The Worm King (47 page)

By the reading of the skid marks, Lord Brown
was of the opinion there must’ve been two explosions: the detonation in the
cab, then the truck rolled and the rest of it went up. The second explosion
blew the back panel of the main tank completely away: ladder, handrail and all.

‘How are we going to get them off?’ said
Winston.

‘What about that knife?’ suggested the Hat,
pointing at the large pocketknife laying on the left side of the Captain’s torso. 
His tunic had burnt off and the knife obviously dropped out.

‘We can’t do that,’ said Wiremu. ‘We’ll
leave it on. Bury them with it, together.’

The four men stood silently around the two
bodies laying in the middle of the road, handcuffed to the handrail. Wisps of
smoke curled from the remains of the girl’s charred coat and hair. The Hat
turned off his torch; the light from the burning truck showed them more than
they needed.

‘What would’ve done it?’ Winston shuffled
his feet. ‘In the end, I mean.’

‘Concussion, I expect,’ said Wiremu. ‘They’re
not burnt real bad, must’ve got blown right out of the fire.’

They waited an hour for the wreckage to stop
burning and cool enough to retrieve bodies three and four. Much of that time was
spent debating the actual point of recovering Dick and Bob’s stinking corpses,
however Lord Brown was adamant. Winston thought it a waste of time. Henry
waited in his Hillman and didn’t seem too heartbroken that his employer had met
his maker.

The flames in the cab took longer to die
down than those at the rear of the truck. It came to rest on its side, driver’s
door up. They could plainly make out one body, roughly where the passenger seat
used to be, and Wiremu piled dirt around to cool hotspots then used the edge of
his spade to hook the carcass out. Definitely Snow. Those Rolexes stay on
through hell or high water.

They chucked more dirt around. Was that him?
No.

No Bob.

‘Oh dear,’ said Lord Brown.

No sign of him at all.

Wiremu eventually crawled right into the cab.
His torch searched every corner of the smoky shell. ‘Yeah, I can see it,’ he
called. ‘The plastics burnt off but you can see the buckle is in on Snow’s
side, but not on the driver’s side.’ His beam worked overhead, probing. ‘Ouch! Can
you pass me a rag or something? I want to check this door.’ Lord Brown undid
his scarf and passed it through. A few seconds later came a harsh, grinding
wrench and a bang as the driver’s door was pushed up, then dropped.

Wiremu emerged, rubbing a hand across his
eyes. ‘He didn’t have his seatbelt on. The roll must’ve thrown him out.’

They searched the area where Bob might’ve
landed for thirty minutes, but found no trace. Either he fell back into the
fire and got completely incinerated, or crawled off somewhere to die from the
effects of the explosion.

Still, they didn’t fancy hanging around. The
Hat suggested leaving.

‘We have to bury him.’ Lord Brown jerked his
thumb towards the scorched remains of the Channel Six weatherman.

‘Why?’ growled Winston.

‘It’s what civilized people do.’

So they buried Snow in a shallow, unmarked
grave beside the road, each kicking a scatter of gravel over top until the site
became practically invisible. Wiremu and Henry were fetching the car so missed
the short eulogy:

‘What a cunt,’ said Winston.

‘That’s that,’ said the Hat.

Lord Brown farted loudly and the three
walked away.

They picked up the bodies and drove them
back to Yass in the Hillman, burying them along with the handrail in a plot beside
others killed at the truck depot a week earlier. A brief discussion was held on
whether to take the girl’s body back to Big Yass Furniture so her sister could
say goodbye, however Wiremu ruled this out.

The Hat, Wiremu and Henry dug the hole, each
taking ten-minute turns with the spade in the hard earth. Lord Brown and
Winston watched silently from the lip, the lantern on the ground between them.

Winston had liked the Captain. When the pit
was deep and long enough, he jumped in. The Hat got in at the other end. Wiremu
and Henry passed Captain Forsyth down, then the handrail, then the girl. Winston
arranged the metal pole between the two bodies as best he could. It looked like
a lance, which they both held hands on. The Hat climbed from the hole. Winston
could barely see out the top, and it occurred to him it was a tremendously sad
place to end up. Forever. He reached up to scramble out, when he noticed
something peculiar. It hadn’t caught his eye before: one of the Captain’s fists
was clenched much tighter than the other. It didn’t really stick out against
the rest of his mangled, broken frame.

Winston crouched on one knee and lifted the
hand, then gently attempted to lever the fingers open. It was harder than he’d
expected. Whatever the Captain held, right at that minute he died, might be
important. His flesh protected it from the worst of the blaze.

No, it was nothing. Just an old silver
button, indented with a lucky four-leaf clover.

Chapter Forty-Seven

Spoils

L
ord Brown had formulated a theory that fish might inherit the Earth.

Thirty hours had passed since the tragedy of
the fuel truck. A grayish, insipid light appeared in the sky again today but Winston
didn’t think it had the intensity of the previous days momentary burst of near-sunlight.
Wiremu lit a fire on the main street, in front of Big Yass Furniture, using shelves
and a wall ripped from an abandoned milk bar up the street. Jerry’s bus, the
Hillman and Snow’s Falcon were loaded up with everyone’s worldly possessions,
ready to go and parked where they could all see them.

The atmosphere was sombre.

Astrid intended taking a bunch of folks back
to her parent’s teashop in Griffith. Jerry and Ken had changed their minds
about Katoomba, mainly because they didn’t have enough diesel, so would go
straight back to Griffith and try and negotiate for the fuel the council promised
them. Āmiria and her father and his men would go too, along with Murray, Sgt
Kevin, Tim, Zelda, David, and the remaining twin.

Francesco intended heading in the opposite
direction, south on the Barton highway and back to the Hyatt in Canberra. Winston,
the Hat and Lord Brown would travel with him as “backup”. And to see what Snow
had left laying around. He wouldn’t be needing it now.

Henry agreed to take them, and Winston and
Francesco already had a good idea of the layout of the hotel. Then Francesco
planned to visit the army barracks at Duntroon, and pass on the news about
Captain Forsyth, and Dick Snow. After this they’d all return to Griffith,
hopefully in less than a week.

‘Fish?’ Āmiria said to Lord Brown. It
was the first spark of interest she’d shown in anything since the explosion, for
which she felt responsibility. The dog sat beside her scratching its own rump.

‘Many species of mammal will have vanished
in the global carnage but fish are designed to withstand overcast conditions
considerably better, and will be the first to recover, so I must go fishing
henceforth with Nathan, on the Murrumbidgee. In order to do this, we have to
complete one final task and undertake a full reconnaissance of the Hyatt. The
hotel reputedly has one of the best wine cellars in the southern hemisphere,’
he added quietly, as though this explained everything.

Astrid frowned. ‘So you mean you’re going to
loot it?’

‘I’ve also been informed . . . ’
he glanced around suspiciously, about to share some great secret, ‘that the
Hyatt may have the last, existing, global supply of prawn cutlets.’

The Hat raised his hands, waggling fingers. ‘All
praise to the cutlet!’

Astrid ignored the Hat. ‘So you’re going to
loot the place, grab all the booze and food you can lay your hands on, and then
go on a fishing trip?’ She could see straight through his flimsy web of
science.

‘With your father. That’s correct. My
understanding from Nathan, when you were kind enough to have us there last
time, was that fishing is apparently always best at dawn, and now that we have this
dawn appearing after such an incredibly prolonged darkness, the fishing could potentially
be—according to Nathan—at its best in more than ten thousand years. Nathan did mention
he was happy to take us . . . and if we were to gather the
sustenance first . . . ? And for everyone at the cafe too,
obviously. With your permission, of course.’

He was smooth, you had to give him that.

‘Well!’ She thought about it for a minute. ‘Fine
then.’

On the basis of the fishing theory, the Hat
resolved to form a pirate band roving the countryside in a bus, doing deeds,
drinking, and occasionally fishing.

‘Solving mysteries?’ asked Winston. Astrid
smiled. It was the first he’d seen on her face in a good while, and he liked
it.

The truth was they’d run out of grog and
Henry told them there’d been rumors of substantial stores at the Hyatt.

Āmiria said she wanted to go looting
too, but her father wouldn’t have a bar of it. At Griffith he’d been promised a
house, as much work as they could take on and access to emergency food held by
the council.

‘What about Bob?’ Winston asked, when the
idea of Hyatt Mission II was mooted.

‘The minions of Snow will scatter,’ Lord
Brown predicted confidently. He’d spent more than an hour speaking alone with
Henry, about recent developments at the hotel.

‘Bob was the ultimate minion and you might
think it’s bad he survived, if indeed he did, which he probably didn’t, but
it’s not.’

Few looked convinced, and the rest didn’t understand,
so Lord Brown continued. ‘Leaving Bob alive means he’ll be drawn to any other . . . scum,
I suppose you’d call it, that happens to float to the top. He’ll be the easiest
man to pick out in a crowd on the planet. Harelip, one eye, nose missing and
possibly severe burns and shrapnel holes. And a lisp.’

‘Bad acne scarring,’ said Astrid.

‘Personality wasn’t up to much either,’ added
Winston.

‘No,’ said Lord Brown, ‘we shouldn’t feel in
the slightest beaten.’ He stared from person to person, then at Āmiria in
particular. ‘A great evil has been choked off. We’ve killed the head of the
beast and the rest of the animal will scatter. They’ll scatter, leaving the
spoils.’

Spoils. That was a word Winston could relate
to.

S-P-O-I-L-S.
He
uttered it slowly; more to himself than anything, to see how it rolled out but the
others easily heard his throaty chuckle.

Travelling the land. Gathering the spoils.

‘Sweet,’ said the Hat. He liked spoils too.

If spoils ran aplenty, life was always good.

Winston wondered, more generally, what his
new found career of Pirate entitled him to. Might it resurrect his chance of a
shag with Astrid?

Or at the very least, a piratey head-job!

.
Pink

Chapter Forty-Eight

Growth

T
en years later

The doctor said goodbye to Natasha and left,
the edge of his fawn parka swishing out a fraction of a second before the front
door clicked shut. Three months! That seemed such a short time.

She went through to the lounge and over to
the ranch slider door then stood before the glass. At the bottom of the garden
a young girl chased a dog with ridiculously long, floppy ears. They ran round
and round an old stump entwined with flowering purple and white Convolvulus. A
ring of daisies was planted at the base of the stump. A much older dog sat in
the shade of a low hedge of Grevillea, watching the pair with his tongue
dangling out.

The doctor wobbled down the drive on his
bike, slowly, so he didn’t skid on the gravel which was easy to do if you
weren’t careful.

‘Bye!’ called the girl, waving as she ran. The
young dog yapped excitedly while the older one merely withdrew his tongue, and
watched the visitor depart.

‘See you!’ He prudently kept both hands on the
bars.

Was it only an afternoon house call to him? A
thirty minute ride out of Griffith? No, he knew the family better than that and
it was kind of him to come. So what now? Why tell anyone else, and upset them
unduly. At least for a while anyway. She had an unexplained urge to tell one other
person, and knew without even thinking who it must be. An alarm went off in the
kitchen, one of those ancient plastic windup types they used to make in China which
switch themselves off in five seconds, so she didn’t bother turning around. The
shrill jingle advised the kibbled wheat had been soaking for an hour and was
ready to be kneaded into dough but another ten minutes wouldn’t hurt.

The butter! She still hadn’t taken the cream
off the top of the milk and churned it. Her first attempt at making pastry, and
the recipe was proving more complicated than expected. A decent-sized pot of
mutton, orange and rosemary concoction already sat on the stove prepared and set
to be stuffed into the pastry once it eventuated, so if all else failed she
could just hoof the mutton on a plate and call it a stew. The recipe for flaky
pastry required a teaspoon of lemon juice, which she’d failed to procure. Hopefully
this wasn’t too critical.

She slid the window open. ‘Jenny! Can you
come inside soon, it’s nearly time to wash up for dinner.’

‘Yes mummy!’

Three months.

She turned and walked to the desk in the
corner of the lounge and sat. From here you had the best view over the garden
of the whole house. The old wooden desk had four vertical drawers, with the
bottom one always fiddly to open. Despite tugging several times, it kept
catching and refused to budge. Just as she was about to go hunt for a
screwdriver in the garage, and attempt to lever it open, the drawer
miraculously untangled itself and flew out with such a jerk it almost shot off
its railing. Peculiar how often that happened—she’d concentrate super hard on
this or that, and it’d generally come about, but never exactly in the way she’d
expected. The only item in the drawer was an old school exercise book: black
and red stripped and so tatty it looked like it’d been through the washing. Natasha
pulled it out, laid it on the desk and picked up a pencil:

WEATHER
BADGE DIARY

Ten years have whizzed past in a flash,
and I still think of you every, single day. What can you say to a sister who
gives her life for you? That there’s a great big cumulus up there? That it’s
raining or sunny and the humidity today is up, and down
 . . . 
and why did you get on that truck!? The
Brigadier told us! Oh Krystal, you didn’t need to.

But you did.

Three months, they tell me. There’s a growth
in my chest and it means
 . . . 
well
it means I have a lot to do. The old man is coming to dinner tonight and he’s
taught Jenny to count to a thousand, backwards. He speaks of you often and says
you changed the course of humanity. Last month, when Jenny turned five, he took
us to where you are now and told me about the handrail, which I hadn’t known.

I hope you liked the flowers we left;
Jenny planted them herself. Next year she is going to try and grow you a tulip.

In the end,
you can’t say anything, only thank you—

‘Mummy?’

‘Yes dear?’

‘Winny just poohed on the good rug. I told
him not to, but he did anyway! What shall I do?’

‘That’s alright darling, I’ll clean it up.’

Natasha put down the pencil then rose to go
fetch a rag and bucket of water. On passing the big ranch window, she stopped,
and watched as the glowing sunset unfolded draping vivid, golden rays across
the gentle hills behind their house. Iridescent beams of pink danced lightly,
twinkling along the tops of eucalyptus and she realized it was the most
beautiful color she’d ever seen.