Life Goes On | Book 4 | If Not Us [Surviving The Evacuation] Tayell, Frank (classic books to read .TXT) 📖

two children roamed this city long after everyone else took to the roofs. The hospital was offering treatment after the outbreak. As conditions worsened, they would trade treatment for food and supplies. The school offered a roof and a meal, but only for one night. It became a place for individuals to gather into groups.”

“They became sanctuaries in a lawless city?” Hawker asked.

“In the eyes of Lesadi and Thato, yes,” the nurse said. “A week after the outbreak, and after the planes stopped falling out of the sky, a friend of the children’s was shot. They took her to the hospital. She died, but the doctors did attempt to save her life. Afterward, the children, along with a dozen others, were walked north to a school where they were given food and shelter for the night. The school was overburdened with survivors, and so the children put together a group who went to the waterfront. A week after that, they came back to the hospital to get antibiotics. They were given some. Not enough. But of all the places in the city, all the people, these groups at the hospital and school were the most friendly and helpful.”

“There are other groups of survivors beyond these two locations?” Hawker asked.

“Many,” Laila said. “At one time, but not as friendly. More recently, most have become defensive, or have disappeared.”

“As we saw yesterday, some are hostile,” Tess said. “We’ll start with those two groups. They should know where the others are.”

As the helicopter rose into the air, the recently attached camera-rig broadcast images back to the ship where sailors would hunt for signs of life. Though as they travelled deeper into the city, Tess increasingly doubted any survivors would be found. Up close, from above, the devastation suffered by Cape Town was far worse than she’d realised. Glinting moats of fire-broken glass lay beneath the smoke-blackened tower blocks. Wide daggers of ash and rubble cut through streets and subdivisions. A township had been replaced with a crater. Wood, steel, and cement had become little more than a grey ash cloud, swirling in the rising wind. She wasn’t the only passenger who checked the dosimeter, but even if that blast hadn’t been nuclear, it had been nearly as devastating.

Smoke still rose from the rubble too frequently to be cooking fires. Figures were everywhere. Moving. In the open. Too slow to be human.

In most cases, it was impossible to identify whether the destruction had been caused by an exploding gas main, static fuel tank, or an unquenched fire, but an occasional tail-wing or giant engine showed how the calamity had begun. Even if this had been an isolated tragedy, unique in the world, the city would have been evacuated. With the undead crawling from the wreckage, clawing their way out of the smoking rubble, with toxic fumes clogging the air, getting away from the city had been the most certain route to survival.

“We’re approaching the hospital,” Commander Tusitala announced. “Car park is empty. I’m going to circle.”

The interchange, where the N1 and M12 met, was expansively empty. Near the roads were two and three-bed starter homes where road noise was less important than affordability. A little further away, squares of brown marked the larger gardens of bigger houses. The smattering of vehicles were in the middle of the road, askew, abandoned if not completely wrecked. But where were the people? From what she could see of the hospital complex, it was desolate and empty.

Modern cities had few fortresses, but in a city with as notoriously high a crime rate as Cape Town, municipal buildings came close. The hospital’s six-storey central building certainly fit the part. Built in a T, it had the look of a 1960s build, ringed by the usual sprawl of newer one-and-two-storey buildings housing the medical sciences invented in the decades since.

Now, it was lifeless. No rooftop sentry flagged them down, or warned them off. No vehicles were positioned ready to escape, suggesting everyone who’d sheltered here had already fled.

“I’m setting down in the car park,” Commander Tusitala said.

Tess’s stomach lurched with the sudden descent, slamming back into place as debris rattled against the underside of the cabin. As soon as the helicopter jolted against the ground, Clyde threw the door open, dropping outside, with Oakes and Hawker bare seconds behind. Head bowed and back bent, Tess slipped outside, waiting for Laila and Teegan, while the rotors slowed, and then stopped, leaving ash swirling in the otherwise still air.

“Nicko, stay with the copter,” Hawker said.

Leaving Clyde at the rear, Tess jogged away from the settling grey cloud, following the colonel across the empty car park.

“It’s abandoned,” Hawker said, pulling a monocular from his pouch. Still walking, he turned his head, raised the monocular, and lowered it a second later. “There’s no one on the roof of the main building, or that smaller tower building to the south. We’ve been buzzing copters back and forth since yesterday. If they were still here, they’d be waving sheets to get our attention.”

“Give them time to climb the stairs,” Tess said.

“Why do I always think cities are flat?” Toppley said, as they reached the steep staircase leading up a steeper embankment, and so up to the main building.

On the embankment, and at the top, trees had been planted so the patients in the upper-floor wards had something other than rooftops to look at. But recently, those trees had been felled, and abandoned where they’d fallen, as had the undead who’d been shot.

“Casings,” Hawker said, scuffing at the ground. “Noticed some back near the copter. Hold here. Major, with me.”

As the two soldiers jogged up the stairs, Tess shifted her grip on the rifle, scanning the fallen bodies for movement.

“The children said there were nurses and doctors at the hospital,” Laila said. “A lot of doctors. A lot more patients. They didn’t mention soldiers,