The Worm King Page 35

  Outside it remained dark as a tomb and cold as one too. A wasteland. Late-December, and the comet landed exactly eighty-seven days ago according to Lord Brown. Only 87 days! This seemed so short, yet the devastation so immense. It’d been more than just 87 days without sunlight. It’d been the king-hit combo of the earthquakes and the tsunamis, and no power or water or phones and bugger all in the way of transport. And the cold. The lack of light wasn’t just starving people to death, the darkness changed their psychology along the way making them more prone to bad decisions and magnifying the negative impact. It’d led to a catastrophic seizure of all economic and social systems, crippling even the most basic activities. Akin to a heart attack, Lord Brown thought. He said the human population will have been pared back to less than 5% of where it stood three months ago. Perhaps only 1%, which equated to 70 million survivors worldwide.

  True, an insipid speck of sunlight had wormed its way through, three or four times in the last month, and each time the bearing seemed about where the sun ort to be. But there was no plant life left alive whatsoever, and everything lay grey and damp and dead. A dangerous, silent wasteland.

  Wiremu asked Forsyth about “ordnance.”

  The matter of ordnance arose because Astrid raised the question of the twins, and Tamati expressed an opinion they should immediately strike back: have another go at Snow, so Forsyth replied they were low on ordnance, more to put them off than anything. Often if you use technical terminology like “ordnance” rather than “ammo”, you’ll throw someone off the trail easier. Unfortunately that didn’t work with Wiremu, which he should’ve anticipated. The Māori wouldn’t tolerate plain old running-out-of-ammo while he still had shovels and chains and rakes or whatever.

  ‘Hang on,’ said Āmiria, before he could craft a suitable answer. She began rummaging in her backpack. Wiremu frowned. The bus wasn’t deemed safe enough to leave personal belongings and most bags were dumped in piles near the lanterns so everyone could keep an eye on them. She withdrew a towel, and unwrapped two hand grenades. One remained on the towel while the other she picked up and rolled nonchalantly in her palm. ‘Is this ordnance?’

  ‘Hey girl, I told you to watch out with those things!’ her father exclaimed angrily.

  Astrid sat beside Āmiria, and looked down in disbelief. Her eyes must be deceiving her? Surely this child can’t be allowed to play with explosives! She raised her glass and took a deep swallow of Bundy.

  Forsyth had to admit to qualms himself, and was tempted to step straight over and take them off her, but for some reason it looked like she’d been carting them around for a while, the way she fingered that Australian-made Thales F1-class anti-personal fragmentation grenade, and hopefully she’d be able to squeeze another couple of minutes out of it before doing something silly and blowing them all to hell.

  Without any due haste her father reached across Astrid and took the one out of her palm, then the one from her lap. Forsyth relaxed somewhat. Wiremu held his hand out again, clicking fingers, and she passed the towel and pack. He wrapped the grenades and re-stashed them in the side-compartment. Āmiria put on an exasperated expression and folded her arms but didn’t offer any real complaint.

  The Hat sniggered and said something about “that mason in the bog”, which Wiremu was none too pleased at.

  ‘And if there’s any more of that behavior, I’ll take them off you for good!’ he warned sternly. Astrid spluttered into her drink. Āmiria looked contrite. Nobody spoke for three or four minutes then someone on the leather sofa farted, and everyone laughed.

  ‘You know what we should do?’ said the girl, regaining confidence with fearsome speed. ‘Just give the ratbag the truck! As soon as we’ve got Natasha and Krystal back, chuck the grenades at him the minute he’s in the truck, and blow him up! Before he can double-cross us again. Then at least we’ve got rid of him and he can’t do any other bad stuff, you know. Even if he doesn’t bring the twins, like last time, he’ll take the truck and we’ll still blow him up, and we’ll just have to go and collect the girls from that hotel you said they’re at.’

  ‘The Hyatt,’ assisted Forsyth.

  After a brief, fruitful discussion, the consensus arrived at a view that her plan was so, so dangerous, it was unparalleled in the field of dangerous, idiotic schemes.

  He considered the angles; not because it struck him as a serious option, but as a professional soldier he’d a responsibility to scrutinize all schemes of a military nature. That’s the job. A bell rang . . . her structure: he’d seen it before. Where?

  It was a solution invariably ending in violence. The plan at the depot had been based around the avoidance of violence and it’d ended in a bloodbath. The girl’s idea aimed straight for violence right from the get-go. It was one of those plans that on the face of it, looked a shocker—elegant, it was not—but the more you drilled into it, and tried to pin down the chance of success, the more you might go hmmmmm . . .

  He remembered! Where he’d seen a structure akin to this before. An Israeli soldier who worked with Mossad had done something similar with a grenade in his quest to rid the Middle East of those who didn’t agree with his general philosophy. It occurred to Forsyth that while Mossad are undeniably a tough bunch of wankers, this little Māori sheila is not someone you’d want to screw with either.

  In order to downplay the allure of her plan and try and set the girl straight, he explained quietly and succinctly what Paulie Schwartz constructed that day in an East Jerusalem street in the suburb of Sheikh Jarrah. Then he told her about the grenades impact on surrounding houses, and people. Instead of putting her off with a healthy dose of the horrors of war—as he’d intended—she looked intrigued.

  ‘Is there a stationery shop in Yass?’ she asked Francesco.

  This darkness—Oh, this darkness has brought very bad things to the surface. An enormous, global festering. Should it be his job to lance this? It must be, given the occupation he’d ended up in: wandering the world gunning down people he didn’t know for a scrawny handful of miserable cash. His time must’ve come; these events are tailor-made. Now he couldn’t even remember when he made the decision to do this, to take on this lifestyle. After all, there must be a point in every boy’s existence where they say to themselves: “I want to be a farmer,” or an engineer or a doctor or whatever grabs their adolescent fancypants. When did he make that conscious decision? What was happening on that particular day, when the sinister thought seeped into his brain and the little voice said: “I want to execute people I don’t know.” Had his parents just given him a hiding? Maybe it was in Mr. Denisen’s death-by-boredom science class, or after the old swine had just handed out the hundred and shittyith detention for the week. Was it simply raining that day, and he was down in the dumps? There had to be some logic, or reason behind why you become a soldier.

  Please Sir, what have I done to you?

  Nothing. But I’m going to kill you anyway because it’s my job, and a job’s a job.

  He’s no different from Dick Snow and the realization of this hit Forsyth like an ice-cold jolt tearing up his arse and ripping round his spine shredding everything along the way. He splashed more gin into his glass without any pretence of measure then walloped it down the hatch, leaving only the harsh, jarring snarl of juniper and it didn’t warm him one little bit.

  Āmiria had left with Francesco, Sgt Kevin, Tim and the dog to visit the local bookshop, approximately five minutes walk down the street. Funny how these days you needed two armed guards and a dog to go do your shopping. They never warned us that was on the horizon at the last elections.

  ‘You ever been in anything worse than that, at the depot?’ slurred Winston. Being of shorter stature, the drink went to his head pretty quick. Astrid wasn’t far behind, having picked up her run-rate on the Bundy considerably. She’d also been making openly overt movements—touching Forsyth’s arm and the like—and he wasn’t too comfortable with this because Francesco had mentioned earlier that Winston “had th
ee hots for the little redhead,” although Winston himself didn’t seem perturbed by her actions. Still, no point in stepping on anyone’s toes unnecessarily. She was about a meter too short for his taste anyway.

  ‘Gizab was worse.’ He hadn’t spoken the name of that town out loud for nearly six months. Not since the last doctor. In a way it was fitting, being at the wake of a doctor. When they’d lowered Azziz into his hole, some of the others placed little keepsakes in with him: a photo of his parents he’d carried; a dribble of beer from a can not quite drained prior to the battle; a tug of wool from his favorite jersey. Forsyth didn’t have anything. Would a hunk of rotten soul now suffice?

  ‘Yeah? What was at Gizazz?’

  ‘It’s Gizab, with a “b”. You would’ve never heard of it. It’s a speck of a town in southern Afghanistan.’ He paused, hoping Winston would lose interest. No. The others were staring too, waiting for more. Much as he hated admitting it there was also strange relief in divulging the story, although this always felt like a weakness, which he seldom gave in to.

  ‘It was in April 2010. I’d been in the country a couple of months and just getting the feel for the place. The Taliban were using this area around Gizab for resupplying insurgents on their way to Kandahar. They were coming from the south, and Pakistan. What happened was a lot of the villagers roundabouts eventually got the shits with this because the Taliban’s roadside bombs kept blowing them up by mistake. Then the Yanks came in, and started giving the villagers compensation for the bombs, which the ’Bannies tried to take, saying accepting money was against this religious law and blah, blah that one too, and of course the villagers got really antsy about that, as you’d expect, because the Taliban were using the cash to buy new guns, and roadside bombs. In Gizab a few locals met with the Americans and were promised supporting troops if they set up the odd roadblock, and started arresting the Taliban to put them off using the area.

  ‘Well. These locals went for it. Arrested a few ’Bannies, then sat back waiting for the Yanks to roll in. Unfortunately the Yankee cavalry got badly delayed by a flooded river, which they hadn’t expected. Despite it being a floody time of the year. The villagers found themselves in a pickle. An absolute army of Taliban had swept in from the surrounding hills and encircled Gizab. This shopkeeper named Lalay had taken control in Gizab and shot a few of the Taliban prisoners, so he wasn’t in a negotiating mood, and the whole thing developed into a fairly substantial firefight—let me tell you—centered on downtown Gizab. The Yanks still couldn’t get through, so they decided the next logical step was to fly in the Aussie commandos, to give Lalay support until the cavalry could arrive. I went in attached to that unit.

  ‘The fight went on for more than twelve hours, before resup properly rolled in and the ’Bannies pulled back. I ended up only firing a couple of clips and spent most of the time on my belly, so the other blokes worked an awful lot harder than me before we got out. I spent virtually the whole time pinned down in this broken-up, mudbrick goat-house. Couldn’t budge until it got dark. Was outflanked on both sides, and the rear. My share of the battle was an obscure nothing in the whole scheme of things.’

  ‘So why was it worse?’ asked Winston.

  ‘Right at the start, as soon as they realized they had me pinned down, four of them charged across this yard in front of the goat-house. They didn’t know I had a clear sweep, and I got one, so the rest turned tail. He dropped less than a meter from me, right by the entrance I was in. Then I saw it wasn’t a bloke at all, but a woman. A girl, really. She wouldn’t have even been twenty. Got her through the eye. There was . . . brains . . . splashed on the ground, back behind her. She’d been carrying an AK and that was on the ground too, right back in the middle of the mess. I spent ages laying there, trying to work out how the gun could’ve landed that far back and the only thing I come up with was she must’ve been carrying it behind herself somehow, not even pointed at me while she was running but they all charged so quick I didn’t have time to see.

  ‘Anyway, I had to keep watching this yard for nearly three hours, in case they tried it on again. All I could do was wait till it got dark enough then slither out and get back to the others. They weren’t far away and they’d got themselves pinned down too. Same as me, waiting it out. There was a lot of other shooting going on; a heap of shouting and noise, but the worst thing was, every so often there’d be this short, calm patch, and I’d hear this baby crying, and couldn’t help thinking: is that hers?’

  ‘Oh no!’ cried Astrid.

  Forsyth decided that was probably enough of Gizab today, even though only a fraction of the story had been told. Winston had gone quiet, and Astrid didn’t look half as horny so he let it be. More could’ve been spoken of the scars, and what the doctors said and wrote afterwards. The Cost. Maybe that would’ve scared them more.

  What do doctors know anyhow? That last one had looked like a pointy-faced rat in a sewer, about to leap on some luckless grub, except this particular rat’s feeding ground was a spotless white office overlooking the Duntroon drill square with its immaculately trimmed grass border. He’d been a Major and wore gold wire glasses. Occasionally the sun glinted off the rims, flashing across the wall, and once even zapped right over the prominent row of his framed, embossed medical qualifications. ‘So, Captain Forsyth, you haven’t been able to relate to women in a . . . physical way, since?’

  ‘What relevance is that?’

  ‘Well, in your family background . . . ’

  That was a long pause, doctor?

  The MO grasped for the correct word. ‘Has there been any history of . . . sexual assault, that you know of, or suspect may have occurred?’

  ‘Again, what business is that of yours? But for the record, no, of course not. Are we finished here, because this is going nowhere fast and I have plenty of other duties to attend to, as I’m sure you’re aware.’

  ‘Yes, yes. No problem. Whenever you wish, Captain. Just one more thing before you dash off. Your younger brother, he suffers from schizophrenia doesn’t he? Why didn’t you mention what he’d done?’

  ‘Because it’s none of your fucking business. Sir.’

  Doctors are brilliant at plugging up holes with logic. Push it down, push it down they say. Suck it in. Toughen up there, soldier. If it’s a really gaping hole they’ll whack planks around the sides to stop the juices running out and infecting everyone else. Planks like integrity, and mateship, and duty, honor and king and country and all that bullshit. But you only need one weak plank—just one—and eventually the whole structure tumbles. The big problem you’ll come to is that if you keep pushing the Evil down, so no one ever knows, you’ll eventually arrive at a crossroads. At this junction you’re forced to make a statement in order to continue: “Nobody, and I mean absolutely NOBODY, must know about this: what I’ve done here on this day.” Therefore there can be no God because a God would know, and Gods know all by definition, don’t they?

  That was the problem with gin, it tended to get Forsyth all metaphysical.

  However, this did seem incredibly important. An instant cure and absolution all rolled into one, simply by admitting there is no God. Had others made this critical link?

  ‘There is no God,’ he stated loudly.

  ‘That’s incorrect,’ replied Lord Brown emphatically. ‘There most certainly is a God.’

  ‘Wait a minute!’ protested the Hat. ‘Weren’t you saying back in Tamworth that God was invented by . . . that’s right, relatives of Saddam Hussein wasn’t it? Back in the Dark Ages or sometime?’

  ‘No, that’s Satan you’re thinking of.’ The old man shook his head at the Hat. ‘God is a physical being, walking this earth. I can prove it.’

  This tore at the foundations of Forsyth’s entire existence, so he couldn’t help taking umbrage. ‘Well, where is he then? What’s his name? He on the electoral role?’

  ‘It can be anyone,’ answered Lord Brown, undaunted. ‘Anyone at all. You could be, if you wanted.’ He pointed at Winston.
‘Or you, or anyone,’ indicating Wiremu and Astrid in turn. ‘It only takes one thing: one . . . warp if you like, or leap of the mind, and anyone can become a God. Do you want to know what it is?’

  The dog padded over and nuzzled Forsyth’s hand. No one uttered a word.

  ‘Yes,’ said Āmiria eventually.

  ‘All you have to do is this: truly appreciate the Joy of a single moment, in the face of the worst possible adversity, then you’ve made it. You, yourself are a God, and nothing can touch you. That’s all it takes. It’s a verified proof.’ He waved his tatty notebook in the air. ‘I’ve done the numbers. It’s all here.’

  An eon seemed to drift past. Outside the wind eased and air became still.

  This was a new angle. Up until now he’d spent his entire life worrying about offending whoever might be “Up-There”, but Brownies theory was that it could be him all along. He liked it! There was a hint of logic behind it: the worse things got, the more chance you have of becoming a God yourself. It felt like a faint light appearing way, way back in the darkness. Hang on, he certainly wasn’t a God yet? That’d be a big stretch in anyone’s books. So did that mean more adversity was required before attaining god-status? That sounded a hard argument too, because things were pretty bloody ad-verse right now. He voiced this concern.

  Lord Brown said, ‘How do you know? Your journey isn’t finished yet, so how do you know how adverse it may become?’ He opened his notebook and leafed through, then tore out two pages and passed them over.

  Both were maps, one of New South Wales and the other of the Middle East together with the western half of Asia, each signed in the bottom right-hand corner with an elaborate “LB.”