Amongst the Dead (25 page)

However, when I looked down at the driver’s lower body, the miracle of his survival was tempered somewhat by the nature of his injuries. Something was terribly wrong with the angle of his legs, and the top of his trousers had been torn away to reveal a bloody crush of bone and flesh where his right hip ought to have been. Having awoken him from death, Farrell had awoken him to a world of pain and, if he survived, condemned him to life in a chair. He didn’t cry out, though, and seemed oblivious to the destruction of his legs. He looked vaguely at us and sank into unconsciousness.

‘Well done,’ I said, and meant it.

‘Where are we?’

The thick rain meant that the only way to find out was to explore the immediate area on foot. There was nothing we could do to help the driver, apart from construct a clumsy lean-to of leaves and bark to keep the worst of the rain out of his face.

‘He was coming down here for a reason,’ I said. ‘We should follow the track to the bottom.’

‘Don’t try anything,’ Farrell said. ‘I’ll kill you if I think you’re about to try anything.’

‘I don’t doubt it. You have plenty of experience.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Just don’t try anything.’

‘Don’t
you
try anything either, Farrell.’

We stared at each other, our faces streaming with water. Farrell’s expression was a curious mixture of belligerence and nervousness. I manufactured a look of uncompromising steeliness, and it had the desired effect of making him drop his eyes. Being only a few inches apart, I could see small muscles jumping in his neck and jaw.

We walked the short distance to where the track levelled out, and found the remains of what would once have been an insubstantial hut, constructed on all sides of corrugated iron, hammered to a skeleton of bush timbers. One or two pieces of iron had fallen to the ground, but the roof was intact so that, although the weather moved freely through the structure, the ground inside, while soggy, had not suffered the inundation of the area around it.

‘We can’t carry him down here,’ I said. ‘His whole lower body’s been crushed.’

‘Well, we can’t leave him up there.’

The pounding rain made thinking difficult.

‘We can’t do anything with these bloody handcuffs on!’ I yelled, my frustration boiling over. ‘He must be carrying a key.’

‘It wouldn’t be in one of his pockets. He’d have hidden it somewhere in the jeep, just in case either of us had any ideas about overpowering him.’

I calmed myself down.

‘If we drag him by the shoulders, and hope he stays out to it, we probably won’t do any more damage than has already been done.’

Farrell nodded, and we made our way back to the jeep.

The driver was heavy, and having to walk backwards, in unison, was tricky. Farrell slipped over once and took me with him. The driver’s head thudded into the mud, which provided some cushion, I suppose. I slipped over next, and the consequences were repeated. When we eventually began moving successfully I tried not to think about what was happening to the driver’s body as it bumped and twisted over the uneven ground. Mercifully, he remained unconscious.

When we’d laid him in the hut, Farrell said it was probably used by the Nackeroos as a supply cache, and that, somewhere nearby, cans of food and maybe medical supplies would be buried. It didn’t take long to find them. Behind the hut, a less than artfully arranged bundle of thick sticks indicated that the cache was buried beneath.

‘We need to be bloody careful,’ Farrell said. ‘Some bastards rig these with a grenade, just in case an Abo finds it and decides to help himself.’

‘I’m not hungry,’ I said.

‘There might be morphine for the driver.’ He began peeling the sticks away one by one.

‘If one of these was wired to the grenade pin and we pulled it, we’d be history.’

‘Do grenades work in the wet?’

‘Are you serious?’

‘No. Desperate.’

My whole body began to shake.

‘For Christ’s sake, keep still,’ Farrell hissed. He leaned forward and removed another stick with his cuffed hands, and then another. The world swam before my eyes and, unable to do anything about it, I fell into a faint. The remaining sticks rose to meet me as I collapsed on top of them. I heard Farrell scream, and disappeared down the well.

I must only have been out for a matter of seconds because, when I groggily came to, Farrell was sitting down, his shackled leg pulled away from me, his face drained of all colour, and he was panting hysterically. He suddenly began to laugh.

‘No grenade,’ he said.

I wanted to be sick, but I’d suffered enough humiliation in front of Farrell for one day, so I suppressed the urge.

My fainting did nothing for my image as a hard man in Farrell’s mind, and he grew in confidence before my eyes. Almost pushing me out of the way, he began digging with his hands. The earth came away easily in great, gloopy dollops, and a tin box was revealed about one foot down. We pulled it out and opened it. There were several unlabelled tins of food and a box of ammunition, but no medical supplies. We helped ourselves to a few tins, and roughly sloshed the mud back over the box. It was beginning to get dark, and the realisation that we’d be spending the night there, chained together, with a critically injured man for company, made me uneasy. If I fell asleep, Farrell could make his move. Of course, being attached to a dead man would be something of an inconvenience for him, but I was sure he’d simply find a way to hack off my foot and free himself from the burden of my corpse.

Inside the hut, the rain was amplified by the iron, and it swept in when the wind began to rise. The flimsily attached sheets rattled and clattered, and the ominous, wet slap of leaves outside announced that this was to be more than just another monsoonal dump. It had all the makings of a fierce storm. The driver groaned, which was unsettling, and his groans swelled into a horrifying aria of agony. We moved across to him and restrained him. The whites of his eyes showed in the last of the light, and in them I saw naked terror.

‘It’s all right, mate,’ I said uselessly, somehow hoping that the word ‘mate’ would do instead of morphine. His mouth opened and closed, and he squeezed his eyes shut before releasing a roar so shocking and so loud that we were pushed back by it. He slumped into an open-eyed stupor, his breathing laboured but strong. God help him, I thought — he’s not going to die.

We were both badly shaken by the driver’s ordeal.

‘We need to eat,’ I said, as if this might restore some calm.

‘And how do you suggest we open the tins?’

‘This bloke must have a knife at least.’

When I said this I felt Farrell stiffen, as if the mention of a weapon offered an opportunity. It was too dark now to see whether or not the driver had a knife on his belt — I hadn’t noticed one earlier.

‘We need to check him,’ I said.

This simple task was made complicated by the obvious uncertainty about what the person who found it first would do with it. We solved this by running our hands over the driver’s body in the same place at the same time. It was both ludicrous and disgusting fumbling about in the blood and pulp of his midriff. There was no knife. We agreed to go outside, clean our hands, and search the jeep. Perhaps the key to the handcuffs might turn up, too. This was much more difficult than expected and, as the wind became more violent, it was also frightening. Having been caught in a cyclone in Maryborough I had no wish to revisit the experience.

A great, hot scribble of lightning ran across the sky, and in the surgical whiteness of its light I saw Farrell’s stricken face. I’d seen that look before on other brontophobes. When the thunder crashed about us he jerked involuntarily and waved his cuffed hands in a circle as if he might conjure an axe or a club with which to defend himself against its force. More thunder exploded, and the sky became alive with great veins of lightning forming an almost continuous display. I’d never seen an electrical storm of this magnitude. In any other circumstances, it might have been magnificent; here, it reinforced our vulnerability, and filled me with dread.

We searched the jeep cursorily, both of us nervous about being out in the open. I was worried about being struck by lightning; Farrell, it seemed, was worried about dying of thunder. We hurried back to the hopelessly inadequate shelter of the hut. I failed to mention to Farrell that I’d discovered a knife, caught between the front seat and the side door of the jeep. It was mere chance that my hands had found it and not his, and in his distracted state he hadn’t noticed that I’d managed to drop it down the front of my shirt. It was a sleight-of-hand of which Glen would have been proud. In one quick motion I feigned scratching an itch on my neck, and dropped it through my open collar. It slipped down and sat where the shirt was tucked into the trousers. Now at least I had something with which to defend myself, and I was prepared to go hungry rather than tell Farrell about it.

The constant washes of white light and chest-rattling peals of thunder conspired to drive Farrell and me into a corner of the hut. The rain blew in and the ground was saturated, but I think Farrell felt safe hunched at the place where two flimsy walls met. I sat with him, having no other choice, and I almost felt sorry for him. The storm had unmanned him. The Wet season must have been a nightmare for him. I wondered, indeed, if it had driven him mad, and that his crimes weren’t symptoms of his insanity. He put his head between his knees, and his body was eloquent in speaking for the trauma he was undergoing.

The wind now howled, and in a burst of light I saw that the driver’s mouth was open and that he was screaming; but his screams were lost in the general cacophony. We must have been sitting in our corner for half an hour when Farrell leaned into my ear and shouted, ‘I need a piss!’

We stood up. I thought he’d do it where he stood, but he indicated that he wanted to do it outside. I was surprised, but grateful. We took just a few steps away from the hut, and were astonished by the force of the wind. Farrell fumbled at his flies and I looked away. A shriek of metal put my teeth on edge, and I turned back to Farrell to ask him to hurry up. Just then, an extended and brilliant wash of lightning exposed the horror of what had happened in an instant. Farrell’s torso, his hands still holding his penis, swayed, stunned into remaining upright, despite his head having been cleanly sliced from his body by the guillotine of flying roof-iron. His trunk, teetering uncertainly, was peculiarly expressive of a profound surprise. It collapsed at my feet.

I closed my eyes against the unspeakable thing that had just happened — closed them against the gouts of blood that were pumping from Farrell’s arteries. When I opened them I couldn’t bring myself to look around for his head. The thought of it staring at me in a sudden flash of illumination was so disturbing that I resolutely kept my eyes straight ahead. It was only when I began to walk away that I realised I was still attached to Rufus Farrell.

This was a situation unique in my experience, so a solution didn’t immediately present itself. I couldn’t remain standing in this tempest, so I half-dragged, half-carried Farrell’s decapitated corpse back into the hut with me. A gap in the roof showed where the guilty piece of metal had clung. Because I didn’t know what else to do, I sat down in the corner — so numb that I didn’t flinch as, one by one, the remaining sheets of iron were prised from the hut’s frame by the wind’s fingers, and thrown into the night.

For hour upon hour, the three of us sat or lay, exposed to the furious elements in the scrawny timbers of the hut picked clean of all protection by the hammering wind. I discovered that when the human mind is deluged with fear and despair, and yet survives, it enters into a dull acceptance that grotesque extremes are somehow not just normal but right and proper. Which is why I decided to use the knife I’d secreted to cut Farrells’ foot off, above the point at which the shackle encircled it.

Having made the decision, I knew I had to do it immediately. If I waited I’d lose my nerve, and it was an action suited to the violence of the storm — it felt almost like it was part of it. It proved to be a difficult task. I rolled up his trouser leg and began sawing. The blade met the resistance of bone quickly, and no amount of sawing with the heavy but blunt knife was going to sever the foot. I eventually managed it with brutal chopping motions. When the final thread of tendon came away, a rush of bile pushed its way up from my gut to my mouth, and I began to sob. The violation was made no less obscene by the fact that this was the body of a murderer.

As if to perform some sort of penance, I crawled across to the driver. His eyes were open, staring at Farrell’s corpse, but unseeing, I supposed. He’d stopped screaming, although his mouth was moving soundlessly. I put my ear to it to hear what he might be saying, but all I could pick up was the faint susurration of weakly expelled breath. He couldn’t last much longer.

The wind dropped, the rain became a benign patter, and the lightning played across the sky silently. I can’t now understand how I did it, but I slept until the dreadful whine of mosquitoes woke me to a dim dawn and to a rising brightness that would reveal the hideous reality of the night’s work. I glimpsed Farrell’s head, and scrambled to my feet, anxious to remove myself from it and from the shape that I knew to be the rest of him.

In daylight it was an easy walk to the upturned jeep, and when I reached it I was surprised to see an Aboriginal man standing by it. He was wearing shorts and carried no weapons, and the sight of me with my hands cuffed and with a chain trailing from one leg must have so alarmed him that he took off before we could exchange a single word.