Trucksong (9 page)

We roaded eastly coastwise towards a burnt out desert truckstop and I tried to get Sinnerman to slow so we could check for signs of brumby passing, but I realised with a shock I’d got no hold over the indie truck. It was feisty and it just wanted to keep going on. It didn’t even hardly feel the feeble tug I could manage on the linkmade patches. I shuffled files to see what I could get it to do. No dice, nothing. I felt a rise of panic, I didn’t realise it were gunna be like this to road with an indie. Getting to the truckstop suddenly seemed vital, if I was gunna prove my will over Sinnerman. I popped the hatch and made to jump. It was all I could do to show Sinnerman that I was serious, but it did at least start to slow as we come up to the truckstop. Though it wanted only one thing, to go after Storm. I didn’t know how to tell it that we’d need to collect signs to the roading along the way, that we’d have to stop from time to time to check the trail. I slotted another patch designed to cool it down and it snorted and blared its exhaust brakes to a stop just past the truckstop. Picking through the ruins, there were nothing much more than a burnt out shell, black pools of plastic melted hard into liquid shapes. Cables and cords hung down from the stripped out ceiling. In one corner all the furniture was piled and in the shadows of the shell it looked like some kind of sickened robo. Crunching on broken glass under me feet and through the wrecked kitchen to the workshop at back. There wasn’t nothing there neither, but in the mess left on the work bench was a geo grid patchfile and when I blinked it through the linkmaker I saw we were close to Midden Dump. That rung true, the Midden Dump had all the right tags and if my instincts were right, it would be a magnet for brumbies and other indie trucks.

Back in the cab, I felt the fear of what was left behind and the longing for Isa that laid ahead. Sinnerman was in the zone too, I cranked a new patch, something that I’d seen Smoov messing with and I felt a fluttering feeling in me guts and the truck moved underneath a shift and a squirt as it rolled along, travelling faster and faster. Opened the throat of the throttle, road hiss sucking sound from the air and the patch in the flow of haze from the IV. A shift in the note of the throbbing rush that beat through the link and inside the cab was its own little world, roading after Isa. I slumped into myself and the stars washed out and it all turned black and I slept safe like a babby in its Mum’s arm.

The highway to the Midden Dump was all choked with traffic. Trucks and mangled vans and clattering wrecks of barely moving vehicles and camels and horses and mules pulling carts made out of the rearends of cars. Skitters skated around and fed off a dead truckbody while a two leg droan stumped past on the track and flapples flew in the sky. Further on and two bigdog robos ate at a roadkilled roo. Blokes on horseback and blokes with guns and blokes with grinning faces in dresses and hats, and women with babbies and women with knifes in their teeth and women fire twirling, all heading to the place where all creatures went to gorge off the rotted carcass of the whole world. And somewhere in there in all that mess I was sure I’d find someone who could tell me where the Brumby King was at. Brumbies would be drawn to that place like moths into the show light. And maybe there we would find the road to Isa. Isa, like ice. Still, like a frozen river in the mountains when winter came. I saw it in a dream in Sinnerman’s truckcab, coming out of the darkness in the headlights. She was there or somewhere close, I knew it and I felt it in me bones.

It was a grey dawn and smoke blew in the wind. Traffic was thicker the closer we got. The heat cranked up, buzz of biz, only one road in and one road out. Trucks carted loads in and trucks carted loads out. There were trucks piled high with all the garbage brought from the bottom of the ruined camps and the corners of the gigacities and the data mines. It was all the stuff of the old times being rebirthed up into the new world through the movements of the trucking lanes and the arsehole of the earth. All the world’s garbage was drawn there by magical forces, and I wondered what the folks expected to do with that trash but even at the end of the world there was a market for everything. There were folks who made their whole lives out of garbage. Roadside thickened up with more and more shacks and hovels and then we rounded a turn and I saw in the distance the mountain that was Midden Dump. It were futher east than I’d ever been, though I’d heard many stories about it. Smoov’s show circuit never wound that far.

The traffic heavy, but it moved along and soon the mountain was all I could see of earth and sky, blocking out the morning sun. We were well and truly coming up on the centre of things, the shacks were more solid, there wasn’t no structures, no order nor nothing but still it was a city built of plastic and canvas and peopled with scavengers. The trucks dropped off their loads and turned around as people and machines crawled over each other to be the first at it. And it was being picked over by the crows and the packs of dogs and robos scrounging parts, trying their best to get by. And there were all kinds of people there too, showmans picking through all the bits, mining for data, and truck mechs lookin for secrets of the patch and there were just plain hungry folks searching for whatever they could find to eat. Eating off each other, eating off roadside weeds and cactusflower, eating off corpses, eating off dirt. Goanna cult on show, perengi march crossing the road, traffic frozen on all sides for the beast that was seven hands tall at the shoulder. It was painted with signs and sigils like a truck would be. It wasn’t shackled but jewelry hung around its neck on chains. Goannaman out front and white clad followers shuffling behind. The lizard rolled slow and easy not a quick skitter like out in the desert. That thing was a King and it knew it, too. The traffic still blocked, stopped dead. Sinnerman was antsy to be roading after its lost partner and the Brumby King but there was nothing it could do. There was no way through so I said, ‘I’m gunna go in on foot, see if there’s any word of those brumbies.’ Even though Sinnerman couldn’t understand a word.

I hitched Sinnerman through the link and it parked, chewing on a heavy narco patch I’d found, and I reckoned that would keep it quiet while I was out and about. I had a quick rush of feeling, hoping Sinner wasn’t gunna run before I got back because if the patch wore off too quick I had a feeling it would get on the way without me. But I swung on down anyway, into the crush and the swell of all those bodies. The smell hit, raw sweet, sour, the smell of death. The smell of bushsmoke and exhaust and fumes, smell of rotted flesh and spent fuel cells and bodies and cooking oil. Tang of piss and cloy of shit. It were all around. There was no easy way through so I clamped on me dustmask and I put myself right into it.

Right away I seen a bigdog robo feeding off a lizard carcass and folks walking like it was nothing new or wrong with a robo eating meat. Funeral smoke in the air, blokes carried bodies on their shoulders to the burning ground. Movement and sound, ashes flowed in the air like pieces of the sun’s burnt husk falling to earth in front of me eyes. Grinning head of a stoned showman pushing his cart through the muck. His eyes were gone far away and his hair a mass of dreads. Rusted steel machines on four legs, six legs, on tracks, on wing. Dirty and broken robos and black crows flapped nearby. Past a white shed, there were signs of an indie mob there, for sure. I could feel them in me bones. I could see it in the flash of light on steel body panel and through the space between piles of rubbish. Indie trucks, if not brumbies, and where there were indies there were sure to be brumbies not far off, because in the end they all needed the same things, patches and parts and panel work and coming together for a truck jam.

Before I came to the white shed though, I saw a bunch of grey faced folks sitting on their haunches picking dirt from besides a trash heap mound and rolling clumps of white clay into balls that they kept in woven plastic string bags. The dirt eaters’ lazy and hollow eyes followed me with no sight to be seen. One bloke was lying on the ground and next to him his missus dug up the clay from the earth. Dug up scoops of it and put them in his mouth. She moved his jaws up and down but he couldn’t swallow. They were men and women both, and now and then they put some clay into their mouth or the mouth of one of their kids while mangy dogs and busted robos hustled close to see, but those grey ghosts were the only ones who wanted the dirt. Even the animals were smart enough to know there was only suffering on that mound of clay. There was still some things that set humans apart from animals and machines and there was a cloud over those folks sleeping under blue tarps in the daylight and eating dirt that was just gunna kill them in the end. They were in some strange place in between, not living but not dead yet neither.

I was freaked out by the dirt eaters, they threw me off me game so I turned a little bit and took another pathway through the piles of rubbish where folks carted out loads and loads of copper wires from coils tore from the guts of machines and there was machines flappling around trying to get at the wires.

I said to one bloke, ‘Anywhere round here I could score some haze?’

I knew that if there was haze, there’d be indies and maybe even brumbies.

He looked at me and larfed, ‘Can’t you see? It’s all around. There’s no shortage of it here.’

That was all he would say but I caught the flash of his eyes towards the white shed I’d seen before. I made back for the shed even though I’d just turned around. It stood out like dog’s balls. It was now or never and as I came up to the inside of it, I saw a woman sitting down tending to the sick and wounded.

She was middle aged, and she had a sawed off shotgun on her knee but she was a healer I thought. No one would trouble her there, as long as she could do something for their needs. Which maybe she often couldn’t, hence the gun. She wore clothes that actually fit, khaki pants and a shirt with shoulder tabs, and she had on glasses and her gray hair cut short to the scalp. She sat at a table making notes on a piece of paper, it were uncommon to see someone writing. There weren’t many except for showmans who knew the ways of letters and signs. I was suddenly very curious about this woman.

Shuffling past the canvas door flap like I was a dump dweller, I found myself a spot where I could look and see but not be seen. There were bodies of dirt eaters on a slab inside the shed, their skin stretched over bone. I could hear her talking on the link in snatches: ‘…rotted faster than before,’ and then, ‘dead flesh is what the dump grows. There’ll be no shortage come harvest.’

From the inside, I could see there were med supplies everywhere. That woman was a camp doctor for sure, and not like the medicine folk that healed Isa’s snakebite. She knowed something of the old times healing powers. I found me balls and walked right through the door and up to her table.

‘You’ve got writin tools?’ I asked.

She looked at me through her specs, real quiet and long. Like she saw me for what I was and it weren’t a nice feeling.

‘What of it?’

‘Well I’m real interested in writing. I been shown the basics of sounding words and letterin sentences. I’m writin down me own trancecrypts with this typewriter.’

I put up the HERMES up on the bench and she took a good look at it. Her whole face softened as she touched it, she suddenly opened up to talking to me.

‘I’ve not seen one of these for a long time.’

‘I use it to do me writin.’

The doctor looked closer at the pages snapped into the top of the case. She said, ‘Maybe we’re talkin about different kinds of writin.’

‘What kinds is there?’

‘There’s the kind that tracks the comin and goin of stocks. That’s what I do.’

‘Well that’s not so different really. I track me memories. Words once written down can’t be changed like a memory will change.’

‘True enough.’ She picked at one of the keys and cranked a new line with the handle.

Another thought come to me and I said, ‘Them words is tricky, but. They don’t always act like I want em to and sometimes I reckon they hide the truth harder than if I’d not wrote em.’

‘Written words’re stuck in time and if you don’t know the questions to ask em, all you’ll hear back is your own thoughts,’ she said.

I leaned over to look at the writing she was doing in her ledger what were bound in leather with ragged edges and the paper was smooth and creamy. She closed it so I couldn’t see what was worded there.

‘Keepin all the columns straight means I can tell where I’m with my biz.’ Her eyes sharpened then. ‘I bet that typewriter is good for keeping figgers in columns.’

I put the case back over the top of the HERMES. ‘I dunno.’

‘What do you want for it?’

I saw a opening then to find out more about brumby trucks.

I said, ‘It don’t seem right, this business of yours what you’re trackin with columns and figgers.’

Her face darkened and I knew I hit a spot.

‘Waddya know of my business? You’re just a rider from the backroads.’

‘Them dirteaters is the poorest of the poor and you’re sellin their bodies to brumby trucks. They got nothin, they’re eatin dirt.’

‘Give me the typewriter and I’ll tell you.’

‘Tell me something I can use.’

‘The white clay the dirteaters chew gives em some benefits but they die if they don’t eat proper food. Their bodies don’t rot because the clay has minerals that keep em from decomposing for a time. The brumbies take them and give me custom meds they can make in their synthfacs. I use them to treat the sick.’

‘The dirt eaters are sick. Shouldn’t you be healin em before they die?’

‘There’s nothin I can do for someone who won’t help emself.’

‘But you’re helpin brumby trucks that don’t care what they kill or steal to get what they want.’

She scoffed then. ‘You’re no better than they are in this world, rider, preyin on anyone weaker than yourself. Even with your typewriter and all your pretty lettered words, you’re still just scavengin a life out of the road.’

That gave me a little pause. I said, ‘Orright, you’ve told me a story. I’ll give you this typewriter, but I need one more thing. I’m trackin down brumby trucks to find me sister, Isa. I gotta find her if I’m gonna find any peace in this life.’