Draw the Brisbane Line (33 page)

He turned away from Jim and started to move to the helicopter.  There was at least one helicopter pilot and one movie starlet who would be quite capable of some heavy lifting.

The helicopter pilot’s name was Cummings.  He was more than happy to be sat in the relative safety of the bird, and he suggested that Jenny should be too.  Jenny responded that she’d feel safer swimming in the ocean through the middle of a shark feeding frenzy.  He laughed, told her not to worry, that they’d be out of there soon enough.

She’d been watching the confrontation through the open door when big thick and thugly shot a man in the head.  She pulled back into the seat she’d been sitting in, as far away as she could get from the ugly chuckling of these men, laughing about death like someone had farted.  Her head buzzed with shock.  She felt like she might be sick.

A moment later a deafening crack rolled across the yard, and something hard and fast punched into the helicopter, once, twice, three times. The third one hit the inside of the cabin, zipping through the open door.  The sound of the impact in the enclosed space was like a church bell being rung in her head.

‘Oh, fuck me,’ Cummings sighed from the front seat.  Though maybe he’d shouted it.  Jenny couldn’t be sure of volume.  ‘Stay there, Miss Lucas,’ he said.  ‘Just stay where you are.’

So she did.  Cummings took his own advice too, maintaining his position in the pilot’s seat.  But then someone outside started groaning, cursing … and was he crying?  It was the QTA soldier assigned to guard the helicopter, and probably Jenny.

‘My leg,’ he said.  ‘Ow my fucking leg, ow!  Ow!’

It had been a couple of minutes since the big bang.  She thought it unlikely that another one would go off now; it had been relatively and worryingly quiet ever since, at least until soldier-boy outside started crying.  Jenny got up out of her seat and stuck her head out the door to see Thugly nudging soldier boy on the ground with the toe of his boot.

Jenny’s breath caught in her chest, grabbed her lungs and squeezed them like a child with a favourite toy.  He looked like a horror show.  The weak light from the helicopter’s cabin reflected of the slick red sheen covering all of his forehead and steadily painting his nose and cheeks in a slow trickle.  He held a big shiny revolver in his red right hand.  He turned to fix his bloody glare on Jenny, and she felt something twist inside her, as if the barely-formed foetus was able to sense the danger in the man.

‘What happened?’ she said, her voice a mouse’s squeak in a thunderstorm.

‘Grenade,’ the bloody thug growled.  ‘Come on.  You’re going to help us with some lifting.’

‘But I’m pregnant,’ Jenny said.  She wasn’t supposed to do heavy lifting, was she?  A laughable notion given all that she’d been through in the past day.

Thugly shrugged.  ‘Still more useful than this guy,’ he said, nudging the soldier on the ground who whimpered at the contact.  ‘Come on.’

Biff started moving forward with the surge.  He didn’t want to fight these people, but what else was he going to do?  Turn around and go home?  He thought about that for a moment:
could
he just turn around and go home?  Where was home now?

Epoch saved him the trouble of having to make a decision by grabbing his shoulder and pulling him close. ‘There,’ he said.  ‘Over there.  You see them Brendan?’

He’d turned him to face the news crews by the side of the road.

‘You wanna get on telly?’ Biff said.

Epoch laughed.  ‘I’m already gunna be on telly, aren’t I?  Nah. I’m talking about the shiny Yvette Winterson over there.  You see her?  The blonde with the heavy makeup?’

Biff saw her.  It was hard to miss her.  The camera lights illuminated her like she was a bright miracle.  Biff recognised her the same way he might recognise a friend’s mother, or an aunt.  She’d been with him so many mornings on the sofa in Sammo’s apartment, smiling, telling him about the day.  He remembered one morning, maybe about six months ago, she was talking about children who had been abandoned by their parents at an early age and forced to bring themselves up on the streets.  He was sure he could see a wet gleam in her eyes as she spoke, the tell-tale red glaze prominent at the edges.  He’d wanted to pull her through the TV into the living room with him, lay his head down on her lap and sleep off his hangover while she talked.

‘Yeah,’ Biff said.  ‘I know her from the telly.’

‘Yeah, she’s from the telly all right.  You know her production company is behind five of the highest rating local productions right now?  And she has a significant stake in the network?’

Biff shook his head.  No, he didn’t know all that.

‘And you know what else, Brendan?’

‘What?’ Biff said.

‘She has a house here in Byron.  A
big
one.  This is where she likes to come to get away from it all.  And I think, I think Brendan … I think we might have found the mother lode.’

Biff thought, what’s a mother load?  Is it a sex thing?  Probably not.  Epoch never seemed that interested in sex, not from what Biff could see.  Sammo used to talk about it all the time, used to describe in HD detail his bedroom adventures — though they were more often nightclub dunny adventures and through-the-kitchen-and-out-the-back adventures.

Epoch signalled to two of the bigger moons which had started orbiting him since Pacific Fair.  Biff thought of them as Pigsy and Ape, because Pigsy had one of those piggy upturned noses with a squishy face to match, and Ape was hairy like a little King Kong.  Also, Biff thought they were dumb like animals.  Biff might be the muscle, but at least he could make his own decisions.  If he wanted to.

Pigsy and Ape jogged up to Epoch.  They looked like they’d been hanging back, waiting to see what kind of job Epoch might give them.  Biff was hanging back because he didn’t want to get his head bashed in.  It was like that old film, Saving Private Ryan, where all those poor fuckers had to charge the open beach and just got chopped to pieces by machine guns and mortars.  They were gunna get through them eventually, but why rush?

Epoch grabbed Pigsy by the shoulder and said, ‘We’re going after the blonde, over there.  You see her?’

Pigsy and Ape looked over to where Yvette Winterson was starting to move away from her position, the camera crew looking like they were getting ready to go a bit more mobile.  They nodded.

‘You want us to snatch her?’ Ape said.  He said it with a thick lisp. 
You want uth to thnatch her?

‘Nah,’ Epoch said.  ‘Just take out the camera guys?  Then stay close.  The blonde might just be our golden ticket.’

‘She has gold?’ Pigsy said.  His voice was even more nasal than Epochs.  He sounded like he badly needed to blow it.

‘Close enough,’ Epoch said, and slapped Pigsy on the back.  ‘Come on now, let’s kick the tyres and light the fires.’

Ape’s face screwed up like a crusty old tissue.  ‘You want us to kick tyres?’

Epoch turned to face Biff and rolled his eyes.  ‘Kids,’ he said.  ‘No classic film education.’

They waded across the river of looters surging forward.  The bright lights of the camera crew wobbled as they started to move, tracking the action.  Once they were clear of the crowd they found themselves behind the trio, a cameraman and a sound guy and the blonde, Yvette Winterson.  Epoch pointed at Ape, then at the cameraman.  At Pigsy, then at the sound guy.  They nodded, having no problem understanding this part, and jogged up behind the men.  Ape struck the sound guy first, clubbing him with a double fist where his neck met his shoulders.  He cried out, stumbled and went down on one knee, and Ape accepted the invitation to kick the guy in the side of the head.  He went down almost immediately, and Biff could tell by the way he fell that he was instantly out of it, as though someone had just flicked his switch from
on
to
off
.  But Ape kicked him a couple more times to be sure, both head-shots.

Something shuddered deep within Biff.  That was not right. 
Not
right.  You didn’t kick a man when he was already unconscious.

Pigsy went for the cameraman a moment later, who’d already started to turn around when his sound man went down.  Pigsy was swinging his right fist as the bright light from the camera blinded them, and Biff saw rather than heard Pigsy connect with something harder than flesh or bone or fat.  The light went out with a crunch.

‘Mother
fucker
,’ Pigsy swore.  ‘
Shit
.’

The cameraman dropped his damaged kit, saw his sound guy on the ground, and his face hardened into anger. He threw a punch at Pigsy, and it was a good one, catching him just under the eye and snapping his head back like it was on a spring.  He was a big guy too, Biff noticed, as much muscle as fat.  Looking at the way he punched, his stance and the flat expression on his face, Biff figured he did at least a little part-time boxing.

The cameraman half-turned his head, not taking his eyes off them, and said loudly.  ‘Yvette.  Run.’

Boxing doesn’t teach you to fight three guys at once, and although Pigsy was close to useless, just getting back to his feet, Ape and Biff had more than enough fight in them to take down the brawny cameraman.  Ape engaged him head-on, the two men trading blows and blocking the shots coming back, just two boxers facing off, while Biff came around the side and punched him hard in the temple, just once.  He would have seen it coming, but so what?  Too late.

Yvette Winterson hadn’t stayed around to argue with her cameraman, she ditched her microphone and took off away from them, moving with the flow of the looters.

Epoch didn’t need to say anything clever to get them moving again.  He hared off after her, his backpack bouncing on his scrawny frame, and the three of them followed.

Dave didn’t play much rugby in school.  Being good at tennis made it easier to avoid when he was older, but before he hit thirteen and began getting more and more serious with the fuzzy green balls, he played outside centre in B-grade teams.  There was no getting out of it — he was big enough, at least as tall and solid as the other kids in the backs positions, and the school’s unofficial rugby coordinator was determined to field at least three teams in every age group.  This meant anyone capable of running and tackling, or being tackled, were considered free for selection, and soccer suffered horribly.

He couldn’t recall too much of his rugby experience, but some elements stayed with him after all those years, sight and taste and smell artefacts embedded in his subconscious, often creeping out in dreams.  He remembered the feel and taste of the plastic-rubber mouth guard between his teeth, moulded for a close fit but nonetheless tripping a gag reflex whenever he ran his throat dry.  He remembered the boots, checking the sprigs were always screwed in tight and running the electrical tape three or four times around his laces to ensure they didn’t come loose in the middle of the game.  To this day he had anxiety dreams about not being able to find his boots before a game, and having to embark on a frantic mission to find them before kick-off. He remembered the angry, adrenaline-fuelled faces of the boys from the opposition team, running at him with expressions of temporary hate.

That’s what came to mind now, those angry faces, full of aggression and violence.  The looters descended upon the town’s defenders, dodging their downed motorcycles and scooters and hurdling the automotive barricade like runners in a steeplechase.  They came on them looking for targets, for something to fix on and to hit and to attack, so Dave did the same thing he’d done back in his brief rugby playing days: he avoided eye contact.  He looked above them, behind them, beyond them, hoping they might think, someone else obviously has him lined up, I’ll pass by.  Sometimes it worked, in rugby, as long as he wasn’t holding the ball.  No ball in his hands now, just a very lethal, very desirable gun.  A very fight-winning gun.

He tucked the weapon in close to his chest and tried to crab-crawl his way through the rushing hooligans.  The gaze-avoidance tactic seemed all but useless now as punches and elbows and slaps and shoulders rained down on him from all directions.  No-one seemed to be trying to do him any serious damage though, they were just glancing blows.  He was just in their way.

At least they appeared to be glancing blows, until someone drove a heel into the inside of his knee.

Oh, God no
.

Those three words were the ones which always echoed through his head when he felt something in his body go on-court.  An ankle.  A muscle in his back.  A tendon in his knee.  He would feel a sharp stab like an electrical surge and he would think,
oh, God no
.  God was listening about sixty percent of the time.  For the other forty percent he was usually fucked.  Physical therapy, rehabilitation, surgery, physical therapy … it sometimes felt like he was stuck in a loop. 

On a scale of one to ten
, his physio would say to him,
rate the pain
.

Anything over six was enough to warrant x-rays.  Over eight just about guaranteed a premature end to his season.

The pain never really went away from those injuries, it just varied in intensity.  It flared in his knee now, in his old ACL wound, right up to ten on the pain scale.

He cried out and went down.  Then there were more kicks, more knees.  He felt the weight of a person under the tread of a shoe push down between his shoulder blades, forcing him to the ground.  And then he was a doormat.

I’m being trampled
, he thought. 
I’m going to be trampled to death now.  People die like this sometimes at football matches and concerts, it’s not so uncommon.

The kicks didn’t stop, driving into his ribs, his stomach, the back of his head — he had the good sense to turn his face away from the rush, or perhaps that was just instinct in action.  He tasted blood in his mouth, felt it warm and sticky in his hair. 
I hope you trip on me
.

God, he hoped Jenny was far away from this mess.

Jenny.  It felt like weeks since he’d last seen her, last held her.  The last time they talked, before the fight, they were discussing baby names.  They’d narrowed it down to six, three girls and three boys, but they’d never tell anyone what they were.

Screw this
, Dave thought, and put his left hand on the ground to push himself up.  It was immediately trampled by a stampede of malicious feet. 
Well, fuck you then.  Fuck you all
.  He half-rolled to his back, ignored the pain of someone’s body-weight driving down hard into the side of his ribs, and he brought around his right hand, the hand with the gun, and fired it into the air.

The kick felt like he’d grabbed hold of an electric fence.  He’d done that once when he was a kid, on a dare.  Tapping the fence a few times, feeling nothing, before wrapping his hands around the wire. The alternating current felt like a hammer-blow to his elbows.

He found himself in enough space to stand.  His knee still screamed at him, and it had started to swell.  It felt as though it had doubled or even tripled in size.  He couldn’t flex it much, didn’t really want to try.  He had a brief window of endorphin-induced pain relief, and he used it to get the hell out of the stampede.  He tried to keep his weight on his left leg as he straightened his back and waited for his head to clear.  There was no point trying to keep the gun concealed, not anymore, so he kept it out by his side but aimed at the ground.

He started to move.  He wanted to get off the road, out of the swarm of violent people.  His body cried with every shuffle-step he took, and his knee wailed like an infant in distress, but the crowd began to thin.  It thinned, it broke up, and suddenly Dave found himself in a wide empty space.

Was the gun really keeping everyone away from him?  He looked at the warm weapon held down by his side, and that’s when he saw the woman on the ground, and the blood.  The spotlights from the news crews had blinked out, but the sun was close to coming up now.  There was enough light to see the slick red patch spreading out from somewhere in the woman’s middle.

No, not a woman.  A girl.  She couldn’t have been much older than nineteen or twenty.  Red curls spilled out from a half-removed black hood, freckles dotted across the bridge of her button nose.  She was wearing the same brand of jeans Jenny liked, he recognised the cut of the pockets and the pewter button embossed with a stylised cow’s head.  It was from somewhere just above the waist of the jeans where the blood was trickling out.  Her blood-slick hand was pressed shakily over the wound, and she stared up at Dave with an expression of fear.

‘It’s OK,’ he told her, his head treating him to a barrage of stabbing pain for daring to speak words in his current condition. ‘You’ll be OK.’

What could have done that?  Someone’s heel?  Seemed unlikely.  Maybe she injured herself during looting and pillaging on the Gold Coast, and now the wound has opened up again.  Maybe … maybe …

Understanding stuck its fingers down his throat. 
That could be a gunshot wound
.

She held her hand out to him, and he reached out with his left.

Give us a hand, mate?
Cain had said as he reached up to him, back up on his balcony a hundred years ago.

Dave didn’t want that memory in his head, not near the top.  He tried to tamp it down, burying it under the here-and-now.

Give us a boost?

He pushed past the pain in his head, his leg, his ribs and his back.  So many pains, might as well bundle them together and sell them as a single package.  The Dave-Ache Deluxe.  He reached down to her, and she flinched away.

But she’d held her hand out to him.  She wanted him to help, didn’t she?

Give us a boost?

Fuck off.  But her hand, look at her hand.  Not imploring, not inviting him to grab it. No, defensive.  Warding off.  Stay back.

Of course.  Of course she was afraid.  He’d shot her, hadn’t he?  Got tired of being kicked and trampled and decided to solve his problems with a gun.  Aimless, arbitrary.  He stepped back and looked at the wounded girl.  Unlucky.  She looked pale.  Maybe she always looked pale, but maybe she didn’t.

Bile and acid ate away at the back of his throat and the inside of his chest, but he was only loosely aware of it.  Looters still rushed past them but gave them some distance, leaping over the barricades and joining one of the dozens of skirmishes which had broken out all around him.

The girl’s eyes were flicking between his face and the gun.

The gun.  Of course.  He wished Pia had never given it to him, desperately wished it.  He held it out by his side, put all his weight on his good left knee, and crouched down to lay it flat on the road.

‘It’s OK,’ he croaked through his acid-eroded throat.  ‘I’m not going to hurt you.  I want to help.’

‘Y-y-you …’ she said.  ‘You
shot
me.’

‘I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean it.’

‘You fucken
shot
me, man.  You shot me?’

‘It was an accident.  I’m sorry.’

She took her eyes away from Dave and looked down at the wound.  She moved her trembling fingers, all slick and wet.  ‘Am I gunna die?’

‘No.  No, you’ll be fine.’

‘But it hurts.  It really hurts.’

‘That’s good.  The pain is just your body telling you to take it easy.  It means you’re going to be OK.’

‘Hey,’ a male voice said behind Dave with two hard taps on his shoulder.

Dave fought through his own pain to turn around.  A heavily-muscled kid stood there, maybe the same age as the redhead, tattoos crawling out from under his shirt and up his neck and over his face, like some kind of chronic fungal infection.  A thick gold chain was strung across his plain black t-shirt, and from it dangled a variety of rings, mostly the kind used to entice would-be brides to become will-be brides.  In his right hand, he held the gun Dave had so carefully placed on the ground.  He took a couple of steps back, keeping out of Dave’s reach, and raised the gun.

‘Ya like pain?’ he said.  His voice was high, like he was just coming down from a helium high.  ‘Here ya go then.’

He squeezed the trigger and there was a loud bang as the gun jerked.

Pain, yeah.  Now I’m feeling it
.  The sudden sharp agony wiped out every other flavour of agony in his body, and Dave realised he couldn’t breathe.  He couldn’t breathe and he couldn’t stand, so he fell to the road.  His head hit the ground with a flat crack, but that no longer seemed to matter.  He saw feet streaming past him, and a bit further away the feet moved around, side-stepped, back-stepped.  As if they were dancing.

He tried to suck in some air, but he still couldn’t do it.  His windpipe had been pinched shut.  Beyond the dancing feet he could see more people running, and one of them stood out from the others in her perfectly-managed presentation, blonde hair bouncing against the shoulders of her white silk blouse as she ran with her awkward stride in a pair of massively impractical heels.

Yvette
, he tried to call out to her. 
Yvette.  Lose the heels.
  But he couldn’t talk, and he still couldn’t breathe.  Soon he struggled to keep his eyes open, and although the sun was now peeping over the horizon and lighting up a clear blue sky, the road leading into Byron Bay began to grow darker for Dave Holden, and the cacophony of the riot quieted to a soft static.

And then all was dark and silent.