The Worm King Read online

  ‘Yes!’ It opened and Bob poked his ratty face in, then reached up to click off his headlight before stepping into the room. A patchy moustache covered most of his harelip but the lisp was bad enough to make anyone take a second glance at his mouth anyway and you’d invariably notice the grotesquely deformed upper lip. The lisp used to be much worse when they’d first met. He must’ve had some freebie work done on it in Goulburn although Dick didn’t like to pry because Bob was somewhat sensitive about facial cosmetics.

  ‘Thumeones arthking for you. Thee workth with you. Thee’s with a fat guy, and a d’warth.’

  ‘A dwarf?!’ snarled Dick.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Shank

  Never again.

  Winston tenderly touched his mangled head. The two of them had bowled two-thirds of a case of Grange, the last bottle skulled in complete darkness.

  The room’s single bulb glowed dimly. He vaguely recalled the porter saying four hours light per day, so if they were already back into the “lights on” cycle, that certainly seemed a quick twenty hours darkness? Or perhaps the four hours was staggered at different times? Astrid propped herself up on the bed rubbing her eyes and Francesco sat on the floor leaning against the wall beside the window, peering at his watch. The Italian’s hair stuck out at odd angles and his pudgy face had picked up a scattering of dark puffy bulges while he’d slept. A greasy swathe of black bristles carpeted his face. He scratched his cheek and squinted at his watch again.

  Without any warning the door opened. Winston got a quick glimpse of a man’s face before it withdrew and the door closed. ‘Did you see—?’

  It reopened, and the head poked back in. He had insipid grey eyes which seemed unusually close together, acne scarring and a pronounced harelip under a straggly moe. ‘Width one’ve you’th Winthton? The beam of his headlight was easily visible against the rooms weak light, and pointed straight at Winston as he spoke. Winston raised a hand; Harelip continued to stare for another few seconds, then closed the door.

  Francesco lumbered to his feet and went to the door, pressing his ear to it, listening. Half a minute passed before he pulled back then said quietly to Astrid, ‘Did you tell them his name?’ He pointed at Winston.

  She shook her head.

  He looked around the room wearily and returned to the bed, sat, then picked the corkscrew off the floor and passed it to her. ‘Put this in your back pocket.’

  ‘Why?’

  Instead of answering he pointed at the head of the bed. ‘Pass me the pillow.’

  She passed it.

  He bent to the floor again, this time grabbing an empty wine bottle and laying it on the pillow. He folded the pillow in half then brought it down lightly across his raised knee. Crump! He unfolded it, and frowned. The neck had broken off in a clean circle at its base. Francesco glanced around the room, saw another empty under the TV, stood up and got it. The procedure with the pillow was repeated. This time the break left a long, jagged spike below the neck and he nodded approvingly. The neck with the spike was left on the pillow and the rest of the glass, along with the first broken bottle, he pushed under the bed out of sight. Then he lifted an edge of the bed sheet and using his teeth, began a tear. A narrow strip about double the length of an arm was ripped off. He spent several minutes carefully wrapping the material around the neck below the protruding shard. When it was finished, he held it out to Winston. ‘The sheet stop end splintering back into your hand. Here.’

  Winston looked aghast at the dagger. He didn’t take it. ‘What on earth do you expect me to do with that?’

  ‘Only two place it work properly. Middle of face.’ He tapped his nose lightly. ‘Or straight in throat. Watch where they take us. If we no like, this might be help.’

  Winston reluctantly accepted it because he couldn’t immediately think of a reason not to, although he knew one was likely to come to him pretty quick. Astrid held her corkscrew out at full stretch as though it were made of poison snot.

  Francesco laughed, but it sounded forced. ‘Is probably nothing. We be fine. Still, you know, they lock the door, and the man who come before, he not chatty man, and the light, it is come on early. All is strange. They probably just testing the light, and checking on the people, but is strange.’

  Winston held up the shard. He imagined that in the joint this is what you’d call a “shank.” After a tentative waggle and thrust, which resembled a poorly played ping-pong stroke rather than a stabbing tool of death, he was even less convinced. ‘I think I can guarantee I’ll be happy with absolutely anywhere they take us, rather than trying to change their mind with this.’

  ‘You right, probably. But put in pocket anyway, just in case. We give them half hour, see what happens. If we no hear anything we try and call them back, ask some question.’

  Winston slipped the shank cork end down into his back pocket and untucked his sweatshirt, pulling it over the spike so it was less visible. He leant nonchalantly against the wall and wondered how far he could actually bend back before fatally stabbing himself in the kidneys.

  Barely a minute passed before the door reopened, and Harelip reappeared. He pointed at Winston. ‘You. Come here.’

  Winston hesitated, then walked slowly towards the door feeling a rising surge of panic over the bottle. If discovered, it’d definitely be assumed he’s up to no good! For an instant he considered attempting to toss it under the bed as he passed, but there was no chance of that without being seen, and a second later he was past the bed anyway and at the door. He glanced back to see if the others were also being taken, but they weren’t, and Francesco stared at him intently, tapping himself on the nose. Then the door shut behind him and Harelip flicked on his headlamp, and re-bolted the lock. Why would there be an external lock on a hotel room? When they’d arrived he’d been too pissed to notice but before he could contemplate this further, he received a shove in the shoulder and they were marching down the hall. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Outhide.’

  ‘Why?’

  No reply. They came to a corner, swung to the right into a hallway with its ceiling lights on so Harelip switched off his headlamp. ‘Why,’ repeated Winston.

  A hand grasped his shoulder. ‘Awound here.’ They took a left into a wider corridor which ended five meters ahead at a double staircase. The hand remained on his shoulder but he didn’t try and shake it off because it wouldn’t have taken much of a tug on his sweatshirt to divulge the concealed shank. They descended. In the foyer at the bottom were ten or twelve men standing around talking in groups of two or three. They stopped and watched Winston and his companion. Adjoining the foyer was a ballroom set up with many tables although he only got a flash of this before they reached another door, beside which stood a man in hotel uniform. The door was opened and suddenly . . . they were outhide.

  A carpark. The air was colder and the grip on his shoulder tightened. Harelip’s headlamp flicked back on. ‘Why are we out here?’

  ‘There’th an eye’th kweam twuck,’ he sneered. ‘You d’warth wike eye’th kweam don’t you?’

  They moved steadily away from the hotel, across the carpark then onto rougher ground. The fence appeared and he saw they’d arrived at a point directly in front of a long, vertical slit in the wire.

  ‘Thwoo here.’ He pushed Winston through the gap, keeping the hand on his shoulder. The top edge of the shard snagged momentarily on the wire but Winston twisted and dropped his rump so was able to slither through, bottle and all. They travelled another thirty or forty meters, weaving their way between patches of dead scrub.

  The hotel lights were much fainter out here. Harelip paused, scanning the ground with his torch; Winston caught a glimpse of a trench about half the length of a cricket pitch, with a mound of dirt piled on the opposite side. Fingernails dug into his shoulder. He glanced around to see where the other hand was and spotted a coil of thick rope dangling from Harelip’s left fist which he didn’t recall being there when they’d climbed through the
fence a minute ago.

  Eye’th kweam? Winston didn’t think his companion was being totally honest with him. He heard a faint rustle in the undergrowth beside them. The headlight swung around and probed the area but found nothing so the beam darted forwards again.

  They were barely meters from the trench. ‘Snake!’ he shouted desperately, hopping first on one foot then the other. Harelip looked down and at that precise moment, Winston jumped with all his might, stretching up his hand like superman and driving the bottle up and up and . . . directly into an eyeball. He twisted as he fell back and the glass spike cracked clean off.

  The hand shot away from his shoulder and Harelip clutched the side of his face. He began screaming like a banshee and blood gushed between his fingers while the good eye darted back and forth frantically. The headlight remained on with the lamp pointed down at a low angle which illuminated the mutilated face beautifully.

  Winston looked at the shank in amazement, but nothing was left apart from the handle; the shard of glass had disappeared completely, buried deep in Harelip’s eye socket.

  They were right, that Grange really was a cheeky little drop.

  He ran off into the darkness as fast as his stubby little legs would carry him.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Battle of Kadesh

  Zelda returned from the supermarket with three cans of tuna, a packet of mixed peel and a jar of Malaysian curried eggs. She’d also thoughtfully brought back a tray of rotten plastic-wrapped chicken drumsticks which she gave to the dog. When the food was laid out, they all stared at the booty.

  ‘Team meeting,’ called the Hat.

  David was down in the dumps. ‘Why didn’t they tell us sooner?’ He’d just been given the Hat’s animated version of what Dr Zoy had told them at Mulloolaloo. Shortly before David had arrived at Zelda’s, she’d been informed by a policeman that it was most likely an asteroid, but terrorists hadn’t been completely ruled out. Since then, she and David had sat in the dark discussing whether the terrorists were somehow using the asteroids, or whether they were different things altogether, because the policeman had had to dash off before giving her the full story.

  ‘All governments will have invariably arrived at the same decision,’ said Lord Brown. ‘They would’ve decided not to broadcast the news purely on preservation of the species grounds. If you tell everyone, then everyone will head for the exit at the same time so it jams up and virtually nobody succeeds. If you keep your mouth shut, you and your family and those deemed . . . more important, have a considerably better chance of success. The trickle-down theory does work, but in reverse. It should really be called sticky-down. Or tricky-down.’

  ‘Uppy-down?’ suggested the Hat.

  Āmiria shook her head. ‘That’s a big help. So how do we get away then? How did those Clovis get out of it last time this happened? If we knew what the people who came after them did, couldn’t we get a head start?’

  ‘Exactly!’ agreed the Hat. ‘They couldn’t all have been flattened. The ones left must’ve hitched up their wagons and headed for the nearest town, surely?’

  ‘No. The Clovis were around before “towns.” And before wheels and wagons were even invented.’

  Āmiria wondered how long Ngaruawahia had existed for. There’d always been wheels there, as far as she knew. It must’ve been settled a long time, given that’s where the Māori King chose to live.

  ‘Nine thousand,’ intoned the old man, staring at her. His pupils were a chocolaty color and the whites much less bloodshot than a week ago. It occurred to her he looked far healthier in general after having had a bit of a cleanup at Nathans.

  ‘Nine thousand what, Lord?’ asked the Hat.

  ‘9000BC. That’s when the recovery began after the Clovis comet landed in 10,900BC. The climate didn’t really warm up again until after 10,000BC, and by 9000BC things were peculating rather well, so to speak.’

  ‘Whereabouts?’ He gazed at her strangely, as though she’d just uncovered some clue and she thought for an instant it might even be Ngaruawah—

  ‘Jericho. That was the world’s first town.’

  ‘Oh.’ She couldn’t help feeling disappointed that it wasn’t Ngaruawahia after all.

  ‘The British first did a proper excavation of Jericho in 1934. They already knew a tribe called the Natufians lived in Middle East at roughly the same time as the Clovis existed in America, and the Natufians were nomadic hunter-gathers very similar to the Clovis. But the remains the British found at Jericho were different: a lot more advanced. They found seventy-odd houses surrounded by a wall, and a substantial brick watchtower with a complicated internal staircase. It’s the first place that mud bricks appear; neither the Natufians nor or the Clovis had used bricks. From a technology point of view, Jericho was a massive leap forward.’

  ‘Didn’t Jericho get a mention in the Bible?’ asked the Hat.

  ‘It did. It crops up more than fifty times in various passages, depending on which Bible version you’re reading. But Jesus definitely healed some blind beggars in Jericho.’ He paused momentarily. ‘Which I suppose wasn’t a good indictment for the town, if it was chocker full of blind beggars. The other story you might be thinking of is when Joshua knocked down the walls of Jericho.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s the one.’

  ‘They’ve carbon-dated the destruction of the main Jericho wall at 1550BC, which roughly tallies with the Bible date so the Joshua legend probably did occur, but it happened more than seven thousand years after Jericho was first settled, so was comparatively late in the piece. Joshua knocked down the wall in the latter half of the Bronze Age, and Jericho had been permanently settled since the Stone Age.’

  ‘I went to Jericho once,’ said Zelda. ‘I didn’t see any Natufians but they had Arabs firing home-made katusha rockets around the place.’

  ‘Indeed. Of course, after inventing the brick they haven’t done much and it’s probably a place best avoided.’

  Zelda gave him a quizzical stare. ‘Are you a schoolteacher?’ His leathery face twitched ever so slightly but he didn’t reply.

  The Hat persisted. ‘There must’ve been some kind of . . . magic or whatever you’d call it, if Jericho was the first town. As well as getting a nod in the Good Book, more than once too. I mean, you never hear people say, “Jesus went to Griffith, and bought a pie.” It’s always, “Jesus went to Jericho and healed some blokes and that sort of thing.” There must have been something special about the place?’

  Āmiria could certainly see the Hat’s logic. Whatever the initial spark was that Jericho must’ve had, they should be looking for spots like that now. That’s what she needed to do. After finding her Dad that is. Maybe the situation is much better in Tamworth and they could all stay in the office building he was putting up there. Or perhaps the flat he and the gang were living in while they did the job? She knew the flats address: 47 Lambert St, three kilometers north-west of the town centre. Whenever he went away on a job he always made sure she had exact details of where he’d be. She was confident he’d either still be there, or at least one of the other builders from his gang would be, or failing that they’ll have left word where they’d gone. And it wouldn’t be fucken Jericho.

  ‘There was no magic,’ said Lord Brown finally. ‘Not back then, anyway. The whole planet had just emerged from a severe ice age, people were looking for somewhere warm and Israel is about the first place the monkeys hit when they emigrated up out of Africa. Jericho was an oasis lying on the main salt and flint routes as you head inland from the coast, and it has an excellent natural spring. There were plenty of wild sheep and goats in the hillier areas nearby, and wild wheat and barley growing around too, so they could’ve made bread. And beer. They could’ve sat beside the spring and had mutton sandwiches and a jug. For a brief period, Jericho was simply the most pleasant place in the world to live.’

  ‘So why did they move then? asked Āmiria impatiently.

  ‘Well, after they’d lived there for a while
they worked out how to use the stream for irrigation and the wheat growing became a more organized affair. It wouldn’t have been long before someone out hunting would’ve discovered that a few weeks walk to the west was a really big river. Two of them in fact, very close together: the Tigris and the Euphrates in the south of Iraq. These rivers carried an enormous amount of silt from the north of Iraq and Turkey, and where they spilled into the Persian Gulf was absolutely perfect for irrigation. The fishing was excellent too. This is where the world’s first city started.’

  ‘Who decides whether it’s a city or a town?’ asked the Hat.

  ‘I know! I know!’ replied Āmiria. She’d asked her Uncle Monty that exact question when she’d been home last year. It cropped up because he’d said, “I’m going to town” and she knew he was going to Auckland, which she’d been told at school was a city, not a town.

  ‘There’s no concrete definition,’ answered Lord Brown. ‘It varies from country to country. I believe in some circles they say a city must contain a university and a cathedral, whereas a town does not, but that seems rather vague.’

  ‘So what’s the Girl Guide ruling? said the Hat.

  ‘Ranger.’

  ‘What?’

  Instead of elaborating on the confusing Ranger-Guide distinction, she quoted exactly what her Uncle Monty had said: “A city is a gathering of people of sufficient size, such that if you rob someone who you don’t know, chances are you won’t run into them again. In a town, if you rob someone, chances are you’ll cross them again.” ‘My Uncle Monty says that changes the mechanics a bit.’