The Worm King Read online

  Two glasses later, Hensley was raving about his favorite American general: some no-name, shit-wit from the civil war, and Dick struggled to look interested. He already knew about the Americans. More than a few had flooded into Canberra at the last moment, but he’d take care of that. They were like maggots, fighting for the last scrap of festering meat on the planet. They’d get crushed, just as they’d used and abused other nations for hundreds of years. Dick had always had a passing admiration for dictators like Mao Zedong and Stalin and Napoleon and Hitler. They’d effected regime changes that involved eliminating tens, or even hundreds of millions, but this time that hard work had already been done. It was the most glorious opportunity that had ever presented itself to a man of calculating vision. It’d be a bottom-up restructuring with a difference, and Dick’s mind spun from one conquest to another in the bat of an eye.

  He knew what he had to do. It would be a big job though.

  Kill them all. Kill them all, and start again.

  In the meantime he refilled the Brigadier’s glass and began unwrapping a brace of Cubans.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Mrs Sheng

  No, not that door! Maybe this one? The lights were off and you couldn’t see a stitch.

  ‘Hello?’ called Mrs Sheng. ‘Gilbert?’ She knocked lightly and the door opened almost immediately. Gilbert gripped a small torch in one hand and heavy stainless steel spoon in the other. The spoon was massive, easily the length of his arm and meant to be welded with two hands, minimum.

  ‘Hello sweetie.’ He tucked the spoon under his arm and squeezed her shoulder. ‘You ready?’

  A series of small unpleasant incidents had unfolded which led Mrs Sheng to believe her life may be in peril. In the normal course of events these episodes wouldn’t be minor at all, in fact they’d be heinous, but getting . . . context, with everything going on, was an impossible affair. Dreadful. However one thing she did know without any doubt whatsoever was that those two little girls shouldn’t be locked up like that. And from what she’d seen, theirs wasn’t the only room with an external lock on it. The spoon was the best Gilbert could come up with to lever the lock off their door.

  Mrs Sheng had formulated a plan to move to new lodgings, together with the two girls and Gilbert, one of the scared waiters she’d befriended at the hotel. The hotel already had an old dumb waiter system, and a couple of fairly evil waiters, but Gilbert was one of the scared waiters. Ha!Ha! Bent as a row of tents too. He’d proposed they simply walk right out of the place. ‘Honesty is always the best approach, darling.’ He advised against going via the back of the hotel. ‘Some of the boys in the kitchen have seen something living out the back. And that fellow with the eye patch is always hanging around out there.’

  ‘Bob,’ said Mrs Sheng.

  ‘Is that his name? He isn’t very chatty. So we shouldn’t go that way. We ort to leave straight through the front.’

  Mrs Sheng hadn’t told Gilbert it was Bob who struck her, and in truth it’d happened twice. The first time she put it down to stress, or some kind of sudden snapping on his part given the cataclysm they were enduring, but she certainly made a mental note to stay away from the man as much as possible. The second time, he’d jumped out of nowhere and belted her across the side of the face for no reason at all. She told Dick and he just looked straight through her, as though he’d bigger things on his plate and a violent unprovoked assault was hardly worth a moments consideration. ‘I’ll speak to Bob, then.’

  ‘But what’s his role here anyway?’ Mrs Sheng persisted. ‘One of the waiters told me he’d heard Bob was in prison! Surely he’s nothing to do with . . . ’ She trailed off, realizing she didn’t know exactly what branch of government Dick was even involved with.

  Dick proceeded to explain how past misdemeanors could not legally be held against a said person once the appropriate penalty had been served, vis-à-vis their current employment contract, and Bob was proving extremely useful within the administrative procurement department that the Deputy-Prime Minister had set up within the hotel while the Canberra offices were being rebuilt.

  ‘But he hit me! In the face!’

  ‘Yes, I can see that. Can’t you get some makeup from lost and found?’

  Mrs Sheng knew for a fact, through Gilbert, that nothing whatsoever was being rebuilt in central Canberra. The whole district was a gutted shell and you wouldn’t go near the place if your life depended on it. Something wasn’t adding up. People were starving everywhere, yet Dick appeared to have authority to send out groups of men to “assess” weather conditions and these same men were entrusted with “redistributing resources” where they deemed necessary, which appeared to mean bringing whatever they could find back to the hotel, as far as she could see.

  Another odd thing: all the clocks were gone. Someone had taken every clock off the walls. Mrs Sheng asked the unfriendly concierge at the front reception desk about it and he’d confirmed the clocks had been removed, but didn’t know the precise reason. Thankfully, Mrs Sheng still had her grandmother’s antique windup.

  The most awful revelation had been the ballroom, on the lower-ground floor of the hotel. Three days ago Dick sent her down there to find some man named “Pickles.”

  ‘Is that his last name? Or first?’

  ‘That’s it. Pickles.’ Dick used his right index finger to roll a small, metal tube across the top of his desk towards her. ‘Here, use this.’ She picked up the tiny, novelty torch.

  As it transpired Pickles wasn’t in the ballroom. About a hundred others were, but no Pickles, which she didn’t discover until doing a full circuit of the room. They were all sitting around the edge, awake, and staring into the dark. Most were men although a few women were scattered amongst. The air was thick with murmuring. Every few steps she’d paused, asking whoever fell under her beam: ‘Pickles?’ A few shook their heads but the majority elicited no response. Back at the door, after going all the way around, she was about to leave the ghastly place when it occurred she hadn’t checked the centre, and the torch didn’t even reach that far, so she let the door swing shut and walked slowly towards the middle of the ballroom, thinking perhaps there was some noise in that direction too . . . ?

  A couple were copulating on the floor. Mrs Sheng gasped and turned in horror, running for the door, all pretence of composure gone. Her footsteps echoed over the muttering, which had become louder and seemingly directed at her. One word over and over, like a mantra. Queue-jumper! Queue-jumper! Queue-jumper!

  It was a queue.

  Later she told Dick that Pickles wasn’t in the ballroom. He said, ‘Oh,’ and went back to reading the page of handwritten text on his desk. She craned her neck, trying to read it. A list? A dozen or so short lines at the top, and three paragraphs scrawled below. Maybe a recipe? Dick had that same vaguely glazed expression of those in the ballroom, and Mrs Sheng wondered if they’d all taken some kind of drug. Already he seemed to have forgotten she was there, so she left.

  ‘Gilbert?’ What was that smell? Cigar smoke? Cigars always reminded her of Dick. It couldn’t be Dick, he must still be in his office: she’d checked less than five minutes ago. And Bob hadn’t appeared in ages. Hopefully he wasn’t anywhere near the girls, although not long before the first striking incident she’d seen Bob coming from the room next door to the twins, so it was hard to be a hundred percent sure where he’d turn up. The girls didn’t know about the plan yet, but Mrs Sheng was pretty certain they’d be keen. Getting them packed and ready without fuss might be the riskiest part of the whole business. ‘Gilbert?’

  ‘Did you hear something?’ he whispered. They were at the corner which turned into the wing the twins were on.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Shall I put the torch on?’

  ‘No!’ She remembered the way Bob had leapt out of the darkness, lashing at her. ‘It’s six doors down on the left. We can do it by feel. I’ll go first.’

  Eighteen hours earlier, Mrs Sheng power-walked out to the front ga
te of the hotel, testing the ground. She’d chatted briefly with the three men on the gate, did a few stretches and jogged back inside. They didn’t have the gate fully closed and it appeared the guards were more interested in keeping people out who weren’t guests, rather than locking people in. Six hours later she did the same thing again, but with Gilbert, which gave the three men a laugh because Gilbert even power-walked like a pansy. This time she would take the twins too, and the four would waltz right on through, and just keep on walking. They’d head for a friend of Gilberts on the outskirts of Queanbeyan. Gilbert had a small compass which he’d bought from a $2 shop years ago, and all they had to do was keep walking south-east for about a day. They’d have to go super-slowly, but he believed it was definitely do-able. Mrs Sheng carried a day-pack containing four packets of uncooked fettuccini and six liters of filtered water in three empty coke bottles. The water would be needed for drinking, so the pasta would have to do raw. Gilbert’s most valuable addition to their booty was a fully-functioning torch with six (supposedly) new AA batteries. The torch took three batteries and had a “low-power” setting which they hoped to eke out for twelve hours, and should see them safely to Queanbeyan.

  The fifth doorway. Her fingers felt ahead along the skirting board as she kept crawling forward down the hall. There it was again, that faint waft of cigar. Mrs Sheng paused, waiting for Gilbert to catch up. The twin’s room must be the next one.

  Dick’s truck had smelt of cigar smoke. Positively reeked of it. That was the first thing she’d noticed when he turned up that day at Mulloolaloo. The Channel Six team arrived to do live coverage of a lunar eclipse at the observatory, which turned out to be fairly boring, as is usual for eclipses, lunar or otherwise. Three days later he phoned, and the following evening they met in Canberra for cocktails, then dinner in a flash restaurant. She was a lonely divorcee in a foreign country—and he was loaded—what was she supposed to do! Afterwards they had sex in Dick’s luxurious hotel room, which like the lunar eclipse turned out to be big, big build-up, then overall yawn, yawn. At least it’d been over quick. Somehow, she’d expected more. The only odd thing was that at 3.15am, when she was lying awake but not moving (as she’d been for some time) he got up, dressed quietly and left. She thought he might be sorting something for the TV, or even arranging a surprise breakfast for them both, which would’ve been nice, but he simply never came back. Two weeks later he phoned to ask about some unrelated, trivial astronomical event and his early departure wasn’t mentioned. However he’d quoted Mulloolaloo on the news several times which her boss at the station was more than happy about. TV coverage equaled funding, as far as Dr Zoy was concerned. Dick called another seven times over the following eighteen months but only for comment on space-related who-ha. Never to meet. Mrs Sheng gradually felt dumped. Which was silly, because there hadn’t been anything in the first place, as she’d told herself a million-and-one times. Maybe after you’ve divorced one husband who’s a drunk and compulsive gambler, anything looks good. For a moment her mind ran back to Macau and her old life and she realized how infrequently she did think about it. But Dick Snow had been there almost every day, like a virus burrowing into her subconscious. Latching on during that lunar eclipse then gnawing insidiously away and niggling at the wound, unforgotten, emerging only when—

  Gilbert?

  ‘Gilbert? Where are you?’ she whispered.

  From behind came a muffled, cut-off gasp followed by a rapid, repeated thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump on the carpet only meters away, which she couldn’t place at all. ‘Dick, is that you? Bob? Please Dick, is that you?’

  A moment later, out of nowhere, a loop of electrical wire drooped over her head and settled on her shoulders. Mrs Sheng barely had enough time to reach up, feel it tightening, then utter a frantic: ‘Oh God!’

  Chapter Forty

  Battle of Yass

  Will they remember the Battle of Yass?

  They remember the Alamo, and the Somme, and the bloodstained streets of Stalingrad. But will they remember Yass? They should do: it was fought between the last men and women on earth with axes and clubs in the frozen darkness.

  The question is, will there be anyone left to remember Yass?

  I will. I will remember Yass. Desperate one-on-one battles unfold where courage flies and is gone, evaporating in a crimson spray as though it’d never existed. All that’s left is a shrunken universe of grunting and hacking and crunching and splashing and screaming in agony as precious—oh so precious!—lives come to an end. A painful and frightening end at that. Heads cleaved in twain, torsos carved like mutton and all the rest of that really bad stuff. Fear, so intense you can actually hear it as a dull, throbbing, background roar.

  As is the case in many a battle the carnage is so extreme on both sides that even well after the end, when there’s finally a pause, and blessed, holy silence descends on the drenched field of gore, no one is truly sure who’s won. Those left always cheer, regardless of what team they’re on: ‘Shit! I made it! How did that happen!? There’s blood all over the place!’

  But this is only what you think in the afterwards, when the battle is done and dusted. Before, the reasoning and logic and all sense of judgment are jumbled and murky and you wonder why you’re actually there? Why! I do every time, and only a madman wouldn’t. Who are these people hanging with me—that I’m happy to die for what they believe? The idiots! The key is to just believe in something. Anything.

  This.

  Lord Brown held on high the unopened can of beer. He said to the crowd assembled: ‘This, is what I teach you . . . ’

  Two hours before Dick Snow was scheduled to arrive in Yass, thirty-seven people were crammed in the designated safe-house across the road and two doors down from the truck depot. Forsyth would’ve said more, given the stink, but old Browny reckoned it was exactly thirty-seven and the funny thing was, when they took the trouble to count there really were thirty-seven. Strange, because his back was to the door and at least five or six people had entered or left who he couldn’t possibly have seen. Lucky guess, Forsyth figured.

  The windows of the lounge cum dining room cum kitchen were nailed over with wooden planks stripped from the house next door to make the place less visible from the road. Before they’d arrived, it’d been occupied by three men, two of whom were currently across the road keeping an eye on the fuel truck while the third was sitting on the floor in here. He was the idiot who’d asked if anyone knew a prayer they could all say together. Everything had been removed from this part of the house apart from one sofa-type chair and a beer crate. Even the stove and fridge had been taken from the kitchen and dumped unceremoniously in the driveway to make extra room. The two bedrooms were stripped apart from a mattress on the floor of the master bedroom and three mattresses in the spare room.

  Outside the wind gusted in short, unpredictable flurries making it hard to isolate any odd sounds. An antenna on the roof kept striking the tiles with a soft, metallic dong that was getting on peoples nerves and the foggy, wheezy breathing of thirty-seven unclean mouths swirled pointlessly through the minimal light of three lanterns, only making you realize how cold and shitty it was inside, as well as out. Everyone was dressed in a multitude of assorted layers, none of which matched or had been near a washing machine in a long time. The stink said forty, at least, and Forsyth was a connoisseur of man-stink after eleven years in the army.

  The coughing came virtually continuous. They looked pale, on the verge on some non-specific sickness. The air tasted . . . well, the air just tasted, which it wasn’t supposed to do. Choked up with dust, or sediment—hard to tell—although plenty of the grayish mucky material had been traipsed inside and coated the floor, and wallpaper to about halfway up.

  Lord Brown stood on the upturned beer crate. He held outstretched a can of Fosters XXXX like it were a jewel-encrusted chalice. The top of the can reached within centimeters of the roof. He hadn’t spoken for maybe thirty seconds and his eyes were cl
osed, then he opened them, looking around the congregation.

  ‘Lads of Yass,’ he said somberly.

  ‘Excuse me,’ interrupted Zelda, putting her hand up.

  ‘Yeah!’ added Āmiria. Apart from these two there were no other women. Astrid was taking a nap in the master bedroom.

  The three lanterns in the lounge were spaced in a triangle around the only chair, which Zelda sat in. Everyone else was on the floor, stood or crouched where they could. What a sorry bunch! Francesco’s team wore the most concerned expressions, and that was a worry because he’d delivered the message to Snow and set all this up. His eight men from the Griffith council seldom spoke and always sat nearest the door. They carried baseball bats, but Forsyth happened to know each of them also had a sawn-off shottie slung under their overcoats, which was why they were all sitting up so straight with such rigid backs. Councilor Montabelli’s promise of at least ten men hadn’t panned out, and apparently Francesco wasn’t very happy about it either. At least the men he did have, had good posture.

  Wiremu, his daughter, and the four men who worked with him were making enough noise for the whole room. They did a version of Kumbaya which made the dog howl. Āmiria, Tim and Peanuts tried to make a hole in wall, through the plaster, looking for “treasure”. The men did a haka which made the hairs on Forsyth’s neck stand on end. That weedy bloke David, who remained perched on the arm of Zelda’s chair, had never seen a haka up close and looked about to wet himself. Winston sat on the floor in front of Zelda, sharpening an axe that Nathan gave him before they left Griffith. He’d discarded the sharpened stick. He’d also shaved his hair back to a mohawk and was one of the few not wearing something on his head for warmth.

  ‘We are gathered here this night to witness, yes witness the unraveling of our foe, who comes hither. I bestow on yea, verily.’ Lord Brown lowered the can.

  What codswallop! Still, he got the thirty-seven right, so Forsyth thought he’d give him a moment longer. Another thirty-seven seconds?