The Business Of Death, Death Works Trilogy (89 page)

She shivers, and I pull her to me.

“Fucking clowns,” she says.

I’ve my crows hunting Stirrers throughout the city, seeking out nests. They darken the sky with their scrutiny, streaking from the edges of the Sunshine Coast to the Gold Coast, the great suburban swathes that make up not only Brisbane but the whole of South East Queensland.

People love it here. They come in their thousands, two thousand every week. The population is swelling, and not just the human population, but those things that use the dead as hosts. I’ve hunted in the darkest alleyways of the Valley, and in the sprawling houses of Hamilton. They’re everywhere. And without my ability to shift, and my eyes in the sky, I wouldn’t be able to cope with the increase.

Imagine a net, dark and spreading across a city. Every strand is an eye carried on wings that beat and snatch against the air. Brisbane is a big city, broad, not the most populous in Australia, by any means, that title belongs to Sydney, but it is spread out, rolling up and down the hilly plains—the Mcmansions in the outer suburbs, the units closer in, a few pockets of older places hanging on grimly. And my net covers it all.

When Lissa sleeps, I go out and I stall what I can. There’s not an evening when I’m not busy, scarcely an hour passes where a Stirrer isn’t found and I’m forced to drop everything and drive it back to the Deepest Dark and the city of Devour.

And I’ve learnt to savor the job.

Here is something that I know how to do. I don’t need to negotiate my way through the corporate minefield. I don’t need to ring Ankous and get their opinions. My only focus is the hunt. It’s like my old pomping days—which, come to think of it, aren’t really all that old.

I sit in my living room and fiddle with my iPod. Slide through my backlist of Okkervil River, or Gotye—occasionally I even indulge in some Killswitch Engage. You need a soundtrack to your life, and there has always been one to mine.

I nurse a coffee in my lap, hands cupped around its heat, as the music plays. I spread my consciousness out through my Pomps, or draw their experiences into me. The things I see, and the things I’ve seen. Crap I’d never even suspected might go on, not even after years of pomping, of coming up hard against the end of people’s lives. I’ve watched pomps and stalls from Antarctica (we have two Pomps there, both part-time) to the Arctic Circle. I’ve heard the same conversations bound in different cultural imperatives hundreds of thousands of times. I’ve seen all manner of excess and stupidity, all sorts of dignity and sadness. People killed for food, wealth, status and greed. People drowning in their own hungers. And I’ve encountered such grinding desperate poverty that it nearly steals the breath from me.

Once this god is dealt with there are other problems that need attending to.

Death is just and impartial. But life…Christ. Life is the cruellest of rigged lotteries.

I let myself doze a little, try and disengage from the world. I dream of black ink, an ocean of it covering the earth in darkness. And there I am swimming.

Hands grab me, and pull.

I wake up. My mouth tasting of ink, as though I’d grabbed a pen and bitten it in half—which I’d done once, back in primary school, to impress a girl (it didn’t). I suck and spit out nearly half a tube of toothpaste to remove the worst of the taste: and still the memory of it lingers. No more sleep for me. I sit and watch my darling dream instead.

The twenty-fourth starts slowly. Like any other day, but it isn’t. We can all feel it. My Ankous are ready to act the moment something happens. I’m getting nervous phone calls from them every half-hour or so.

When my crows alert me to a Stirrer in Mount Gravatt around midday, it’s a blessed relief. Maybe it thought it could escape my scrutiny in the lunchtime rush. And perhaps it would have, if it hadn’t passed a tree in which some of my Avians roost. I think the crow that saw it was almost as shocked as me.

I shift, and follow it quietly at a distance, but it must sense me because it stops and waits at a street corner. I get a little closer and it turns its head in my direction. Dark eyes stare.

The Garden City mall is to the left of us, but we’re out on Logan Road, all traffic lights and trucks, cars and smoking buses shuffling for ascendancy. “Get any good bargains?” I say, above the rumble of a bus.

The Stirrer stops, swings its head all the way around toward me, bones cracking. It picks up speed, staring at me as it pushes the shopping cart away.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I say, shifting to its side, taking far too much pleasure from its terror.

The Stirrer bolts from me, but I shift in front of it, stopping the cart with a boot. And it stands there, realizing it has nowhere to go. It tosses the shopping cart towards me, but I have already shifted again, beside it, close enough that we could be sharing a secret. Perhaps we are.

“It doesn’t matter,” it mumbles. “None of this matters. Our world is coming back, soon enough we will no longer be hunted.”

“Probably,” I say, and slap it once on the cheek with my bloody palm. It shivers, then drops.

I look in the cart—aerials.

I look up into the beady eyes of my crow, rather than through them.

“Awcus,” it mutters softly.

“There’s hunting to do,” I say.

I
t takes a long time to organize a raid. And the day, if it is the beginning of the end, has been alarmingly free of portends. Sure the sky is lit with the great glowing orb of the comet, but there has been no increase in stirs. In fact, we’ve had a decrease. As though the Stirrers themselves are holding off. I don’t even want to think what that might mean.

My Ankous are waiting. We’re all waiting. After the last day’s sprinting, time seems to have slowed. Each hour of nothing is another knot of tension in my neck. The anxiety level in the office is insane.

The twenty-fourth is here and not a thing has changed in the world at large.

Several of the blokes in the office have imitated my new haircut. Even Lundwall is sporting a shaven skull.

“You’ve started a trend,” Lissa tells me.

I rub my stubbly head. Maybe it’s not too bad after all.

Things are going to happen soon and we can all feel it. I’ve found what I think is the last of the houses. Forty in all, that large a number at once fills me with rage and embarrassment. This is my city, how dare they? And this is my city, how did I let it happen? They ring the Brisbane area from in as close as Toowong, west to Darra, south to Rochedale and almost as far north as Noosa.

I’ve had people try and make sense of their location, maybe read some sort of pattern in it, but no, other than surrounding Brisbane there’s no real sense to them. Certainly no logic that we can ascertain.

Lissa has assembled thirty-nine teams of three. Three’s enough, I think, to deal with a house full of Stirrers. I’ll be taking a place on my own. Lissa’s leading a team into Ascot. Even Lundwall is in on the act, he’ll be taking a team into a place in Bardon, not far from the cemetery.

Tim’s staying at Number Four. Monitoring everything from there. Knives glint in the strip lighting, people are suited up, body armor beneath their jackets. This is as professional a raid as I’ve ever seen, and I can’t help but think of Dad in his daggy and somewhat crushed sports jacket, hunting Stirrers back in the day.

He’d have laughed at what he would have seen as overkill. But things have changed in the last six months. Different generation. Different problems. Too bloody right.

I look at my watch, it’s after one. The office is quiet but for our prep. Maybe we’ve got it wrong, or maybe all we ever needed to do was destroy a few Stirrer strongholds. Imagine if it’s that easy.

If only I could believe it.

I’ve run through our strategy twice, but I can see that people are still working it through in their minds. The northern teams are already on their way. This last bunch are inner suburbs, they can be ready in less than half an hour.

“Any questions?” I say.

“No,” Lundwall says. “We get in there, and we stall these things, seems pretty simple to me.”

“Don’t get too cocky,” I say. “They’ll be on the ceiling, maybe in the roof. Be careful.”

Lissa pats my back. “It’s OK. You’re not the only one who’s been hunting Stirrers these last few months. We’ll deal.”

“Watch out for traps, pit traps and dogs. And if anyone has trouble, call it in, and call me. I will shift there as fast as I can.”

It should be quick in and quick out.

The moment I arrive I can feel it, I’m alert to the sensation. The rot at the edges, where the Stirrers’ influence is strong enough to kill everything but the hardiest and hungriest of bacteria. The trees around the place are dead, one looks about ready to fall over in the next strong breeze. The lawn is a sere old thing slipping away to dust.

The house is a big brick-veneer building, built in the mid-eighties in a boom time. It’s in the heart of the suburb of Sinnamon Park, on the western fringe of the city. The building has a huge glass frontage, with Doric pillars leading toward the front door. It projects despair, and not just because it lacks any architectural integrity. The place is a complete mess, but it would be worse if the Stirrers’ presence hadn’t killed off all the weeds and creeping vines.

I kick open the door and—

Ears ringing.

On my arse. Coughing.

The house a flaming wreck, bits of brick and glass are still raining down.

The dead tree is now on the other side of the road and it’s burning.

For a moment, all I can think of is Molly Millions, my dog. And my house, the one that Morrigan blew up. I shake my head to stop the ringing. Doesn’t work. All along the street, car alarms start their shrieking. I can barely see through the smoke. I shake my head.

I grab my phone with numb fingers, drop it, scrabble along the ground to pick it up. I try to call Tim. The line’s busy.

Lissa!

I shift to her position, the building isn’t a building anymore.

Then come the deaths.

They slam into me worse than any explosion.

But I can feel Lissa’s heartbeat.

She’s still alive!

Not here, out the back.

I race around the ruined building, and there she is, in the backyard. Up against the fence. Stunned. She blinks, wipes at her gritty face until I hiss at her to stop. Not to move. Everyone else is dead here.

“What happened?” she says, as I search her body desperately for injuries. She’s all right.

“Gone, they’re all gone. It was a trap.”

“Can’t be. Where’s Clare? I sent her around the front, thought she’d be safer.”

I shake my head. I just pomped her. Clare, and so many other young Pomps.

It’s happening again!

“I’ll get you out of here,” I say, holding her to me. I shift.

Phones are ringing off the bloody hook at Number Four. And no one is answering them. At least ten Pomp souls have found themselves here, confused and babbling. People are crying as they send them to the Underworld. I’ve Lissa in my arms. I stride to the sick bay. The door opens, Dr. Brooker’s not here.

“What the fuck happened?” Tim demands, running in after me.

“No time,” I say, and lay Lissa down on the bed in the sick bay.