The Worm King (28 page)

‘So you don’t believe in God then? asked Zelda,
dismayed.

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Oh, you do have a soul! There is hope for
you.’

‘No. There is no hope for me, and there’s no
such thing as a soul either.’

‘You can’t say that for sure? I know I’ve
got one!’

‘As soon as you show it to me, I’ll review
the situation, I assure you.’ Lord Brown paused, looking at her expectantly. ‘No?
No soul today? Well, all right.’

‘Just because I can’t pull it out and show
you in ten seconds, doesn’t mean it’s not there! That’d be crazy: you can’t
discover a person’s soul that quick. It takes time. And . . . love.’

Āmiria snorted. ‘Spew bucket!’

‘Discover?’ retorted Lord Brown. ‘You’ve hit
the nail on the head. That’s just the problem: it still hasn’t been discovered.
After 2400 years of rigorous empirical testing: nothing. Zip.’

‘James Brown discovered soul didn’t he?’ chimed
the Hat. ‘I mean, get dowwwwn Slick. Jive time!’ He made a wavy motion with flattened
hands, one in front and one pointed out behind, raising his chin like a chimp.

‘Tool,’ said Āmiria.

He stopped. ‘What did you say?’

‘Ahhhh . . . cool. James
Brown, he’s really cool.’ She wondered who James Brown was. Some old black
piano player from way back before they even invented phones, if she recalled. ‘So
James Brown discovered souls then?’ Out loud, it didn’t sound so plausible.

Lord Brown smiled at her. ‘Plato invented the
idea of the soul, in 400BC. But the road Plato went down, investigating the
soul, and spiritual consciousness, has turned out to be a complete failure. What
we know today, about the soul, hasn’t progressed one iota since Plato’s day. The
best comparison you can make is with Aristotle, who was born at virtually the
same time as Plato, in 384BC. He was actually a student of Plato’s, attending
the same university. Well, I suppose you’d call it a university and it was like
the ones we have today, except only men and they spent most of the day
wandering around drinking wine in the nude, but more-or-less similar. Anyway,
Aristotle went down the science road, developing mathematics and biology and
physics. Think how far these fields have progressed? But the soul? It’s been a
failure! Not one shred of evidence. There is no such thing.’

‘If we have no soul, then we’re just a . . . just
a bag of guts and bones!’ exclaimed Zelda. ‘Do you think that’s all we are?’

‘You’re closer than you realize. Bag of guts
and bones? Yes, that’s very close. The latest theory on the makeup of the
individual says we are each a distinctive chemical soup. Every person is merely
a chemical soup which reacts to external stimuli.’

‘I like guts and bones better,’ declared Āmiria.
She reached between Hemi and Geoff, and picked up the bible.

‘Mason!’
whispered
Geoff urgently. She looked up and he was not ten meters distant, coming straight
at her. The Hat and Lord Brown faced the wrong way and were yet to spot him. Āmiria
darted her spare hand forward and grabbed the magazine, which had been lying
under the bible, then placed it on top of the book. She opened the magazine so
the Bible was totally hidden from view.

‘Has anyone seen my Bible,’ demanded the
Mason. ‘I believe it was . . . ’

He stared down at Āmiria’s reading
material. ‘Sweet Jesus! Are you
allowed
to look at that?’

‘I . . . well . . . ’
Her father appeared, giving the faintest of nods as he sat down next to Lord
Brown. Suddenly she felt more confident. ‘Well sure, dad lets me.’

The Mason looked disbelievingly at her
father who shrugged, disinterested.

The double-page, glossy spread showed a
blonde lady with enormous jumblies and a vibrator. It was the first time Āmiria
had actually seen a real one. She’d heard a couple of the skankier girls at school
talking about vibrators, especially over the last year, but never seen one in
action. She never realized they were that big, and couldn’t see the slightest appeal
in jamming
that
into your privates.

‘Oh my!’ The Hat gazed over her shoulder. ‘I
see she’s using a Glenn and Jennings 500.’ He seemed impressed. ‘Normally you
need an external diesel generator to drive one of those.’ The Mason coughed in
disgust, like he was trying to work out a fur ball. ‘Can’t see a power cable
though?’ The Hat peered closer at the photo. ‘She must have it on hand-crank? Wow,
she’ll never walk in a straight line again, after half an hour on that beast!’

‘Yeah!’ hooted Āmiria, and laughed a
bit madly although not sure exactly what she’d agreed with. The Mason clearly
hadn’t got the message because he still stood there, mouth open. She punched
the air with her fist. ‘Whoa! Hand-crank! Choice!’

‘You shouldn’t be reading that at your age.’

‘I’ve got some crayons, sometimes I color
the fuckin pictures in.’

The Mason looked like he’d been slapped. Even
her father frowned, and she knew she’d pushed it one step too far. The Mason
began backing away, then stopped. ‘Are either of you named John?’ he asked
Geoff and Hemi.

Both shook their heads.

‘What about you,’ he asked the Hat,
suspiciously.

‘Hat.’

‘What?’

‘Hat. It’s Welsh.’

‘I don’t know . . . ’ The
Mason scowled in frustration. ‘And no one here’s seen my Bible?’ He gave the
Hat another piercing stare, while everyone else found something different to
look at. ‘Right then.’

Āmiria casually turned the page, hoping
he’d left but not wanting to look up and draw his attention. The blonde lady was
on all fours this time, smirking back into the camera, and appeared to have somehow
got the vibrator stuck in her bottom. It looked bloody painful, so she quickly
flicked to the next page, thankfully an article called Forum, and pretended to
read that.

‘Hey!’ The Mason
still
hadn’t gone. She
looked up and he pointed straight at her. ‘We need someone to clean out the changing
room loo.’ He gestured in the direction of the toilet at the end of the gym. ‘If
you’ve got time to be reading that muck, you can clean out the loo, if you
don’t mind!’

‘They aren’t even supposed be used, are
they? Āmiria exclaimed, appalled. ‘It’s not my job!’

‘Well someone’s used ‘em. Must’ve snuck in
when it was too cold and wet to go outside.’

‘Which is fairly well all the time,’ added the
Hat unhelpfully.

The Mason put his hands in his pockets and stared
at her father, daring him to disagree, but he just shrugged again and turned
away.

After the Mason left, all he said was, ‘I don’t
want to hear you using the F-word like that again, my girl. Now get back and
get some sleep.’

The cadets returned shortly after breakfast,
having spent an uncomfortable few hours attempting to sleep in the partially-constructed
shelter they’d been working on. Her father spotted them right away, and as soon
as they’d sat down, he got up, holding the rucksack. She’d been trying to keep
an extremely low profile in case the prospect of cleaning the bog came up
again. Thankfully it hadn’t. He wagged his finger at her: c
ome with me
. Tamati
also rose, following without smiling or even glancing her way, which Āmiria
thought might be a bad sign because Tamati usually smiled a lot.

The cadet who’d traded the grenades looked
apprehensive as they approached. Her father stopped short, turning momentarily.
‘Which one was it?’

‘The one with blonde hair. His name’s Daniel
but the others didn’t say their names.’ He grunted and continued. The second
cadet looked more scared than Daniel, while the third had his head in his hands
and failed to respond to their arrival. They didn’t get up and her father dropped
to a crouch directly in front of them, plonking the rucksack on the floor
between himself and the cadets. Tamati sat alongside in the narrow pathway
between beds so Āmiria did the same.

Daniel stammered, ‘Gidday mate, we were—’

‘Don’t you bloody “mate” me. What did you
think you were doing? I’ve got a good mind to take you outside and give you a
bloody good hiding!’

‘I told you we shouldn’t!’ whined the second
cadet.

‘Where did you get them from?’ Wiremu
Ruarangi’s right fist curled into a ball. The muscles on the side of his face tightened,
and his teeth were clenched like he was ready to strike at any second.

Daniel held up his palms defensively and
leant back as far as he could. The people billeted around realized trouble was
brewing, and shuffled back too. ‘Look, sorry mate! We were at the RAAF training
base. It’s on the outskirts of Tamworth. We’d hardly had anything to eat for a
couple of days and that bloke up there told us we’d probably miss dinner too
because we had to go out and fix some . . . building or
shit, so she was a godsend, really. Is she . . . your daughter?’
Daniel lowered his hands.

Her father nodded. ‘How’d you get them?’ His
fist uncurled and he reached forward, put a hand in the rucksack and picked one
up but didn’t take it out, keeping his gaze on the cadets who watched the arm
in the bag nervously.

‘We didn’t want to carry the damn things around
anyway,’ said Daniel. He must’ve immediately realized that wasn’t the right
angle, and tried to change tack. ‘That’s all that was left, at the camp, and
they were only still there ‘cos they’d rolled behind some other boxes. I dunno
who it was, but they come in and took everything.’

‘Who did?’

‘Couldn’t tell. There was a lot of them; not
much we could do.’ Daniel’s eyes darted back and forth guiltily.

‘Yeah?’

The second cadet confessed. ‘We hid in the
barracks. All the other blokes just naffed off. Then we come out.’

‘How do they work?’ Wiremu pulled down the
opening of the rucksack with his left hand until the grenade cradled in his right
palm was just visible. When Āmiria had picked one up earlier, she’d
guessed it to be maybe twice the weight of a cricket ball. They were sort of
mango-shaped, but more symmetrical, and olive-green with squarish dimples
except for a mustardy-yellow band around the top. Down the side was a flat
metal lever, and clipped into the top of this, a metal ring. Each of the grenades
had a piece of insulation tape wound around a couple of times which Daniel told
her they’d put on themselves to hold the lever down, “just in case.”

‘They drummed it into us at training, so . . . yes,
we know how they work,’ replied Daniel, with far less confidence than when he’d
been trying to flog them for food yesterday. ‘Each one has about two
tablespoons of explosive, they told us, and four thousand tiny steel balls. The
balls are 2.4 mm in diameter, about the size of a shotgun pellet. The lethal
radius is six meters and the safety radius is thirty meters. The important
thing is the five-second delay. Once you pull that ring, which allows the lever
to flick off, you’ve got exactly five seconds to get at least thirty meters
away. Five seconds. It seems long now, but when you’ve pulled that pin, it
seems much less long.’

‘So you’ve used one then?’

‘Kind of. They let us try a practice grenade
this year. The practice ones weigh the same, but they’re a different color, and
don’t have the shrapnel. It was excellent.’

Her father grunted, and nodded. For a while
he didn’t say anything, just held the grenade in his palm, staring at it. ‘What’d
she give you for them again?’

‘Two cans of lentils in brine, a sachet of
instant chicken gravy and a one kilo bag of self raising flour. We mixed it all
up together. Pete ate the most.’ Daniel gestured at the third cadet who still
had his head between his knees, and hadn’t spoken a word since they’d sat down.
He looked sick as.

Tamati nudged her father and pointed at the
door. The Mason was heading slowly in their direction, with another fūlla,
stopping to refill lanterns along the way.

‘Bugger. They must need us now.’ The Mason
had earlier asked for volunteers to help fix up walls in a shelter. It used to
be a small supermarket, a few blocks from the gym, although Āmiria hadn’t been
there. Her father had surprisingly agreed, and afterwards told Tamati and Geoff
that it’d be handy to get outside anyway, and assess conditions if they were
thinking of shooting through soon. Besides, he’d said, a couple of hours yakka
for a feed and bed for the night is probably about right, and the others seemed
satisfied with this. Āmiria suspected he also put his hand up because he
was a builder, and hardly anyone else in this dump even knew which end of a
hammer to hold.

He tightened the top of the rucksack and bounced
to his feet, swinging the bag lightly so it banged against his leg with a dull
clunk.
Daniel and the second cadet cringed, but Pete didn’t stir. ‘Well,
good luck with all that then,’ he told the trio.

While weaving their way back, Āmiria
heard him say to Tamati, ‘She didn’t get a bad deal though, did she?’ When they’d
sat down he put a woollen jersey over the rucksack and gave her a deadly serious
look. ‘Now you keep a good eye on this, girl.’

‘You blokes ready?’ the Mason called,
strolling over. ‘Come on, chop-chop. I know, no one wants to go, but we’ll try
and sling you some extra tucker while you’re over there or at least when you
get back. Take your water bottles too, if you’ve got them.’ In less than a
minute her father, Geoff, Hemi, Rangi and the Hat had gone. Tamati remained
behind.