10: Always Have a Plan-C

  Chapter 11: Inedible Carats

  Chapter 12: Dancing Penguins

  Chapter 13: The Questionable Inevitability of Death and Taxes

  12th March

  Chapter 14: An RAAF Upgrade

  Chapter 15: Waves of Change

  Part 2: The Bunker

  11th March

  Chapter 16: The Antibody Test

  Chapter 17: A Conscripted City

  Chapter 18: Housing and Agriculture

  12th March

  Chapter 19: The First Wave

  Chapter 20: Off the Scale

  Chapter 21: Bad News Loves Company

  Chapter 22: The Fragility of Unicorns

  Chapter 23: Political Immunity

  Chapter 24: The Blood-Red Flag

  Chapter 25: The Treachery of the Opposition

  Chapter 26: Coup Interrupted

  Chapter 27: Uphill Battle

  Part 3: While the Lights Are On

  13th March

  Chapter 28: First Class Policing

  Chapter 29: Honesty Test

  14th March

  Chapter 30: A Dinosaur of a Caravan

  Epilogue: While the Lights Are On

  Part 1

  Zombies Can’t Run

  Canberra & Queensland

  11th & 12th March

  11th March

  Chapter 1 - The Conspiracy So Far

  Bonner, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory

  As the sun rose over Canberra, so did the flies, forming a buzzing replica of the clouds of breakfast-barbecue smoke billowing above the recently barricaded rear gardens. But no smoke rose from the abandoned suburbs to the north of the defensive wall.

  “They’re not interested in the bodies. D’you notice that?” Mick Dodson asked. “The flies hover above the zombies, but they don’t land.”

  The streetlight flickered on, off, on, off; an unnecessary signal to those standing watch that dawn had arrived. One by one, the searchlights and spot lamps went out, leaving the roundabout on Shoalhaven Avenue in artificial darkness. Slowly, day’s first light smoothed the shadows into distantly spaced, mostly one-storey, single-garage homes. Neatly fenced, occasionally hedged, dotted with trees, and ringed by parched, and often charred, moats of lawn. Once home to clerical staff and administrators, teachers and nurses, and the other essential workers who kept the lifeblood of Australia’s capital pumping. Now they were lifeless. Evacuated.

  Many bore the smoke-black scars of the conflagration two weeks ago. Those fires, begun a week after the outbreak, had led to the evacuation of the northern and eastern suburbs of Canberra. With most of the city’s firefighters already deployed to the bush, swathes of the city had burned before the blazes were brought under control.

  On most houses, charred or not, wooden boards covered windows and doors. Those weren’t repairs, but reinforcement, defences added during the panicked first hours of the outbreak three weeks ago, when misleading rumours made it unclear whether the nightmare was global or confined to Manhattan. Before the location of the first outbreak was confirmed, the virus had spread at subsonic speed as the infected escaped aboard passenger jets. Nowhere was safe from the undead. Not even Australia.

  Some aircraft had been shot down. A few had landed at airports where they’d been quarantined. Many had crashed. One of those downed planes had slammed into the outback only a few hundred kilometres from Broken Hill, where Mick Dodson worked as a Royal Flying Doctor medic and pilot who refused to retire, and where Tess Qwong had been a police inspector ever-grateful she no longer patrolled a city’s beat. Three weeks later, Mick Dodson was still a pilot and medic. His daughter, Anna, had risen from an independent backbench rural representative to a senior member of the cabinet.
Tess had been appointed deputy commissioner with the Australian Federal Police. It was a grand title considering that under a dozen, mostly elderly or injured, coppers remained in Canberra.

  “I’ll tell Dr Smilovitz about the flies,” Mick Dodson continued. “He’s a fella who’d be interested.”

  Daylight now more formally arrived, Tess Qwong took a closer look at the four corpses they had killed during their night’s unexpected sentry duty. “I’m more interested in their clothing,” she said, brushing away the pestering insects; they might not be interested in the zombies, but they were very interested in her living flesh. “The coats are too warm for the weather, so they were originally worn for protection.”

  “They were city folk,” Mick said. “Bet they fled to the bush when news of the outbreak struck. Didn’t know the rules for surviving out there, so came back. But not quickly enough.”

  Tess turned around, looking across the roundabout which created a junction with Mirrabei Drive. A few of the sentries further down the rampart were pacing back and forth. A few of the newer conscripts had taken the all-clear signal as the okay to relieve themselves. Crucially, no sirens were sounding and no one was screaming. “Reckon the wall works,” she said.

  “They’ve been building these types of walls in Singapore, have they?” Mick asked.

  “So the report goes,” Tess said. “Create a line of cars along the middle of the road, with a skirt of corrugated metal to stop crawlers. Bolt fencing to the bodywork to provide protection to the sentries standing guard. Lay planks and ladders across the vehicles’ roofs to create a walkway. Not a bad system, quick and easy, utilising whatever is close to hand.”

  “And the Singaporeans call them crawlers?” Mick asked.

  “No, but that’s the polite translation,” Tess said. “You should read some of the briefing notes Anna brings home.”

  “That hotel suite isn’t home,” Mick said. “Home is the outback. Sixty thousand years of ancestral history is calling to me. It’s where I was born. It’s where I’ll be buried. But a hotel isn’t a bad place to spend a few nights, even if I’ve got to share the suite with you and my daughter.”

  “And here I was, about to offer to cook you breakfast when we got back.”

  After the Rosewood Cartel had dropped mortar bombs on Broken Hill’s runway, Mick had flown Tess to Canberra to report the cartel’s activities directly to the cabinet. And to report the departure of Liu Higson and the Guinn siblings for Vancouver aboard Lisa Kempton’s private jet.

  As much as life had changed for Mick, it had changed even more for his daughter. Anna was the youngest member of the Australian parliament and independent representative for the Division of Parkes, a rural constituency containing four hundred thousand square kilometres, one hundred thousand people, and her childhood home of Broken Hill. After the outbreak, Anna had jumped from the backbench to a backseat in the cabinet. As the number of suicides and disappearances among her colleagues had increased, and after the mirror-cabinet had been dispatched to Tasmania, Anna had been promoted again, to the front-bench position of Minister for Housing and Agriculture.

  “You should still read the reports,” Tess said. “If you can find the time to watch every bad action movie ever made, you can find time to read some of the briefing notes.”

  “A bloke’s allowed to enjoy his retirement,” Mick said. “And you’ll tell me anything important.”

  A distant gunshot crinkled across the low roofs to the north. Tess turned around, peering across the roundabout northwards, up Mirrabei Drive, but the young trees were still taller than her perch atop the barricade.

  “Only one shot,” Mick said. “Probably just a shadow. How many of the conscripts d’you reckon have ever used a gun before?”

  “Can’t be many,” Tess said, “or you and I wouldn’t be on guard duty. But I think we’re turning a corner. One of Anna’s reports was from the Minister of Defence, Ian Lignatiev. He estimates only ten thousand zombies remain in the outback and bush.”

  “And that’s why I don’t bother with those reports,” Mick said. “I got a different number from that Canadian scientist.”

  “You mean Dr Avalon?” Tess asked.

  “No, from the normal one, Leo Smilovitz,” Mick said. “He reckoned there are about a hundred thousand zombies out there now. He extrapolated the figure from the reports on rural fuel shortages to come up with an estimate on how many people had fled into the outback. Smart fella,” he added, offering a rarely given measure of approval. “But as long as everyone remains locked down in the camps and cities, in the farms, mines, and cattle stations, the troops currently deployed will have it down to a thousand by the end of March. If we can re-establish proper communications so teams can be rushed to local outbreaks, we can return to nearly normal by the end of April.”

  “Only if you’ve a weirdly twisted definition of normal,” Tess said. “April is too ambitious. If we had soldiers in the outback, it would be different. Or even police. But we’ve hardly any to deploy here in Canberra.”

  “I trust Dr Smilovitz more than Mr Lignatiev,” Mick said. “Leo Smilovitz worked on this kind of thing before the outbreak. What did Lignatiev do but complain not enough money was being spent on the military?”

  “Maybe the bloke had a point,” Tess said. “And I know why you don’t like Lignatiev, it’s because of all those publicity photos of him flying a helicopter.”

  “Just because he was in the cockpit doesn’t mean he was flying,” Mick said. “It certainly doesn’t make him a pilot. Rule six.”

  “That’s your third rule-six since nightfall,” Tess said. “You didn’t tell me what Avalon and Smilovitz thought of the Guinn siblings. You did remember to ask, right?”

  “No worries, I’m not so old I forget so easily,” Mick said. “Leo’s professional opinion is that the Guinns were weird. The brother more so than the sister. Out of their depth, and possibly obsessional. And this is from a bloke who works with Dr Avalon. He knows weird.”

  “Fair dinkum, but what did the siblings tell Dr Smilovitz they were doing in Canada?” Tess asked.

  “Looking for the girl Pete left behind,” Mick said. “And Leo believed them. Good man, that scientist. And a good judge of people. And so am I, and I don’t think Pete Guinn was lying.”

  “Someone lied,” Tess said. “Look at the evidence. Before the outbreak, a private jet belonging to the billionaire, Lisa Kempton, landed in Broken Hill. Aboard were two pilots, apparently two of Kempton’s most trusted employees. And also aboard was Pete Guinn. If he was telling the truth, he’s a bloke who sold carpets, and whose sister used to write computer code for Kempton a long time ago.”

  “I like Corrie,” Mick said. “Nice woman. Bit reserved. Spent too much time talking to kangaroos, but that’s more common than you’d think.”

  “And she was maintaining the dingo-fence near where the infected plane crashed,” Tess continued, citing the evidence.

  “You can’t suspect she had anything to do with that,” Mick said. “Who’d want a plane-load of zombies crashing on their head? If Captain Hawker and his SAS team hadn’t rescued them, both the Guinns would be dead. And, later, it was Liu who volunteered to billet them in her house. With her past, if you suspect Liu Higson of some connection to a drug cartel, I’ll prescribe you a week of sleep and I don’t care how short-handed we are.”

  “I’d take that prescription,” Tess said. The dawn chorus, conducting an early reveille from atop a tree at the centre of the roundabout, was cut short by the chronic coughing from a trio of chain-smoking conscripts, emerging to light up what had to be the last of their supply. “But no, of course I don’t suspect Liu of anything other than wanting to rescue her daughter from Vancouver.”

  “And you’ve seen the footage the Guinns sent back?” Mick asked. “They’re doing what they said, finding out what’s happened in North America.”

  “Anna still has the footage of Michigan,” Tess said. “But I’ve seen the interviews the Guinns
recorded in Pine Dock and Nanaimo. Liu’s account of what she saw is just as useful. And with millions of refugees arriving by plane and ship, we’re hearing plenty of stories of how the world fell apart. No, it’s not that I distrust the Guinns. Not as such. With rioting in the cities, with chaos in the skies, regaining order here in Australia took us too long.”

  “Only because the satellites are down,” Mick said.

  “Partly, and partly due to shock and panic which still hasn’t subsided,” Tess said. “Too many infected arrived by air. Too many planes crashed in the bush. And too many people fled into the outback, faster than we could evacuate the non-essential civilians to the coast.”

  “Which is exactly what Dr Smilovitz told me,” Mick said.

  “I’ll agree he has a point,” Tess said. “But my point is that, in Broken Hill, we were coping with the undead until the cartel arrived, and those criminals were in Broken Hill before the outbreak. Maybe even before Lisa Kempton’s plane landed. Last year, we received a warning about how the Rosewood Cartel was looking to expand their operations in Australia. We were told to watch for criminals with the three-leafed tattoo, and carrying three gold coins.”

  “Like that bloke who attacked Liu and Pete in Joey Thurlow’s cafe,” Mick said. “But when a bloke is carrying a silenced pistol, you don’t need to be a police inspector to know he’s a professional assassin.”

  “Deputy commissioner, if you please,” she said, her fingers brushing the Australian Federal Police shield-badge around her neck and the only indication of her rank, office, and authority. “Deputy commissioner, even if I’m still getting a police inspector’s pay.”

  “Don’t expect sympathy,” Mick said. “Because I should be enjoying my retirement.”

  “You refused to retire two years ago,” Tess said. “So who’s to blame if you’re here?”