Draw the Brisbane Line (32 page)

Sammo had to move quickly in a kind of half-skip shuffle to keep from falling behind Nero.  Nero seemed to move at a normal, even pace, and although he and Sammo had roughly the same leg length, and despite the injuries he was carrying, he managed to stay ahead without trying.

Maybe it was the helicopter ride.  His whole body still carried a slight buzz from the vibration and the semi-weightless sensation.  He just needed to wait for his land-legs to return.  Yeah, that was it.  It had nothing to do with him being scared shitless by all these bush militia and bikies coming together in the back yard of this middle-of-fucking-nowhere farmhouse, all of them armed for a gunfight.  No, that had nothing to do with it.

As they moved over dark ground towards the house lights, Sammo was able to get a closer look at the people they were going to meet.  There were about twelve in all, every one a bikie, and front and centre in the group was a guy who looked like he might account for about a quarter of their combined mass, his gnarly red hair a quarter of that.  He held a pump-action shotgun across his body, the barrel resting on his forearm and pointed more or less directly at the guy beside him, a thin streak with lanky dark hair and a handlebar moustache who looked like he was trying his hardest right then to fold himself out of the situation, just concentrate real hard on being somewhere else and,
pop
, gone.

All the guns around him, all the aggro in the air … Sammo thought that maybe wasn’t such a silly thing to want.

Nero was getting ahead of him again, so Sammo put on a short quickstep until he was at his elbow.

‘Who are these guys?’ he said to him as quietly as he could. ‘They your boys?’

‘Rangers,’ Nero growled.  ‘Present.  And some of em, soon to be past.’

They walked to a point where the faint glow of light stretched to the edge of the gloom, fingered throughout by long shadows.

‘Nero!’ the big guy boomed.  ‘Or should we call you Lazarus now?’

‘Nah,’ Nero said.  ‘Lazarus was a guy who just got lucky.  I was thinking more along the lines of Julius Caesar.  Et tu, Blinky?’

Sammo didn’t know what it meant, but the long-haired guy, Blinky, he went pale as a sheet.

Red roared with laughter. His mouth was making all the right shapes, but his eyes stayed clear and bright.  His hard grip on the shotgun didn’t loosen.  Although he was as hairy as Bigfoot, his red mane was pulled back into a tight ponytail.  Less chance of it getting in his eyes if the fighting began.  Sammo followed that approach himself, which was why he always kept his own hair clipped short.  Nero too looked like he kept his hair scraped to his skull, maybe with the chipped edge of a slightly rusted fishing knife.

Sammo tried to make sense of who was who.  The way Nero had explained it to him, some of them were loyal, and some of them were backstabbing thieving cunts who needed to be put down.  He figured Red was one of the first kind, along with the other Rangers who stood at the ready with rifles and shotguns and pistols drawn.  The group in front, Blinky and his scraggly mates, were most definitely from the second group.  They looked tired, twitchy, and the least certain of everyone there.  They had the look of men who had been disarmed on their way to a holdup.

‘You look tired, Blinky,’ Nero said.  ‘You ride all the way down here?’  He squeezed the grip of the big revolver as he spoke, squeezed hard until his knuckles popped.

‘Ya should have told me about this,’ Blinky said.  ‘Ya should have kept me in the loop, but ya had to keep everything to yourself, didn’t ya?’

‘And I should have told you why?’ Nero said, his voice scraping through heavy rocks.  ‘Because you’re such a trustworthy cunt?’

‘Because I was your
lieutenant
, but you never stopped treating my like a fucken new recruit, did ya?’

‘You know why I made you a lieutenant in the first place?’ Nero said, shaking his head.  ‘Just to stop your bitching.  Just to keep you close so I could keep an eye on what you were doing, make sure you didn’t shoot me in the back when I wasn’t looking.’

‘Yeah, and how’d that work out for ya?’ Blinky said with a sneer.

Suddenly, Blinky moved, and he moved fast.  There was a silvery flash as he pulled something from beneath his jacket, a butterfly knife, and he was behind Red with the blade to his throat before Red could even think to pull the trigger of his shotgun.  It had all happened in the blink of an eye.

‘We came in carrying guns, and Red and his boys, they must have thought that’s all we had.’

Red shrugged at this and his bushy hair audibly crinkled, even above the winding-down thump of the helicopter blades.

‘You were always a quick one Blinky,’ Nero said.  ‘I’ll give you that.  It’s why I recruited you.’

‘Yeah, and I’m still quicker than you lot.’

Nero’s expression didn’t waver as he raised the big stainless steel revolver and pulled the trigger.  The top-right side of Blinky’s skull dissolved in a wet pulpy spray, and Red shrugged away the now lifeless corpse as he might flick a bug from his shoulder.

‘Blink and you’ll miss it,’ Nero said.

All the men laughed, really cracked up, and Sammo joined them even though he wasn’t sure if it was funny.  He was too numb to do anything else. 

Red shook his head and wiped a dark wetness from his face.  ‘What about the rest of them?’ he said to Nero.

Nero rubbed the hot barrel of the revolver against his thigh, scratching an itch.  ‘Dunno, to be honest,’ he said.  ‘I hadn’t really thought much beyond Blinky.’

‘I have an idea,’ came a voice to the side of Red, shaking with tension, or adrenaline, or both.  ‘Why don’t you all back off?  Lay down your weapons and back off?  How about that for a plan?’

One of Blinky’s boys was holding something out in front of him.  For a second Sammo thought it was a beer.  What was he doing, proposing a toast?  But then he saw the way the men near him reacted, first leaning away as though he’d farted, and then turning to run.

He didn’t know whether it was out of a sense of obligation or friendship which prompted Nero to drag Sammo to the ground with him as he shouted
grenade!
  Maybe Sammo was just in the way as Nero dived for cover.  Maybe Nero though Sammo’s body might shield him from the shrapnel.  In the madness of the moment, Sammo didn’t care so much about the why of it.  He’d stared dumbly as the guy squeezed the little avocado and ripped out a steel pin.  A flat lever flipped out from the top of it in a tiny metal salute.  Sammo had seen enough war films to think, don’t you normally hold that down before you throw it? 

‘Oh fuck,’ the guy said, and tried to push it back into position.  ‘Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck.’

Sammo was still wondering why he didn’t just pitch the thing away when a huge percussive slap smashed most of the grenadier’s body into a collection of butcher’s offcuts in tattered leather and denim.  Someone punched him in the shoulder, hard.  That’s how it felt in the brief instant following the bang.  He hit the ground and stayed there for a spell, dreaming —

— of falling from the open doors of a helicopter.  He fell through the night sky with explosions blooming in the air around him.  They were under attack.  Must be the Indos.  Even though the explosions didn’t feel threatening, he knew he was falling too fast.  The bushy landscape below rushed up at him like a clever camera effect.  He felt the parachute strapped to his back, and he groped around for the ripcord.  He found it, a hard steel circle, and he pulled.  Nothing happened, he was still falling like a pallet of bricks.  With great effort, he brought his hand up in front of his face and saw the small silver pin.  Fuck, he said.  Oh fuck oh fuck oh —

‘— fuck!  Oh my fucking head!’ Nero groaned.

He was leaning over Sammo, shaking him.  A dull pain throbbed somewhere in his shoulder like a root-deep tooth-ache.

‘Kay,’ Sammo croaked.  His throat felt like it had been packed with dirt.  ‘Mm-OK.’

‘Yeah,’ Nero said.  ‘You’ll be fine kid, you’ll be fine.’  His face was tinted a rich red, and as Sammo watched a round bead of blood formed on the tip of his nose and dropped onto Sammo’s chest.  He heard it hit his shirt, but he didn’t feel it.  Wasn’t that funny?  Wasn’t that just … just …

Nero shook him again.

‘M’awake,’ Sammo said.  He moved to sit up but Nero put a hand on his chest.  To Sammo, it felt like he’d just dropped a rock there.

‘You stay there,’ Nero said.  ‘Wait until the ambos show up.’

‘Fuck that,’ Sammo said, and tried to push Nero away, but Nero must have already had a tight hold on his arm because he could barely move it.  He could barely
feel
it, except for Nero’s hard grip under his armpit.  ‘Let go a me,’ he said.  ‘You’re cuttin off me circulation.’

Nero held both hands up in front of Sammo’s face.  There was something unusual in his expression, but Sammo couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was.  It was like annoyance, but different, softer somehow.  Sammo didn’t recognise sympathy when he saw it.

He shivered.  Why was he cold?  It was warm enough to go shirtless out there.

Nero moved out of his line of vision, stood up and began shuffling off awkwardly somewhere.  That left the sky to look at, starting to lighten now.  The sun must be about to peek up over the horizon, but up there in the hills they probably wouldn’t see it until it had well and truly crossed the bar.  Sammo was looking forward to seeing the sun up there. 

He shivered again. Maybe it would take some of the chill out of him.

The kid was fucked.  Nero had done his best to try and stem the bleeding, but by the time he’d come to, it was almost certainly too late.

The first thing he’d noticed about Sammo, when he turned his head and saw him lying there, was just how grey his face was.  He looked more fish than man with flesh that colour.  Then he pushed himself up, and that’s when he saw all the blood and the tattered streamers of muscle and flesh draped out from his shoulder, where the rest of his arm used to be.

Nero used his belt to fashion a too-late tourniquet.  He stood up, saw his revolver glinting in the grass and picked it up.  He moved off, away from Sammo, though to where he wasn’t sure.

The sun picked a bad time to show its face, softly illuminating the mess around him.  Bodies were bunched on the ground like they’d just taken a collective decision to have a nap.  Some of them were moving, groaning; some of them weren’t.  He saw one of the QTA soldiers, guy who’d been sitting next to Jenny Lucas on the helicopter, with his head all but completely separated from his neck, a single red tendon maintaining the connection.  There was no look of shock or pain or surprise frozen on his face.  He looked like he’d gone out in his sleep.

Nero’s brain was in a vice.  He wanted to lie down with two or three oxy, hopefully sleep off the worst of the pain, but he was worried the blast might have attracted the attention of local law enforcement.  Clock was ticking.

Jim was wandering away from the mess, and away from the helicopter, straight out into the dim nothing of the bush.  He held his rifle loosely down by his side, the muzzle bumping over the grass.  Nero knew it wasn’t a good idea to go walkabout in that scrub; land-mines made that a poor proposition.  He tried to cover the gap between them as quickly as he could without triggering a pain flare to knock him to his arse, shuffle-skipping, not lifting his feet too far off the ground.

‘Oi, Jim!’ he called out.

That was a mistake.  It felt like someone had twisted a thick jagged screw somewhere in behind his eyes.  He had to stop for a moment.  He bit down on his tongue to keep from crying out, tasted blood and swallowed it.  But at least Jim stopped his own zombie shuffle.  He fought his spinning head and caught up to him, placed a hand on his shoulder and he flinched as if shocked.

Jim’s face was as grey as Sammo’s, the parts of it not covered in blood.  A wide gash ran across the edge of his hairline, and the blood had flowed down his forehead like a waterfall.  It had slowed now, and the bright crimson was starting to turn dark and sticky.  Nero thought he could see the white of bone at the base of the cut’s canyon.

‘The hell?’ he said to Nero in a quiet voice.  ‘The hell was that?’

‘Fragmentation grenade,’ Nero said.  ‘Come on now.  We need to move.  You need to focus.’

‘My men …’

‘Are badly wounded, many probably dead.  They’re not much help to us right now.  Do you think you can go round up whoever can still stand?’

Jim nodded weakly, subtle enough that he might have just been nodding off to sleep.  ‘Why?’

‘We need to gather up all the gear.  Remember, the reason we’re here?  Before the law shows up.  Once we’re away to safety, I’m gunna need you to go ahead and make that transfer.  OK?  You OK with all this?’

Jim blinked, then nodded his head again.  ‘Yes, yes.  Fine.’

Nero glanced back at the mess outside the house.  They really had been wiped flat by the blast.  Two QTA soldiers and one of Red’s men were slowly moving about, but the rest remained prone.  Nero couldn’t tell if any of his old crew was still in the land of the living.  He hadn’t been planning on killing them, despite what they’d done to him.  Except for Blinky.  The rest would only have been paid out broken knees and hands.  But that didn’t mean he was going to go to any great lengths to make sure they were OK now.  He had his priorities.