The Worm King Page 24

  Daniel stammered, ‘Gidday mate, we were—’

  ‘Don’t you bloody “mate” me. What did you think you were doing? I’ve got a good mind to take you outside and give you a bloody good hiding!’

  ‘I told you we shouldn’t!’ whined the second cadet.

  ‘Where did you get them from?’ Wiremu Ruarangi’s right fist curled into a ball. The muscles on the side of his face tightened, and his teeth were clenched like he was ready to strike at any second.

  Daniel held up his palms defensively and leant back as far as he could. The people billeted around realized trouble was brewing, and shuffled back too. ‘Look, sorry mate! We were at the RAAF training base. It’s on the outskirts of Tamworth. We’d hardly had anything to eat for a couple of days and that bloke up there told us we’d probably miss dinner too because we had to go out and fix some . . . building or shit, so she was a godsend, really. Is she . . . your daughter?’ Daniel lowered his hands.

  Her father nodded. ‘How’d you get them?’ His fist uncurled and he reached forward, put a hand in the rucksack and picked one up but didn’t take it out, keeping his gaze on the cadets who watched the arm in the bag nervously.

  ‘We didn’t want to carry the damn things around anyway,’ said Daniel. He must’ve immediately realized that wasn’t the right angle, and tried to change tack. ‘That’s all that was left, at the camp, and they were only still there ‘cos they’d rolled behind some other boxes. I dunno who it was, but they come in and took everything.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Couldn’t tell. There was a lot of them; not much we could do.’ Daniel’s eyes darted back and forth guiltily.

  ‘Yeah?’

  The second cadet confessed. ‘We hid in the barracks. All the other blokes just naffed off. Then we come out.’

  ‘How do they work?’ Wiremu pulled down the opening of the rucksack with his left hand until the grenade cradled in his right palm was just visible. When Āmiria had picked one up earlier, she’d guessed it to be maybe twice the weight of a cricket ball. They were sort of mango-shaped, but more symmetrical, and olive-green with squarish dimples except for a mustardy-yellow band around the top. Down the side was a flat metal lever, and clipped into the top of this, a metal ring. Each of the grenades had a piece of insulation tape wound around a couple of times which Daniel told her they’d put on themselves to hold the lever down, “just in case.”

  ‘They drummed it into us at training, so . . . yes, we know how they work,’ replied Daniel, with far less confidence than when he’d been trying to flog them for food yesterday. ‘Each one has about two tablespoons of explosive, they told us, and four thousand tiny steel balls. The balls are 2.4 mm in diameter, about the size of a shotgun pellet. The lethal radius is six meters and the safety radius is thirty meters. The important thing is the five-second delay. Once you pull that ring, which allows the lever to flick off, you’ve got exactly five seconds to get at least thirty meters away. Five seconds. It seems long now, but when you’ve pulled that pin, it seems much less long.’

  ‘So you’ve used one then?’

  ‘Kind of. They let us try a practice grenade this year. The practice ones weigh the same, but they’re a different color, and don’t have the shrapnel. It was excellent.’

  Her father grunted, and nodded. For a while he didn’t say anything, just held the grenade in his palm, staring at it. ‘What’d she give you for them again?’

  ‘Two cans of lentils in brine, a sachet of instant chicken gravy and a one kilo bag of self raising flour. We mixed it all up together. Pete ate the most.’ Daniel gestured at the third cadet who still had his head between his knees, and hadn’t spoken a word since they’d sat down. He looked sick as.

  Tamati nudged her father and pointed at the door. The Mason was heading slowly in their direction, with another fūlla, stopping to refill lanterns along the way.

  ‘Bugger. They must need us now.’ The Mason had earlier asked for volunteers to help fix up walls in a shelter. It used to be a small supermarket, a few blocks from the gym, although Āmiria hadn’t been there. Her father had surprisingly agreed, and afterwards told Tamati and Geoff that it’d be handy to get outside anyway, and assess conditions if they were thinking of shooting through soon. Besides, he’d said, a couple of hours yakka for a feed and bed for the night is probably about right, and the others seemed satisfied with this. Āmiria suspected he also put his hand up because he was a builder, and hardly anyone else in this dump even knew which end of a hammer to hold.

  He tightened the top of the rucksack and bounced to his feet, swinging the bag lightly so it banged against his leg with a dull clunk. Daniel and the second cadet cringed, but Pete didn’t stir. ‘Well, good luck with all that then,’ he told the trio.

  While weaving their way back, Āmiria heard him say to Tamati, ‘She didn’t get a bad deal though, did she?’ When they’d sat down he put a woollen jersey over the rucksack and gave her a deadly serious look. ‘Now you keep a good eye on this, girl.’

  ‘You blokes ready?’ the Mason called, strolling over. ‘Come on, chop-chop. I know, no one wants to go, but we’ll try and sling you some extra tucker while you’re over there or at least when you get back. Take your water bottles too, if you’ve got them.’ In less than a minute her father, Geoff, Hemi, Rangi and the Hat had gone. Tamati remained behind.

  After seeing them to the door, the Mason returned. Āmiria sat on her father’s bedroll with Lord Brown and Peanuts, reveling in the extra space. ‘Haven’t you started on that loo yet? he snarled. ‘On the double, hurry up!’ She wondered if he’d come over especially to ask her that, and didn’t know what to say because it was pretty bloody obvious she hadn’t started cleaning. He looked around in frustration, hands on hips. ‘And who’s got my bible!?’

  ‘Hand-crank’s got it!’ yelled Tamati from a dark spot behind Lord Brown, and fully half the gym burst out laughing.

  The Mason stormed back to his tower.

  WEATHER BADGE DIARY

  It’s gotten colder in the last few days and Francesco found a funny hole in the wall. We aren’t allowed to talk to Mr Snow anymore and Astrid told us we must be very careful what we say all the time, because everything is not what it seems. She is always telling us what to do which Krystal says is because she keeps losing at cards.

  Gilbert (the waiter who likes Francesco) delivered spaghetti for our last meal and gave us three extra blankets and dragged a mattress in from another room so Francesco could sleep on it rather than the floor. Another man always comes too but he stays in the hall, and didn’t even help with moving the mattress. Gilbert said it is even colder outside and now there is a Troll living in the rubbish at the back of the hotel. All the other waiters are really scared of the Troll.

  Natasha

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Fractal Analysis

  Zip! The room lights went off in the blink of an eye. Forsyth took out his torch, switched it on and crept to the window, making sure it wasn’t just his room cut off. No, despite being late afternoon on a spring day, it was pitch black out there. Cold too. The Hyatt had that closed-down, sour dampness of some ancient, draughty castle in the middle of a Scottish winter.

  He sat on the bed and shone the torch on the document clutched in his left hand, wondering what the chances were of obtaining a fractal analysis microscope on a filthy day like this. Because those signatures simply didn’t match up. For a start, her name on the Order of Darkness was in a totally straight line, with only the last letter raised slightly above the others, and like that on all three pages. The torch wasn’t helping: the piss-weak rechargeables he’d juiced up on Duntroons generator were already fading, so he quickly refolded the Defense Appropriations Bill from his attaché case, even nearer the PM’s signature this time, and while gripping the torch in his teeth, held the separate documents together. There was a small gap between the 2nd and 3rd letters of the signature on Snow’s page that wasn’t apparent on the Appropriations Bill either.
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  He’d been through the text of the legislation twice, and still couldn’t make head nor tail of it. The Canberra law firm Mellon, Milosevic & Enright got mentioned a number of times, so presumably they drew the document up, and in the normal course of events it’d be easy to just jump in a cab, make the ten minute trip into town and speak to Mellon or Milosevic or Enright, and all would be fine and dandy. But there were no cabs running today and if Forsyth recalled, the block which housed the prestigious offices of Mellon & Co was now a charred heap of bricks and broken concrete anyway.

  His biggest gripe had to be with the wrinkliness of letters. The wrinkliness of the Order of Darkness signature appeared quite different from the Appropriations Bill. Even with a decent magnifying glass, you’d have a shot at confirming it. Once you count the number of wrinkles on a given letter-stroke, simple fractal theory says the forgery will always have more wrinkles, because it’s always written slower.

  Would room service be able to organize him a lazy fractal analysis microscope? Forsyth had his doubts.

  A safety pin! A drop of water in the circle at the bottom end of a safety pin gives a respectable magnifying glass, of a type. Not a terribly big one, but it might just do, and these rooms usually had those wee embroidery kits which always have safety pins. Nothing like that had been obvious on his initial check of the room on arrival, and chances are whoever stayed here last would probably have taken it with them. Nevertheless, he checked down behind the TV and bar fridge, where those sorts of things were prone to fall. No luck. Forsyth shone his torch around the room, seeking inspiration.

  Several minutes passed. He was about to turn out the light to save the batteries, when a loud Knock! Knock! Knock! resounded further up the corridor: fists pounding on a door or wall. A muffled voice called out indistinctly. Forsyth went to his door and opened it.

  ‘Can we speak to someone?’ a woman pleaded. ‘Hello!’ Knock! Knock! Knock! ‘Could you please get Dick?’

  Snow!

  Her door must be locked, which seemed odd. If a prisoner for whatever reason, why keep her here? And “Can you get Dick please,” didn’t sound like your classic prisoner demand. It occurred to Forsyth that at the very least, he could go and say hello and see if she happened to have a sewing kit.

  After shielding the torch with his hand, and padding down the corridor as lightly as is possible in size 12 combat boots, he stood outside Room 237. Knock! Knock! Knock! She hadn’t heard him approach and was giving it a decent thump. The door had an external padlock bolted beneath the handle, confirming his suspicion she was locked in.

  ‘Hello there.’ He tapped lightly twice on the door.

  Silence. Ten seconds passed, then a tentative, ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Forsyth. Captain Forsyth. Australian Army, ma’am.’

  A deeper, male voice spoke quietly; the woman uttered a short reply, then asked loudly, ‘You’re in the Army?’

  He wondered how many there were in the room. ‘That’s right. I’m staying down the end of—’

  Without warning a door clicked open immediately to his right so he spun the torch in that direction. It came from the next room along, where a man’s head poked furtively out. Forsyth didn’t shine the beam directly in his face, because no one likes that, but the man’s skin was deathly pale, and something else looked wrong too, with his eye . . .

  Knock! Knock! ‘Are you still there Captain?’ Forsyth jiggled the padlock, keeping his torch pointed roughly up the corridor towards the neighbor.

  ‘Yes, I’m here. Is this door supposed to be locked?’ he asked the man.

  ‘Yeth.’ The neighbor continued to watch, but didn’t offer anything further. There’d be no point inquiring why the lock was on, because there’d undoubtedly be a reason and it’d have nothing to do with him. The man’s head and left hand were visible, but his right hand was tucked behind his back in pose strongly suggesting he held something, so Forsyth didn’t feel on entirely safe ground to be starting an argument.

  He lifted the torch slightly, in order to see him better. ‘I’m actually just after a . . . sewing kit. You don’t happen to have one, do you?’ He didn’t really look the sewing kit type, so Forsyth was hardly surprised when the man disappeared without a word and the door closed. Or maybe he’d already used his sewing kit to try and patch up whatever was wrong with that awful, gammy eye?

  ‘Who are you talking too? What did you say you wanted?’

  ‘A safety pin. Do you have a sewing kit in there ma’am?’

  ‘We can’t see a thing, sorry’. The deep-voiced male spoke quietly again and the woman said, ‘Hang on.’ Perhaps a full minute went by. Tap, Tap. ‘You there Captain?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Down here.’ The end of a safety pin protruded from under the door, then the whole pin popped out on his side, pushed along by a piece of broken glass. The glass disappeared back under the door. ‘You got it?’

  ‘Yes I have, thank you.’

  ‘There were two young girls with us, whose parents just arrived. They took the girls at least two hours ago and said they’d come and get us straight away, but no one’s been back since. Can you find out what’s going on?’

  He had a feeling the crusty neighbor would’ve had his ear pressed to the door, listening to every word, so this wasn’t the time for in-depth questioning. If the girls were moved two hours ago, that would’ve been shortly after he’d been shown to his room, and there had been some noise in the corridor around then, but he’d put it down to normal hotel comings and goings and hadn’t paid much attention.

  ‘What’s your name ma’am?’

  ‘Astrid. Astrid Simpson.’

  ‘Righto. I’ll see what we can do with this safety pin then. Thanks very much for that. Cheerio!’ He clumped noisily back down the corridor to his room.

  After forty-five minutes of fiddling with the improvised fractal analyzer safety pin device, it became patently obvious there was absolutely no way of zooming down to the required level of detail. A stronger torch might’ve helped, but the Brigadier took his spare. When Forsyth’s torch had faded to virtually nothing, there was no point even staying in the room.

  So out he went.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  The Great Steppey Schism

  There was movement at the gymnasium,

  for the word had passed around

  That the Māoris had a bus and were getting away

  Lord Brown smiled to himself, despite the tension in the dank, stale air. You could actually feel it, like some minute, crackling vibration seeping from people’s pores and coating them in a brand new epidermis composed solely of anger. Twenty-three meters away a disagreement over a blanket rapidly escalated to a heated argument which spiraled into a fistfight within minutes. The old lady who threw the first punch wasn’t mucking around either.

  ‘There be rage,’ he said quietly to Zelda. The old lady and the man she’d attacked were pulled apart by those nearer the action.

  ‘People are frustrated.’ She gazed around. ‘They think it’s getting lighter but I’m not sure if it really is. Well, it’s certainly not light enough to see properly yet, and no one has a torch that works, or fuel for a lantern apart from what they’re dishing out here. As soon as you go outside you’re just groping around in the dark, choking on all that muck in the air and trying to find food, and water, which at least they’re giving us in here, I suppose. You know what?’

  ‘What?’

  Zelda lowered her voice. ‘I keep having these dreams, about this place. That it’s an enormous coffin. This coffin with lots of other people in it, who’re all still alive, and we’re allowed to climb out occasionally and use the loo but when you get out, it’s even worse and you can’t wait to get back inside. It’s so awful outside you can’t wait to get back in the coffin. And if it suddenly does get completely light, right from now, say, which I can’t imagine, then what’ll be left? How many plants will still be alive!? And all the animals that live off them? There’ll be
. . . nothing! So we just have to sit here, in the dark, waiting to die.’

  He tried to think of something positive, but nothing sprang to mind.

  ‘Oh no!’ She balled her hands against her mouth.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Little could be worse than that coffin scenario.

  ‘The pandas. All the panda’s will’ve gone, and I really like pandas. I’m pretty certain all they can eat is fresh bamboo. Maybe they’ve got more light in China? Can’t be much less, that’s for sure. We’ve got nothing here apart from a bit of canned food and dried rubbish, which will soon run out then we’ll starve! I don’t know anything about planting things or growing stuff. I tell you, we’ll starve! Why’s this happening? What’ve we done!?’

  She be angry too. Lord Brown put his arm around her and rocked gently. Even through the layers of clothing he felt her heart pounding like an overheated steam-hammer as the panic attack subsided.

  The bedroll he sat on was usually occupied by David, who’d been reluctantly hauled away on a work detail. Wiremu said everyone had to pull their weight and the timid lad hadn’t offered any argument. On the other side of David’s space, Jerry and his mate Ken lay sprawled on their backs muttering every so often, sometimes in agreement, and sometimes not, so it was general muttering rather than a specific mutter relating to a singular issue.

  Zelda had settled down so he removed his arm, and looked around the gloomy gym. A hundred and thirty-four? Almost impossible to fix with any accuracy in this insipid light. Twice in the last three days, he’d done a rough circuit, taking along Āmiria who’d wanted to “try some stuff from her first aid badge”. The recipients of her medical advice were generally sceptical, and not without good reason because Lord Brown was fairly certain the Girl Guide rulebook didn’t call for amputation as frequently as she’d proposed. However, these excursions proved extremely useful intelligence-gathering exercises. While patients were debating the pros and cons of getting this or that cut off, he’d been able to assess the condition of the populous. Of the hundred and forty-odd, Lord Brown figured perhaps thirty-five were keen to leave as soon as the situation allowed, while the rest were content to sit it out here for as long as they could. The first group thought the brunt of the storm had passed, and it was time to get back out there and restart lives, and families and jobs: the whole works.