The Worm King Read online

  ‘What shape is that?’ said the girl.

  ‘Pardon?’ He hardly needed to raise his voice.

  ‘There. Look.’ She pointed up at the sky, towards the rear.

  A distinct glimmer of light floated high above, even the faintest outline of a cloud. They were heading south, so you’d expect the sun to be more or less in that position at this time of day.

  ‘Do you think my sister will be all right?’

  It seemed a shame she hadn’t used her sister’s name, then he’d know her name. Somehow, “What’s your name?” sounded too trite, given the circumstances.

  ‘I’m sure she’ll be fine.’ He squeezed her shoulder confidently. Astrid and Francesco would undoubtedly take care of her sister. The image of petrol gnawing through rubber elbowed its way into his brain.

  ‘Shape? Oh yes, I see.’ She’d meant the cloud which even in the last few seconds had become more prominent. Roughly zeppelin-shaped, with narrowing pillars underneath looking vaguely like long legs, and a knobbly bit on top like a head, all flecked with color. ‘It’s a . . . horsey.’

  ‘Horsey?’ she replied indignantly.

  ‘Sorry, horse I mean.’ He tried to elaborate. ‘It’s a horse, and she’s flanking across a grid square to, umm . . . a tea party.’

  ‘No way!’ The truck swung around some object on the road and he tightened his grip on her bracelet but she didn’t seem perturbed by the ride. ‘Whose party is it?’

  ‘Umm, it’s a friend of the horse. One of the sheep, who lives in the barn with her.’

  ‘A sheep?’

  ‘Roger that. This sheep’s name is . . . Shirley. Shirley the sheep, and she owns a Ferris wheel, so she’s having a big party.’

  ‘Is it a big Ferris wheel?’

  ‘It’s got M20’s on it, so yes it is.’

  ‘Is the Ferris wheel in the barn too?’

  ‘Of course not! How could Shirley keep a Ferris wheel inside like that? Can you imagine the logistics?’

  She laughed and the tinkling sound of it was so wonderful he nearly cried. ‘What color do you think the horse is?’ She pointed at the cloud again.

  ‘Guess,’ he prompted.

  ‘I need a clue. What’s her name?’

  Forsyth gazed at the sky, and the cloud, and then looked down at the girl. He remembered a pony he once won a stack on at Randwick one day, during spring carnival. ‘Well, when she was young she used to be a racehorse, and her name was Flamingo; so what color do you think she is?’

  ‘I know! I know! Flamingo is p—’

  * * *

  By the reading of the skid marks, Lord Brown was of the opinion there must’ve been two explosions: the detonation in the cab, then the truck rolled and the rest of it went up. The second explosion blew the back panel of the main tank completely away: ladder, handrail and all.

  ‘How are we going to get them off?’ said Winston.

  ‘What about that knife?’ suggested the Hat, pointing at the large pocketknife laying on the left side of the Captain’s torso. His tunic had burnt off and the knife obviously dropped out.

  ‘We can’t do that,’ said Wiremu. ‘We’ll leave it on. Bury them with it, together.’

  The four men stood silently around the two bodies laying in the middle of the road, handcuffed to the handrail. Wisps of smoke curled from the remains of the girl’s charred coat and hair. The Hat turned off his torch; the light from the burning truck showed them more than they needed.

  ‘What would’ve done it?’ Winston shuffled his feet. ‘In the end, I mean.’

  ‘Concussion, I expect,’ said Wiremu. ‘They’re not burnt real bad, must’ve got blown right out of the fire.’

  They waited an hour for the wreckage to stop burning and cool enough to retrieve bodies three and four. Much of that time was spent debating the actual point of recovering Dick and Bob’s stinking corpses, however Lord Brown was adamant. Winston thought it a waste of time. Henry waited in his Hillman and didn’t seem too heartbroken that his employer had met his maker.

  The flames in the cab took longer to die down than those at the rear of the truck. It came to rest on its side, driver’s door up. They could plainly make out one body, roughly where the passenger seat used to be, and Wiremu piled dirt around to cool hotspots then used the edge of his spade to hook the carcass out. Definitely Snow. Those Rolexes stay on through hell or high water.

  They chucked more dirt around. Was that him? No.

  No Bob.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Lord Brown.

  No sign of him at all.

  Wiremu eventually crawled right into the cab. His torch searched every corner of the smoky shell. ‘Yeah, I can see it,’ he called. ‘The plastics burnt off but you can see the buckle is in on Snow’s side, but not on the driver’s side.’ His beam worked overhead, probing. ‘Ouch! Can you pass me a rag or something? I want to check this door.’ Lord Brown undid his scarf and passed it through. A few seconds later came a harsh, grinding wrench and a bang as the driver’s door was pushed up, then dropped.

  Wiremu emerged, rubbing a hand across his eyes. ‘He didn’t have his seatbelt on. The roll must’ve thrown him out.’

  They searched the area where Bob might’ve landed for thirty minutes, but found no trace. Either he fell back into the fire and got completely incinerated, or crawled off somewhere to die from the effects of the explosion.

  Still, they didn’t fancy hanging around. The Hat suggested leaving.

  ‘We have to bury him.’ Lord Brown jerked his thumb towards the scorched remains of the Channel Six weatherman.

  ‘Why?’ growled Winston.

  ‘It’s what civilized people do.’

  So they buried Snow in a shallow, unmarked grave beside the road, each kicking a scatter of gravel over top until the site became practically invisible. Wiremu and Henry were fetching the car so missed the short eulogy:

  ‘What a cunt,’ said Winston.

  ‘That’s that,’ said the Hat.

  Lord Brown farted loudly and the three walked away.

  They picked up the bodies and drove them back to Yass in the Hillman, burying them along with the handrail in a plot beside others killed at the truck depot a week earlier. A brief discussion was held on whether to take the girl’s body back to Big Yass Furniture so her sister could say goodbye, however Wiremu ruled this out.

  The Hat, Wiremu and Henry dug the hole, each taking ten-minute turns with the spade in the hard earth. Lord Brown and Winston watched silently from the lip, the lantern on the ground between them.

  Winston had liked the Captain. When the pit was deep and long enough, he jumped in. The Hat got in at the other end. Wiremu and Henry passed Captain Forsyth down, then the handrail, then the girl. Winston arranged the metal pole between the two bodies as best he could. It looked like a lance, which they both held hands on. The Hat climbed from the hole. Winston could barely see out the top, and it occurred to him it was a tremendously sad place to end up. Forever. He reached up to scramble out, when he noticed something peculiar. It hadn’t caught his eye before: one of the Captain’s fists was clenched much tighter than the other. It didn’t really stick out against the rest of his mangled, broken frame.

  Winston crouched on one knee and lifted the hand, then gently attempted to lever the fingers open. It was harder than he’d expected. Whatever the Captain held, right at that minute he died, might be important. His flesh protected it from the worst of the blaze.

  No, it was nothing. Just an old silver button, indented with a lucky four-leaf clover.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Spoils

  Lord Brown had formulated a theory that fish might inherit the Earth.

  Thirty hours had passed since the tragedy of the fuel truck. A grayish, insipid light appeared in the sky again today but Winston didn’t think it had the intensity of the previous days momentary burst of near-sunlight. Wiremu lit a fire on the main street, in front of Big Yass Furniture, using shelves and a wall ripped from an abandoned m
ilk bar up the street. Jerry’s bus, the Hillman and Snow’s Falcon were loaded up with everyone’s worldly possessions, ready to go and parked where they could all see them.

  The atmosphere was sombre.

  Astrid intended taking a bunch of folks back to her parent’s teashop in Griffith. Jerry and Ken had changed their minds about Katoomba, mainly because they didn’t have enough diesel, so would go straight back to Griffith and try and negotiate for the fuel the council promised them. Āmiria and her father and his men would go too, along with Murray, Sgt Kevin, Tim, Zelda, David, and the remaining twin.

  Francesco intended heading in the opposite direction, south on the Barton highway and back to the Hyatt in Canberra. Winston, the Hat and Lord Brown would travel with him as “backup”. And to see what Snow had left laying around. He wouldn’t be needing it now.

  Henry agreed to take them, and Winston and Francesco already had a good idea of the layout of the hotel. Then Francesco planned to visit the army barracks at Duntroon, and pass on the news about Captain Forsyth, and Dick Snow. After this they’d all return to Griffith, hopefully in less than a week.

  ‘Fish?’ Āmiria said to Lord Brown. It was the first spark of interest she’d shown in anything since the explosion, for which she felt responsibility. The dog sat beside her scratching its own rump.

  ‘Many species of mammal will have vanished in the global carnage but fish are designed to withstand overcast conditions considerably better, and will be the first to recover, so I must go fishing henceforth with Nathan, on the Murrumbidgee. In order to do this, we have to complete one final task and undertake a full reconnaissance of the Hyatt. The hotel reputedly has one of the best wine cellars in the southern hemisphere,’ he added quietly, as though this explained everything.

  Astrid frowned. ‘So you mean you’re going to loot it?’

  ‘I’ve also been informed . . . ’ he glanced around suspiciously, about to share some great secret, ‘that the Hyatt may have the last, existing, global supply of prawn cutlets.’

  The Hat raised his hands, waggling fingers. ‘All praise to the cutlet!’

  Astrid ignored the Hat. ‘So you’re going to loot the place, grab all the booze and food you can lay your hands on, and then go on a fishing trip?’ She could see straight through his flimsy web of science.

  ‘With your father. That’s correct. My understanding from Nathan, when you were kind enough to have us there last time, was that fishing is apparently always best at dawn, and now that we have this dawn appearing after such an incredibly prolonged darkness, the fishing could potentially be—according to Nathan—at its best in more than ten thousand years. Nathan did mention he was happy to take us . . . and if we were to gather the sustenance first . . . ? And for everyone at the cafe too, obviously. With your permission, of course.’

  He was smooth, you had to give him that.

  ‘Well!’ She thought about it for a minute. ‘Fine then.’

  On the basis of the fishing theory, the Hat resolved to form a pirate band roving the countryside in a bus, doing deeds, drinking, and occasionally fishing.

  ‘Solving mysteries?’ asked Winston. Astrid smiled. It was the first he’d seen on her face in a good while, and he liked it.

  The truth was they’d run out of grog and Henry told them there’d been rumors of substantial stores at the Hyatt.

  Āmiria said she wanted to go looting too, but her father wouldn’t have a bar of it. At Griffith he’d been promised a house, as much work as they could take on and access to emergency food held by the council.

  ‘What about Bob?’ Winston asked, when the idea of Hyatt Mission II was mooted.

  ‘The minions of Snow will scatter,’ Lord Brown predicted confidently. He’d spent more than an hour speaking alone with Henry, about recent developments at the hotel.

  ‘Bob was the ultimate minion and you might think it’s bad he survived, if indeed he did, which he probably didn’t, but it’s not.’

  Few looked convinced, and the rest didn’t understand, so Lord Brown continued. ‘Leaving Bob alive means he’ll be drawn to any other . . . scum, I suppose you’d call it, that happens to float to the top. He’ll be the easiest man to pick out in a crowd on the planet. Harelip, one eye, nose missing and possibly severe burns and shrapnel holes. And a lisp.’

  ‘Bad acne scarring,’ said Astrid.

  ‘Personality wasn’t up to much either,’ added Winston.

  ‘No,’ said Lord Brown, ‘we shouldn’t feel in the slightest beaten.’ He stared from person to person, then at Āmiria in particular. ‘A great evil has been choked off. We’ve killed the head of the beast and the rest of the animal will scatter. They’ll scatter, leaving the spoils.’

  Spoils. That was a word Winston could relate to.

  S-P-O-I-L-S. He uttered it slowly; more to himself than anything, to see how it rolled out but the others easily heard his throaty chuckle.

  Travelling the land. Gathering the spoils.

  ‘Sweet,’ said the Hat. He liked spoils too.

  If spoils ran aplenty, life was always good.

  Winston wondered, more generally, what his new found career of Pirate entitled him to. Might it resurrect his chance of a shag with Astrid?

  Or at the very least, a piratey head-job!

  .

  Pink

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Growth

  Ten years later

  The doctor said goodbye to Natasha and left, the edge of his fawn parka swishing out a fraction of a second before the front door clicked shut. Three months! That seemed such a short time.

  She went through to the lounge and over to the ranch slider door then stood before the glass. At the bottom of the garden a young girl chased a dog with ridiculously long, floppy ears. They ran round and round an old stump entwined with flowering purple and white Convolvulus. A ring of daisies was planted at the base of the stump. A much older dog sat in the shade of a low hedge of Grevillea, watching the pair with his tongue dangling out.

  The doctor wobbled down the drive on his bike, slowly, so he didn’t skid on the gravel which was easy to do if you weren’t careful.

  ‘Bye!’ called the girl, waving as she ran. The young dog yapped excitedly while the older one merely withdrew his tongue, and watched the visitor depart.

  ‘See you!’ He prudently kept both hands on the bars.

  Was it only an afternoon house call to him? A thirty minute ride out of Griffith? No, he knew the family better than that and it was kind of him to come. So what now? Why tell anyone else, and upset them unduly. At least for a while anyway. She had an unexplained urge to tell one other person, and knew without even thinking who it must be. An alarm went off in the kitchen, one of those ancient plastic windup types they used to make in China which switch themselves off in five seconds, so she didn’t bother turning around. The shrill jingle advised the kibbled wheat had been soaking for an hour and was ready to be kneaded into dough but another ten minutes wouldn’t hurt.

  The butter! She still hadn’t taken the cream off the top of the milk and churned it. Her first attempt at making pastry, and the recipe was proving more complicated than expected. A decent-sized pot of mutton, orange and rosemary concoction already sat on the stove prepared and set to be stuffed into the pastry once it eventuated, so if all else failed she could just hoof the mutton on a plate and call it a stew. The recipe for flaky pastry required a teaspoon of lemon juice, which she’d failed to procure. Hopefully this wasn’t too critical.

  She slid the window open. ‘Jenny! Can you come inside soon, it’s nearly time to wash up for dinner.’

  ‘Yes mummy!’

  Three months.

  She turned and walked to the desk in the corner of the lounge and sat. From here you had the best view over the garden of the whole house. The old wooden desk had four vertical drawers, with the bottom one always fiddly to open. Despite tugging several times, it kept catching and refused to budge. Just as she was about to go hunt for a screwdriver i
n the garage, and attempt to lever it open, the drawer miraculously untangled itself and flew out with such a jerk it almost shot off its railing. Peculiar how often that happened—she’d concentrate super hard on this or that, and it’d generally come about, but never exactly in the way she’d expected. The only item in the drawer was an old school exercise book: black and red stripped and so tatty it looked like it’d been through the washing. Natasha pulled it out, laid it on the desk and picked up a pencil:

  WEATHER BADGE DIARY

  Ten years have whizzed past in a flash, and I still think of you every, single day. What can you say to a sister who gives her life for you? That there’s a great big cumulus up there? That it’s raining or sunny and the humidity today is up, and down . . . and why did you get on that truck!? The Brigadier told us! Oh Krystal, you didn’t need to.

  But you did.

  Three months, they tell me. There’s a growth in my chest and it means . . . well it means I have a lot to do. The old man is coming to dinner tonight and he’s taught Jenny to count to a thousand, backwards. He speaks of you often and says you changed the course of humanity. Last month, when Jenny turned five, he took us to where you are now and told me about the handrail, which I hadn’t known.

  I hope you liked the flowers we left; Jenny planted them herself. Next year she is going to try and grow you a tulip.

  In the end, you can’t say anything, only thank you—