The Business Of Death, Death Works Trilogy (19 page)

“Well, there’s naked and then there’s naked.” I am utterly exposed out here, and it’s cold. The odds of me being able to ejaculate are pretty grim. Lissa leers at me. That doesn’t help.

She rubs her hands together. “Well? Pants down, prong up.”

“Could you look away?”

“I’ll look away,” she says. “Just think about some of those busty trollops and you’ll be OK.”

Wicked woman!

There’s got to be cameras around here somewhere. I imagine the image as I, um—present—another addition to the caseload against me.

“Hurry up,” Lissa hisses at me. “I can hear a car coming.”

OK, deep breaths: a half dozen of them. I know that I have to do this, that there’s nothing else to be done, but I’m feeling very peculiar
about it. In fact, I’m feeling very dirty-old-mannish. Friction isn’t enough. Nor is strength of will.

It has to be done. It has to be done.

And it is. And at the moment of ejaculation, a quick hard orgasm, I see Lissa’s face.

I open my eyes, and I’m looking into Lissa’s face. Oh. My. God.

“You were supposed to look the other way,” I grumble, my face burning.

“Good work,” she says, ignoring me, though she seems a bit flushed, too.

I’ve got the semen in a handkerchief. I’m not sure if I’ve ever been more embarrassed in my life.

“Can I have a look at your, um, handiwork?”

I comply, careful to keep my distance.

She frowns, looks like she’s doing maths in her head. I’m not exactly sure how the dead perceive the world but she couldn’t possibly be counting the little swimmers. “That should be enough.”

“It better be.”

The car drives slowly past. I give it a wave. Nothing to see here, now.

C
rouching down like some maniacal Gollumesque creature, I scrape with a stone the Four Binding Elements (as Lissa called them), basically four triangles, each containing a circle on the cement of the footpath. Lissa stands in the middle of my esoteric squiggling.

“You need a drop of your doings for the center of each circle,” Lissa says.

I mark each one, then step back.

“Now, look at me. We need eye contact, and total concentration.”

I take a deep breath and gaze at her. It’s not gazing, it’s grazing, I hunger for her stare. I could look into those eyes forever, they are a fire in my chest and in my stomach. Lissa holds my gaze. I don’t know how long we stand that way; it’s intense but pleasurable, how my orgasm should have been. The air around us pushes in. I feel the weight of all that sky, and I am bound in a kind of leaden warmth. And then it bursts. The pressure is gone in an instant. And it’s just me and Lissa, and the car park. The air is cold. I let out a breath.

Lissa stumbles back from the circle of triangles, her eyes wide. She looks at me, her lips moving soundlessly. Whatever moment we shared has passed. She smiles. “Well, you’ve bound me. I cannot be pomped on this plane, except by an RM, and we haven’t seen too many of those about lately, have we? It won’t last forever, but for the next few days it should do.”

A few days are probably all I have, anyway, though I keep that thought to myself. I’ve already shared far too much with Lissa in the last half-hour.

She winks. “Naughty, isn’t it?”

“Easier than I thought,” I say.

“Well, I
was
thinking that about you,” Lissa says.

“So what do we do now, have a cigarette?” I’m shaking a bit, my face is still burning with the intimacy of the ceremony.

“If only … but what we have to do is get you out of Brisbane. We need time to think. To get Morrigan on the backfoot.”

“I’m not so sure. Tremaine said we should contact Mr. D.”

“Let me tell you about Eric Tremaine. He’s a bit of a tosser but, of course, you know all about that.” She chortles. “I don’t know if you can totally trust anything he has to say. Me, on the other hand…”

Tremaine must have really had it in for me. Sure, I’d let down the tires on his car at a convention last year, but it had just been a bit of fun. Maybe that was one of the reasons; other people had found it a lot of fun too. After all, it was how Tremaine had gotten the nickname, Flatty. “One of my reasons for breaking up with him was that he was too negative.”

“It’s hard to be upbeat when you’ve just been killed,” I offer. I can’t believe I’m coming to the guy’s defense.

Lissa glares at me. “You’re telling
me
that?”

Yeah, that’s me, Mr. Sensitive. “I’m sorry,” I say.

“I still agree with Don,” Lissa says. “You need to get out of here. Out of Brisbane altogether. And out of mobile range. This is Queensland, there’s got to be lots of places like that. Morrigan knows he can’t let the Stirrers grow in serious numbers. He wants to be the new RM, and if he’s going to become part of the Orcus, he needs to keep the Stirrers in check. Leave it up to him. I think you have to take yourself out of the picture for a while.”

“I know a few places that—”

“No, they have to be places you don’t know, towns that Morrigan isn’t going to look.”

She’s right. And Queensland
is
perfect for that. I could jab my finger at a map of the state with my eyes closed and find a hundred of them. Once you get out of the south-east corner or away from the coast, most of the country is hot and dry and empty.

People get lost there all the time. Often they’re never seen again.

I find some cover after sunset, and try and rest while Lissa keeps guard. I wake from bad dreams to the dark.

“I have to call Tim,” I say.

We stop at a pay phone in a park near the Regatta Hotel. I grab the handset and pause, disturbed by what I’m feeling in the air.

They’re out there in the dark. Stirrers, stumbling through the night. At first they’ll gather in the deserted places, the quiet places, and when there are enough of them together they won’t bother hiding.

If Morrigan doesn’t get on top of this soon, there will be a lot of suicides over the next few weeks, a lot of unexplained behavior. Bodies will disappear from morgues, people will see their deceased loved ones walking in the street, or wake with them in their bed. And there will be no joy in the occasion, because they are not loved ones, just something that possesses their memories: an imperfect and deadly mimic.

Stirrers are voids. They will turn a house cold, and they will swallow laughter. They are the worst aspects of time only sped up and grown cruelly cunning. Bad luck follows them.

They’ll keep their distance from me, if they can. If they have a chance they’ll try and kill me, from as great a distance as possible, with a gun or in a hit and run. They can sense me, but I can sense them as
well. And I’m more practiced at it, and I’ve only just had to face off seven of the bastards in the Wesley. You could say my palate was refined.

Which was why I could tell that the man pushing the swing in the park was a Stirrer, even from a few hundred meters off.

I slide my knife across my palm, wincing a little. And then I come up on him casually, trying not to look like he’s where I’m heading. It works for a while.

He finally feels my approach and turns, but now I’ve got up quite a head of steam. The Stirrer runs from the swing set toward me, but he doesn’t quite inhabit the body properly. After all, people spend the first couple of decades of their life coming to terms with their bodies. It’s one of the most obvious ways of telling them apart.

Their flesh will be bruised, the nails and hands will often be dirty. The longer they stay in the body the less clumsy they become, but there are limits. They will never attain the kind of grace that even a relatively clumsy person has—this isn’t their universe.

The Stirrer slips, then gets to his feet. I grab his back, and he wrenches away, so I tackle him, a perfect round-the-legs tackle. My hand brushes cold flesh.

The Stirrer rushes through me, and it is like swallowing glass. I push myself away from the motionless body, my chest heaving.

“Rough stall?” Lissa looks at me with concern.

I nod, some stalls aren’t too horrible and some are like a punch to the stomach. This was the latter. Jesus. Normally I would have called for a pick-up, someone to take the body and dispose of it, but that’s not an option, now.

The Stirrer opens its eyes, sits up: sees me. Its panicked expression is almost comical. It lets out a groan and struggles to its feet, legs shaking. The blood on my hand must have dried too much to have a permanent effect.

I reopen the wound, fresh blood flows.

The Stirrer stands there, unsteadily. Its eyes dart left and right of me, looking for some sort of escape route.

“Fuck off back to the Underworld,” I growl, and slap my hand against its face. The body drops. This stall doesn’t hurt as much. The Stirrer hadn’t inhabited the body long enough to get a good hold on it, but there’s more pain to it than there ought to be.

“That’s not good,” Lissa says. And it isn’t. That was way too fast.

The Stirrer’s eyes flicker. And I do it again, this time sitting on its chest while I get out my knife.

I slice open one of my fingers, making a fresh wound, and touch the Stirrer’s cheek. There’s a definite finality to that stall, like a door slamming shut. The body stills for good. Nothing will get through now, as long as I stay alive.

I get to my feet. We have to keep moving.

“The world’s gone to hell,” I say as I dash across the park, Lissa by my side.

“Not yet,” she says.

And I know she’s right. Things can get a whole lot worse, and they probably will.

“I have to see, Mr. D,” I say. “There’s no way I can leave Brisbane with this going on. It’s obviously getting out of Morrigan’s control.”

“And I’m telling you that’s not going to help anymore—at least, not now, maybe later. You just need to stay alive for a little longer, get out of Brisbane. Come back later.”

“But if that’s what Morrigan wants—”

“I think he wants you in Brisbane. But regardless, I want you alive. Neither of us know enough about Schisms to hang around, except I can guarantee this much: all the other regions will have closed down communication. They don’t want word of this spreading. Something like this could see a whole heap of madness. No, you need to keep moving, and Brisbane’s not big enough for that to work.”

I head back to the pay phone on the edge of the park and dial a number I know off by heart.

“I thought it would be you,” Tim says. His voice is strained, the kind of strained that the last few days will engender. I look at my watch: it’s three-thirty in the morning.

“Not getting many calls?”

“Too many, but I just thought it would be you. I’m glad to hear your voice.”

I’m glad to hear his as well. “We need to meet,” I say.

“The Place?”

“Yeah, that’ll do. I have to get out of Brisbane.” It’s not far away, I can easily walk it.

“I’m going to have to organize a few things,” Tim says. “You going to be safe until mid morning?”

“Yeah. I think I can manage that.” I’m not sure if I can, but Tim knows what he’s doing.

“You OK?”

“No. You?”

“Not at all.”

Honesty is such a wonderful thing.

D
elightful,” Tim says, glaring at a gob of spit on the ground by his foot. It’s fluorescent green and ants have encircled it like a besieging army, a boiling hungry black mass. “That your handiwork?”

I shake my head, thinking about some of my recent handiwork. “If I start spitting that sort of stuff you’ll know I’m not long for this world.”

I doubt I’m long for this world as it is, but neither of us goes there. I’m feeling very rough this morning. The souls have kept coming, and the drain I slept in last night was hardly salubrious. I reckon I’ve slept maybe three hours in the last twenty-four. I know I don’t smell that good.

The first thing Tim did was throw some clothes at me. I’ve got my backpack with me, but it doesn’t hurt to have some more. They feel better than what I was wearing, not exactly a perfect fit. The jeans are OK, a little loose around the waist, but my wrists jut a good ten centimeters out of the sleeves. I’m rolling them up as Tim gets to work on his third cigarette.

We used to smoke cigarettes here, when we’d first got our licenses. Or sometimes a little weed, but not for a long time. Tim offers me a cigarette, but I decline. “Yeah, stupid idea.” But he lights one up and has a puff.

“The Place” is a small park in Paddington. Very suburban, but
old-Brisbane suburban. Big weatherboard Queenslanders surround us, all of them in far better condition than the one I’d belted my way out of in Albion, but essentially the same design. Their verandahs are empty. No one is that interested in being outside.

Tim has driven here, in yet another car that I don’t recognize. I apprise him of the situation in detail that I didn’t want to disclose over the phone. Tim’s opinion I trust, though he doesn’t need to know anything about the binding ceremony. Lissa corrects me often enough that, even though Tim can’t hear her side of the conversation, he laughs. “You’re sounding like your parents.”