Draw the Brisbane Line (17 page)

‘Explain,’ Dave said.  ‘Now.  Just … what …
what the fuck?
’

‘He pulled a gun,’ Papetti said in a cold monotone.  She could keep her voice steady, but the bloodless grey of her face betrayed her.  ‘What’s to explain?  He pulled a gun so I shot him.’

Caution seemed a quaint custom as the Humvee carried them down the highway at a hundred and fifty kilometres an hour.  The static traffic on the southbound side was a multi-coloured train of defeat — more people were outside of their cars than in.  The frequency of drivers chancing their hand at going south on the northbound side was increasing.  Papetti let the mini-tank drift to the left as a bright green boy-racer flashed past them.  They’d been driving like that for close to ten minutes before Dave had dared to speak.  Before he’d been
able
to speak

‘But why did he pull a gun?’ Dave said.  ‘Why?’

‘It doesn’t matter why.  How should I know why?  He pulled it, that’s all I can tell you.  He pulled a gun so I shot him, period.  You know, some people might actually be grateful for having their life saved.  Some people might even say
thank
you
.’

Dave reached across and squeezed her shoulder.  It was like squeezing a tightly-packed sack of rocks, vibrating at a high frequency.  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

She gave him an expressionless glance and he took his hand away.  She twitched.

‘We need to get off the highway at the next exit,’ she said.  ‘Ditch the tank, get a civilian car.’

‘Why?’ Dave said.  ‘I feel safe in this thing.  Well, safer than I would in a hatchback if one of those psycho drivers drifts too close.’

Papetti shook her head.  ‘The incident has forced a change of plan.  We’re going to be all over the news, and there will be a lot of people looking for us.’

‘Cops?’

‘Sure, cops.  Media.  Also the QTA.’

‘We should be worried about the QTA?  They’re just a fringe political party.’

‘You know them as a fringe political party, because your what, your frame of reference?  Is your brother’s.’

Dave nodded to himself.  It was true.  If it wasn’t for Tom’s derisive comments like
the sheep-shagging candidate for Mackay
or
the Prime Minister of North Cowshit
, Dave wouldn’t have
any
frame of reference.  ‘So how else should I think of them?’

‘Paranoid bush militia.  All the doom-mongering about Australia being invaded and overrun by Indonesia, by China, by anyone?  QTA.  The conspiracy theories about the US wanting to take over the country?  QTA.  Those are like the two core tenets of their nut-job bible.  Your brother warned me about them.’

‘Oh come on.  Are you seriously worried about a local bush militia?  You, a soldier in the US Army, are worried about a handful of over-excited farmers with rifles?’

‘Double-fault, Sportacus.’

A shiver ran down his spine when she called him
Sportacus
.  And not just
Sportacus
, but
double-fault, Sportacus
.  That’s exactly the phrase Tom liked to use whenever he was about to highlight just how wrong Dave was about something.

‘Estimates put the QTA’s membership at over six thousand, and those are the active members.  There’s probably double that in passive members.  And rifles?  Yes, they have rifles.  Automatic, sniper, large bore, carbine … just about any kind of rifle you care to name, they have it in multiples.  Also pistols, shotguns, grenades, even Claymores.’

‘Jesus Christ.  How?  What happened to gun control?’

She shrugged.  ‘It’s a big country, lotta places to hide things.’

‘Do you really think six thousand men spread across that area are really a concern for the combined Australian and US military?  Even if they are heavily armed?’

Papetti shook her head.  ‘It’s not that.  It’s their political ambitions.  They want control.  That’s the stage they’re gonna fight us on.  And I just shot one of them in the head.’

‘The roundabout’s coming up.  We want to take a left.’

She drifted to the left lane as they moved past the still-burning wreck of strange car with two rear-ends, one white and one gold.

‘You think there were any survivors?’ Dave said.

‘Only if they were locked in the trunk,’ Papetti said.  ‘And even then …’

More people were out of their cars on the southbound side taking pictures and video with their phones and their tablets.  A few had actual cameras.  Papetti dropped their speed as they approached the roundabout and turned off left onto the New England Highway.  It was a calculated gamble, taking the inland route, with only two lanes running in each direction.  And it seemed to possess just as much of a southbound jam as the Pacific.  It was Dave’s suggestion.  He was familiar enough with the random choke-points on the Pacific Highway to know that though longer, the New England was likely to be quicker.  And then there was the matter of residents fleeing from the fires and fighting in south-east Queensland.  A fair proportion of them would be travelling the coastal route because the road was wider, and it’s what they knew.

And the New England was the route he told Jenny to take if she wanted a longer drive with less traffic.  Sometimes she listened to him.

Nero glared at his scratched Casio G-Shock as though it were somehow to blame for the delay.  He’d lost nearly an hour since the big rig coughed out its last diesel wheeze and left him stranded.  He tried to slow a few cars heading south on his side of the highway, but the only response they made upon seeing him was to accelerate.  Aiming the shotgun at a couple of them, experimentally, caused them to both accelerate
and
swerve erratically as the drivers ducked below the dashboard.  One of them passed close enough to bump the carry-all from Nero’s shoulder as he turned away from the madly slewing vehicle.  Dying like that would probably earn him a Darwin award, so he kept the gun in the bag.

He brought the weapon back out to breathe when he reached a break in the crash barrier, a narrow crossing lane between the two sides of the highway.  A few cars made the switch to the wrong side of the road as he watched, and when a big black Ford ute grew tired of the traffic snarl and turned onto the crossing lane, Nero stopped it with the shotgun.  The man driving it was big, a deeply-tanned site worker still in his orange hi-vis vest.  His hands almost entirely enfolded the steering wheel, and he was clearly unsure whether he should keep on driving or pay heed to the bandit; Nero helped clarify his thought processes by driving the butt of the gun into the window mere inches from the man’s face.  He was still picking and brushing crumbs of safety glass from his clothes as Nero drove away from him in the black ute, towards Brisbane through the steadily-thickening traffic of the wrong-way highway.

Time was not on his side.  It wouldn’t take the mutineers long to get to his bolt-hole in Brisbane, and to Lily.  He hoped they’d stay on the right side of the highway, content to weave through the unmoving traffic, believing there was no real rush.  He hoped that if they did get there before him, that Lily would be able to keep them out of the apartment, or that she’d get out before they got to her.  He’d tried calling her before he left Moranbah, but he couldn’t even get through to voicemail.

After his experience with the semi, he kept one dry eyeball on the fuel gauge, which was steadily dipping down towards empty.  Goddammit, why couldn’t he have jacked a hybrid?  He needed to go fast, but speeding in the ute burned through the fuel.  He had to pick a bloody V8 big-boy car.  He could feel the petrol emptying out of the bastard thing with every metre of road it ate, and he realised that if he ran out of fuel again and had to repeat the whole car-jacking exercise, that would be more time added to the gap between where he was and where he needed to be.  There was less than quarter of a tank showing on the gauge, and that last quarter usually drained away faster than his longest slash.

A couple of cars ahead of him, a white Subaru four-wheel-drive and an old black Saab touched their brake-lights and drifted to the right lane.  He soon saw why: a BP service station up ahead glowed in the twilight like a neon green aircraft hangar.  The forecourt heaved with cars of all sizes, many of them spilling out onto the highway shoulder as they waited for their improbable turn at the pump.  Nero pulled into the queue, behind the Saab, and stepped out of the ute.  He lifted out the carry-all and slung it over his shoulder before closing the door.  The weight in the bag bounced against his back as his boots crunched over loose gravel.  He appraised the cars as he made his way towards the pumps: BMW X8, too thirsty; early model Nissan convertible, too unreliable; Hyundai people-mover, just …
no
; Honda eco-hybrid, fuel-efficient, but a top speed of eighty just wasn’t going to cut it.  He scored each car he passed, giving it marks out of ten for speed, economy, and reliability.  Then he took an average of the three.  A Mercedes AMG caught his eye for a moment, but then he thought about fuel economy again.  There weren’t many cars which would give him what he was looking for him, but he’d take the best of what he could find.

The advertised petrol prices were almost double what they should have been, but that didn’t take even a small bite out of the queues.  If you’re going to sell life preservers, his father once said to him, find men half-drowned.  Sound advice, even coming from an alcoholic.  And here they were all around him, scores of men and women half-drowned; drowned in panic, drowned in desperation, drowned in fear.  They stared at the pumps with an intensity that suggested that perhaps they believed in telepathy, that they could silently convince those at the pumps to stop taking all their petrol, all their petrol, ALL THEIR PETROL!  They kept their hands locked at ten and two on their steering wheels, absurdly clinging to the notion that the queue might start moving again at any moment.

Nero knew he’d never get behind the wheel of that black ute again, nor did he wish to.

A horn blared from closer to the front of the queue, once, twice, three times.  Then a shout, ‘Oi!  No fucken jerry cans!’  A man with a shaved head, bald-by choice, leaned out of the window of his electric blue Great Wall off-roader and aimed an accusatory finger at the offender.  A short man in a plaid short-sleeved shirt stood beside a bronze Toyota Everest, pumping petrol into a bright red jerry can almost as big as he was.  He was surrounded by a crowd of angry men, still a small posse but growing by ones and twos.  Nero strode towards the source disagreement — if he was going to get a new ride, he’d rather pick one which had just filled up anyway.

Cars were everywhere, trying to cut into the broadly-agreed lines and crawling back and forth behind the shop, perhaps hunting for any spare pumps which might be kicking around.  A couple more horns honked, followed by shouts.  It all appeared to be aimed at the jerry can man.  Nero noted the pump he was drawing from, a premium unleaded.  He would have preferred diesel, but beggars can’t be choosers.

‘That for me?’ Nero said as he arrived at the small cluster of men.  He reached out to take the handle of the jerry can just as the man in the plaid shirt finished screwing the lid on.  Before his fingers could close around it, someone grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him back.  Nero turned to face the bald man from the Great Wall.

‘You’re nowhere near the front of the line, I saw you come in.  If anyone’s taking that petrol, it’s me.’

‘No-one’s taking the petrol,’ plaid shirt said in a small voice.  ‘It’s my petrol.’

Nero didn’t plan on getting into any arguments over this.  Nero reached up with his right hand and grabbed Baldy by his dark blue wife-beater, and that’s when Baldy noticed, too late, the marks on Nero’s face, the still-fresh cuts and bruises.  Before he could take anything back, Nero pulled him in close and drove the hard ridge of his skull into the centre of Baldy’s face.  The payoff was a familiar crunch, and he stepped away before the soon-to-be-spurting blood could hit him.  Baldy went down on his arse and yeah, the blood started pouring down his face in a wide stream.

Nero stared at the five men crowded around, and reached out to take the jerry can.  This time there was no hand pulling him back, no words of objection — he lifted the can from plaid’s damp trembling fingers and the weight of it pulled down hard on his arm.  Pain awoke in his shoulder, but he bit down on his tongue to keep his face straight.  The coke buzz was fading fast.  He needed to take another bump soon, before the pain caught up and rolled over him.  First though, he needed to find his next ride.

Four of the five men found other things to look at, the other pumps and the ground and their own cars.  One of them, though, he met Nero’s stare.  He was barely a man — maybe twenty, twenty-one — but big.  Maybe had a bit of islander in him.  Yeah, that seemed about right.  Nero never had a problem with islanders, and he found they often made excellent recruits.  Good hard muscle to have on hand when the need arose.

Nero squared up to the boy.  ‘Problem?’ he said.

‘No sir,’ the boy said.

No sir
.  He liked that.  And the boy was big, no doubt he could handle himself.  His eyes twitched from Nero’s face to the jerry can.

More horns started up from nearer the front of the queue, punctuated by shouts of
come on!

The pain in Nero’s beaten frame was increasing by the second.  If he didn’t sit down soon he was going to fall over.  ‘What ya drivin?’ he said to the boy.

He nodded to the car in front of plaid shirt’s Toyota, and Nero’s breath actually caught in his throat.  Of all the shit he’d witnessed and experienced over the past two days, this is the thing which truly caught him by surprise, the clean white Lexus LXA.

‘Jesus Christ boy, how’d you get a ride like that?’

‘Santa Claus,’ he said with a straight face.

‘Yeah, a lotta that going around.  How would you like to give me a ride?’  It wasn’t really a question, not the way Nero said it.  His employees would have recognised it as an order.

He stared at Nero for a second before flicking his eyes to the can of petrol.  ‘You going to donate that?’ he asked.

‘If we need it, sure.  Haven’t you already filled up?’

He shrugged.  ‘No credit card.’

Nero chuckled.  ‘A Lexus LXA owner without a credit card.  Isn’t that shitty luck?’

‘Yeah,’ he said.  ‘I left my wallet in my Gucci board shorts.  So whaddya say?  A ride for some petrol?’

Nero smiled at the kid.  ‘I tell you what.  Here, hold this for a second.’

He handed the jerry can to the boy and walked back to where baldy was still trying to recover his senses and staunch the flow of blood from his nose.  ‘Wallet,’ Nero said, holding his hand out.

Baldy stared up at him with undisguised loathing.  Nero could see him trying to calculate the odds, the options for attack.  As much as Nero would enjoy exorcising a few of his grudges onto this guy, he was also tired and in pain and, he suspected, very close to exhaustion.  He unzipped the carry-all and pulled out the shotgun by the stock, not all the way, just far enough for Baldy to recognise it.

‘Wallet,’ he said again.

Any thoughts Baldy was having of retaliation were swept aside by a wave of instinct.  He reached into his back pocket and slipped out a worn brown leather wallet, then held it out to Nero.

‘Good boy,’ Nero said as he took it, still keeping the gun aimed forward.  He’d learned, from the broad expanse of his violent experience, always to expect sudden bursts of stupidity from his fellow man.  Baldy seemed like just the right kind of candidate to try something truly moronic.

‘Let’s get you filled up,’ he said to the boy as he held out the wallet.

He took it with a grin and turned to the Lexus.  Nero let him keep hold of the can as he followed him to the car.  The boy checked the contents of the wallet before sliding out a black card and touching it to the pump’s sensor.  He pre-selected two-hundred dollars, and with the pump’s apparent approval, he began filling the car.

‘Nero,’ he said to the boy, holding out his hand.

‘Sammo,’ he said, switching the pump to his left hand so he could shake it.

‘Where you headed to Sammo?’

Sammo shrugged.  ‘Brisbane, I guess.  See what’s going on there.’

‘Well, Brisbane’s where I’m headed.  If you can get me there in one piece, and quickly, I’ll make it worth your while.’

Nero could have simply demanded, or threatened, they both knew that.  He wasn’t small, this Sammo kid, and he looked as though he was unaccustomed to submitting to anyone — but Nero sensed a decent measure of respect in this him.  It’s unlikely he knew who Nero was, but he was apparently canny enough to recognise his type: a leader, an outlaw, a genuine one-percenter.  They were a predator’s survival instincts, and Nero figured that a great many people without those survival instincts would find themselves on the wrong end of a fist or a boot or a pipe, or worse, over the coming weeks and months.

Sammo nodded furiously.  ‘Sure thing Nero.  Whatever you want.’

Nero smiled, laughed, and clapped Sammo on the back.  Even a simple gesture like that cost him an unhealthy handful of pain.  He needed to get off his feet.  He opened the passenger side door and dropped into the seat.  Oh God, what a seat!  It made the ute’s seat feel like wooden slab by comparison; the semi’s was like a sack of rocks.  He opened the carry-all on his lap and dipped his finger into the bag of coke, rubbing whatever stuck to his skin into his gums.  He needed to stay awake and alert until they were on their way.  The powder did the trick, and he felt his nerve-endings snap out of their near-slumber almost as one.  Sammo tapped on his window.  He found the control and lowered it.

‘Pump’s empty,’ he said quietly.  ‘Made it to one-sixty then cut out.’

‘Right,’ Nero said.  ‘Get in the car and let’s get the fuck out of here.’

Sammo moved quickly around to the driver’s side while Nero searched around in the bag and pulled out the Sig Sauer.  If he had to fire a gun from inside the car he didn’t want it to be the shotgun, it’d bloody deafen them.  He’d seen what happened in Rocky when the fuel ran dry, the way hard men could turn rabid the instant they came to realise the precious commodity they needed to get themselves to safety was suddenly in desperately short supply.  The people at the BP were from a softer environment, and took many of the basics of life for granted, but they too would find themselves driven by something base and primal when they finally put two-and-two together and realised that without petrol, their lives might be at risk.  It just might take them a little longer to come to that conclusion.