The Tankermen (17 page)

‘Surprise, surprise,’ Finn said in a choked voice, then added in a whisper, ‘What do they expect from aliens—a Lockwood with the key still stuck in it?’ He and his mother had an attack of slightly insane giggles.

‘So anyway,’ his mum said when she had partly recovered, ‘they’re going to blow it open—the inner door, that is.’

The laughter died in them as more loaded stretchers were brought out from the rock, their burdens covered entirely with plastic sheeting. Full plastic garbage bags, too, were carried out and placed in a police wagon. Finn guessed the police must be getting to the end of the line of cages.

Then a stumpy man in a grey boiler suit was being escorted in through the crowd. He blinked up at the tanker ladder.

‘What, hang onto that and walk into the rock?’ he said, on the verge of bursting out laughing. He carried a large, slick-looking tool box, with DO NOT TOUCH stencilled across both sides in livid red. ‘You must think I’m—’ He stopped
speaking as the sergeant in charge stepped out smoothly from the stone. ‘What is it—a hologram or something?’ He disappeared into the wall, the sergeant following.

‘That’s the man from Explosives,’ said Stella. Police began filing out of the wall. Then a new species of police appeared, in helmets, boots and blue-black coveralls, toting rifles and machine-guns. They arrived in a tight squad, and Finn had the impression they had all come off the same production line, so uniform were their tall figures, their clean-cut square jaws and their aloof eyes. They had obviously been well briefed—they took the hologram-wall in their stride, showing no surprise. One of them hoisted himself on to the tanker’s ladder and disappeared over the top of the tank.

‘Who are these guys—the Army?’ said Stella.

‘They must be police sharpshooters or something,’ said Finn.

‘Great—more corpses,’ she said sourly, ‘more Rambo carry-on. Where are the scientists? That’s what I’d like to know. Where are the interpreters? Where are the people who can tell us what these creatures are up to?’

‘Good questions, Mum.’

Stella stood up and handed her blanket back to the ambulance officer. ‘Thank you for the tea,’ she said. ‘Come on, Don, let’s have a look inside. Here, I’ll give you a leg-up to the ladder.’

The nasty tingling invaded Finn’s body again as he climbed to the top of the tanker. His mum scrambled up behind him and they pushed their faces through the stone.

The Explosives man had disappeared into the cavity beyond the outer door, and the sharpshooters had deployed themselves in a neat semicircle around the door, weapons at the ready. One guarded the open trapdoor and another covered the Explosives man’s retreat.

‘They look like something out of
Star Wars,’
muttered Stella in Finn’s ear. ‘Almost as creepy as those insect blokes.’

The Explosives man came out not long afterwards. ‘Three minutes,’ he said to the sergeant, who immediately snapped, ‘Everyone out.’ The sharpshooters re-formed and came out in a block. ‘You too,’ said the sergeant, motioning to Finn and his mum.

They all waited on the street while the time ticked over. The Explosives man counted down on his watch, until there was a slight shudder under their feet. ‘Thar she blows,’ he said and the sergeant, a megaphone in his hand, slid through the rock-face again behind one of the sharpshooters.

Finn climbed halfway up the ladder behind another, and craned around the tank. The second door had been blown right through the first, and a black tide was swishing out over it: a tide full of lumps that struggled. It jetted out in all directions like seawater bursting through a porthole. Finn saw the Explosives man and the sergeant baulk and step quickly back out on to the street. ‘You reckon that’ll follow us?’ he heard the man say, and the sergeant barked, ‘Back off, everyone! Evacuate the area!’

‘It’s okay!’ Finn cried out. ‘It’s stopping at the entrance.’ The semi-liquid mass splashed against the opening in the whiteness as if against a glass wall, curling back on itself. Finn had to keep his mouth and nostrils outside, the stench was so overpowering, and the man above him was cursing and crawling back along the tanker. It was the poisonous gas he had breathed in the laneway, but with a difference: it had matured, it was fully alive. Dark, ant-like creatures of all sizes fought to stay submerged in it, and the liquid streamed and stirred and swam within itself more busily than was warranted by its tidal sweep.

As the sharpshooter leapt from the top of the tanker, Finn
felt someone climbing up behind him, and his mother leaned in beside him, then drew back choking. She held her nose and her breath and peered through again.

The liquid was maybe a metre deep now, and slowing. ‘What can you see?’ called the sergeant.

‘Insect soup,’ said Stella. ‘There are these big insect things, all shiny and hairy, and they make a noise, like wheezing—’

Finn held his breath and poked his head further in. He heard it, a sucking whistle, like the noise you get sucking water from a facewasher, only continuous . . . and coming from all sides, emitted by each insect that surfaced and echoing around the chamber.

The creatures were clearly in distress, as the tankerman up at the Cross had been when the fluid ran from its suit, leaving it exposed. The smaller creatures swarmed, and the larger ones thrashed and fought and wheezed in the blackness. Purple-black themselves, they consisted of three sections: round head, bead-like thorax, and heavy, wedge-shaped abdomen. Their limbs were sticks, like an insect’s, but softer, and they each had only four, pincer clawed. Their faces were all the same, oval fencers’ masks covered with black spikes, among which dark bubbles multiplied in a desperate froth.

‘Well,’ said Finn, ‘they’re definitely not people.’ His brain could barely take in what he saw, the three-dimensionality of it, the fact that it was not on a cinema screen.

‘And they’re definitely unhappy,’ said his mother on the last of a breath, then pulled her head back for more air.

Finn felt the charge in the tanker and in the air around weaken, felt the dreadful jumping of his cells gradually slow.

‘That gunge is draining away,’ said Stella. ‘It must be going down into the cellar.’

The insects were being left high and dry, the liquid
swirling more slowly as it sank between their layered bodies. The wheezing sounds rose separately to a certain pitch and faded out, and the creatures staggered like half-drowned flies, heaving their bodies up and then keeling over pathetically.

‘What’s happening over by the door?’

Finn looked up from the grisly scene on the floor in time to see the doorway disappear behind a layer of brown-yellow, traced with wavy patterns. ‘Sandstone,’ he said. ‘It must be the rock, closing back up.’

Silently the rock progressed towards them, layer by thin layer. The insects stilled as it approached, until they were all locked into a sticky mass. The rock lipped over the end of the tanker, and came gradually along it, encasing it.

‘I think we’d better move,’ said Stella.

‘I think you’re right,’ said Finn, scrambling down the ladder after her.

‘The rock’s closing up,’ Stella called out to the sergeant.

‘Terrific,’ he said bitterly. ‘That’ll look good in the report: “And then the rock-face went back to normal, and everyone lived happily ever after.”’

‘It sounds good to me,’ said Finn’s mum under her breath. She and Finn stood together, their shoulders touching, and a few seconds later they saw the sandstone face slip down to cover the tanker’s ladder. Finn reached out to touch the wall, and it met his hand, gritty and impenetrable.

‘Damn and blast,’ said the sergeant, slapping the wall with the palm of his meaty hand.

‘Never mind, sarge, we got photos, didn’t we?’ said a younger officer behind him.

‘Yeah, we got photos, and four of these blokes’ corpses, and suits and weapons. Better than nothing, I guess.’ He sighed gustily and turned to Finn and Stella. ‘You two’d
better come down to the station, then, and we’ll get your version of things down on paper. Reckon you could cope with that?’

‘I don’t know. How about you, Don?’ His mum put her arm around him.

‘Yeah,’ said Finn. He was exhausted. He checked his mum’s watch: four-thirty. He looked out at the sky—yes, it was greying slightly now, the stars fading from view. ‘Yeah,’ he said again as they followed the sergeant through the packed emergency vehicles. ‘Let’s get it all over and done with.’

Greenlawns Nursing Home was much nicer in real life than in the postcard. From being trimmed and painted up for the photograph, it had relaxed slightly. Tropical growth spurted up around the verandah stairs; the curtains behind one of the French windows were going a bit tatty. And of course, once you put real people on those cane settees, old people who tended to lean one way or the other, and not care whether the blanket was half falling off their knees or that their cardigans were buttoned up wrongly, the whole effect was pretty untidy.

Busy as the front verandah looked, it had a crucial emptiness to Finn’s eyes. He walked slowly up the circular gravel drive, determinedly swallowing the lump in his throat.

He saw an old hand lift into the sunlight and point waveringly at him. The girl in the white uniform, who’d been bending to lower a tea-tray, stood and squinted out at him, then gave a cry and headed for the stairs.

‘It’s Donny! Don Finley!’ she called over her shoulder, and an older nurse came to the front door to see. ‘My, haven’t you
grown
, just over Christmas!’ The nurse ran down the scrunching gravel. Finn laughed, and accepted her excited hug and a kiss on the cheek. ‘Oh, we thought we might never see you again! You know,’ she added at a lower pitch, ‘some people, they lose their gran and of course there’s no real
reason
why they should come back, but we do miss them.’

‘I’m glad to see you’re okay,’ the older nurse said, coming down the stairs to meet them. ‘We were worried about you. It’s a pity it’s Danielle’s day off—then again, none of us’d get a word in edgewise if she were here. Cup of tea?’

‘Yes please, Sarah. G’day, Barney.’

‘Young Master Finley! It’s been a long time!’

Finn put his hand into the cool, papery one extended to him. ‘It sure has. How’ve you been?’

‘Oh, the usual. Another day, another chance to beat Mrs Stanwick at Five Hundred.’

‘Barney, you’re a ruthless man. He’s just a ruthless man, isn’t he, Donald?’ Mrs Stanwick was a tiny woman with a soft shock of pale blue hair, seated at the far end of Barney’s settee. Her eyes disappeared completely as she smiled at Finn. ‘You’re getting to be quite a handsome young man, Donald, isn’t he, Janine?’

‘Gorgeous. If I weren’t already engaged I’d ask him to take me out dancing.’

‘Engaged, hey? So you finally got Jason to pop the—’
‘Finally.
I had to
literally
bend his arm. Like my ring?’ Finn bent over the cluster of miniature diamonds and made dutiful, admiring noises. ‘Have you bitten it to see if it’s real?’

Janine pushed at him. ‘You’re dreadful! I’d forgotten what a tease you were. We’ve really missed you, haven’t we?
Haven’t we missed Donny, Mrs Casey?’ she added in a loud, clear voice to a woman perched dreamily in a wheelchair at her side.

Mrs Casey looked up and smiled sweetly. ‘No, thankyou, nurse.’

‘Still off with the pixies, that one,’ said Mrs Stanwick fondly. She gathered a handful of cotton blanket and pulled it in closer to her. ‘Sit down here, Donald love, and drink your tea by me.’

‘I’ll just pop in and get the biscuits,’ said Janine. ‘Can’t have our tea without biscuits, can we?’

She left the conversation pilotless, and Finn subsided, with the others, into that warm, timeless calm brought on by the wide, silent lawn between the Home and the forest, where birds fluttered and called.

Barney’s hand wavered to rest a moment on Finn’s knee. ‘Your gran went off very peacefully,’ he said. ‘Right in the middle of
Paradise Row
, it was, so she must have died happy. Worried about you, of course. What were you up to, running orf like that and upsetting everyone?’

Finn looked at him, the milky eyes and the mouth that delicately fumbled around the dentures. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘It all seems like a long time ago now.’

Barney smiled distantly. ‘I remember doing exactly the same thing when I was about sixteen. Ran off to the war, you know. Of course, I was small for my age then, so they sent me straight home again. By the time I was old enough it was all over. Just as well, probably.’

He laughed a little, soundlessly, then allowed a long, sleepy pause before continuing. ‘We all miss her, of course, your grandma. Even Lores there—’ he glanced at the nodding Mrs Casey ‘—sometimes asks “Where’s Iris gone? Is she having
another
bath?” she says, because, of course, your gran
liked to bathe so often, in the summer.’ The battered dentures showed in his smile, and Mrs Stanwick laughed creakily, like a cricket starting up.

‘Here we go,’ said Janine, bringing back noise and bustle with her as well as biscuits. Sarah followed, handing Finn one of the unbreakable Greenlawns cups and saucers. The two nurses went ceremoniously up and down the verandah, handing out biscuits and pouring tea and milk.

‘So what exactly are you doing here?’ Sarah asked, when they’d settled with their own tea in front of Finn.

‘Yes, I thought you were going to spend this year in the Big Smoke,’ chirped Janine.

‘I was.’ Finn had a sip of scalding tea. ‘But my dad decided he was fed up with living in the city. My mum found this property for him and Janet and Alex to live in—and me, of course, sometimes—outside of Lismore. It’s great, really big, a bit like this—you know, verandahs all round. They’re renting out our old place in Sydney. Now I get to go to the same school every year, which is good.’

‘Oh, you can pop in any time now, can’t you?’ said Janine. ‘Goody, you’ll be able to help us with our Easter celebrations again. You remember that beautiful bonnet Don made you last year, Mrs Stanwick?’

‘Oh
yes
, with the pink and white frangipanis. I was a real picture!’ She smiled charmingly at Finn.