Draw the Brisbane Line (34 page)

Thugly managed to find three more men of reasonable mobility to help him with whatever labour he had planned.  Jenny still had no idea what it might be, and she had trouble even guessing at possibilities, because her brain slipped into a dull shock when she saw, up close, the extent of the carnage.  There were ten, maybe twelve bodies strewn over the ground.  Jenny didn’t want to count them, didn’t want to pay that close attention.  Didn’t want to notice the blood, the mangled flesh, the limbs untethered from their bodies.  She couldn’t look away quickly enough to not see Sammo in there among the dead though.  A great dark stain soaked into the ground in the place where his right arm used to be.  So much blood.  It just couldn’t be real, it just couldn’t.  It — 

No, it was all wrong.  Even in the dim early morning light, Jenny could see his complexion was completely off, ashen and waxy.

Makeup.  Can we get makeup on the set?  This extra needs more colour.  He should look hurt, not long dead.

And who wrote this screenplay?  There’s no way one grenade could have done this kind of damage.  No way.  No, it needed to be something bigger, more insidious.  Maybe a nail bomb.  She’d have to talk to the director.  She doubted he’d want to re-shoot the scene though, a lot of work went into this.  Look at the mess in the middle of it: she could see leather jacket virtually blended with flesh and hair and bone.  Buttons from a pair of jeans glinted through the gristle.  Fantastic attention to detail.

As she looked at Sammo, he blinked.  His eyes locked onto hers, flat. Practising his open-eyed death-gaze.

‘It’s OK,’ she said to him.  ‘Someone will be along soon to fix you up.’  Get a bit of colour back into his face.  Maybe they’d just fix it in post.

The director tapped her on the shoulder.

‘We’re going this way,’ he said.  ‘Move.’

Jenny nodded, followed the other actors.  The director was rough, but he had that reputation, so she knew what to expect.  It would be good for her career though, to say she worked with him.  Give her a few anecdotes for the chat shows.

She had her moment of panic.  Her lines.  What were her lines?  She couldn’t even remember what the scene was supposed to be about.  She waved it away, pregnancy brain.  That’s what Dave would tell her.  But nicely, not being mean about it, not like he was saying she was stupid.  Never mind, he’d say.  The lines would find her when she needed them.

Pia wrapped her arms around Bryk and locked her fingers together.  At the speed he was running the bike, leaning into the corners so low she could have reached down and brushed the road with her fingertips, anything less than a life-or-death grip would have turned her into roadkill.  Her arms were looped through the arms of the carry-all, and she wore it like a backpack.  Something poked her in the back, either the muzzle or the stock of her rifle.  Bryk followed a small GPS display strapped to the handlebars, and she could see they were close to their destination.  When they were about a kilometre away — and she still had to labour through the simple conversion to arrive at the miles — he cut the engine and let the bike roll off the road. 

They heard the gunshot seconds after they parked up behind a gumtree just big enough to hide it.  Bryk went straight to the bike’s panniers, pulled out his Heckler & Koch MP7 machine pistol and his night vision kit.  Pia had the same gear in her bag, so she just left it on her back and started back along the road.  It might have been quicker to take a straight line through the bush, but Bryk said intel highlighted a strong risk of mine employment around their compound.  Bryk caught up to her, the small GPS unit strapped to his wrist.

They didn’t speak.  He tapped her on the shoulder, then tapped her pack.  She nodded, and he fell in behind her to lift it off her back.  The weight disappeared, and she suddenly felt three times lighter.  He moved up beside her and unzipped the bag, holding it open for her.  She pulled out her rifle and slung it over her shoulders so it hung down in front of her, her night-vision headset which she slipped on like a hat, and her own MP7 — all without breaking her stride.  She fished out a couple of spare cartridges for each weapon and stuffed them in her pockets.  It was a tight fit in her jeans, she wished she’d had the foresight to load them into a belt.  She was about to grab her pistol for backup, but then remembered she’d given it to Dave.  Probably just as well, she didn’t really have anywhere left to put it.  She nodded to Bryk, who zipped up the bag and slung it over his own back.

They were settling into a good rhythm when the loud crack of an explosion rolled through the trees.

‘Mine?’ Pia guessed.

‘Could be,’ Bryk said, barely out of breath.  ‘Or a grenade.  Amount of fucking materiel they got in that place, it could be just about fucking anything.’

They ran faster.

The director dragged some of the extras off the ground for the next scene.  They all stayed in character, limping badly if bloodied, crying out in pain when lifted if the effects department had given them a more dramatic injury.  He picked up one man who’d been face-down on the ground, and she saw something long and wet hanging dangling from a red mess in his stomach.  No, his character wouldn’t be getting up for the next scene.  One of the other actors — she couldn’t remember his name, but his character’s name was Jim — stared emptily as he shuffled towards the house, his rifle held low but tightly in two hands.  He saw her looking at him out of the corner of his eye, and sneered at her before falling in a step or two behind.  He was staying in character.  That was fine, she would too.

Show fear.  Show distress.  Show mild horror.

It wasn’t hard to get in the moment.  The special effects crew really had done an excellent job dressing the set.

But if they were moving onto the next scene, why weren’t the extras getting up off the ground?

She was shivering.  She didn’t know why, it should have been warm.  She walked through a patch of grass heavy with early morning dew, and when it flicked up against her shins, it was warm instead of cold.  Something was

wrong

a little bit out of whack.  Jim moved up closer behind her.  She could smell the bacon on his breath from breakfast.  Had they sat together in the comm?  She thought they might have.

‘Your clock’s just about out of tick, missy,’ he said.  ‘Not even Al would want you chatting to the media about this clattering shambles.’

Al. Did she know an Al?  It rang a bell.  And what clock was he talking about?

He grabbed her by the back of the shirt and held her in place.  Her shirt, this over-sized khaki number from wardrobe, bit into the tender skin under her arms.  The director saw them both, turned away from the house and started walking back their way, frowning heavily.

‘What do you think is going to happen after we’ve carried all we need to, loaded up the helicopter ready to go?  You think you’re just going to take your seat and fly away to back to your comfortable life?  You think we’re even going to be able to spare the space on-board?’

‘Jim,’ the director grumbled.  He moved slowly, limping badly.

‘You look around here,’ Jim said, ignoring the director, ‘you look at all these men on the ground, and you still think you’re better than they are.’

She wanted to say, well, I
am
the leading lady, but she bit it back.  Something about the scene, about the intensity of his vitriol, it all seemed a bit

wrong

unnecessarily hostile.

‘I …’ she said.  ‘I …’ She knew she wanted to say something, but she couldn’t quite manage to strap the words together.  She tried, but they kept slipping loose like escaped polystyrene balls from a bean bag, evading her grasp with random crackles of static electricity.

‘What’s the matter?’ Jim sneered.  ‘Forgot your lines?’

YES!
She wanted to scream it, but her throat locked, drying out like someone pulled a plug somewhere in her body.  Her hands went to her barely-showing belly, covered it.  This defensive gesture, she would later realise when the final remnants of her hastily-assembled delusion crumbled to dust, was an instinctive reaction to the vision she saw approaching them from the darkness: a giant dressed in black, alien technology on his head, a thin red light slicing through the early morning murk and playing over their small troupe.

She thought,
I didn’t realise this was a sci-fi film.

Jim, who had been between Jenny and the alien intruder, turned his head to see what she was looking at and then, quick as a hummingbird’s fart, he was behind her.  He was faster than he looked.

‘The fuck are you?’ the director growled.  But was he the director.  Another name floated into Jenny’s mind:
Thugly
.

‘Navy Seals,’ the Alien said, still advancing.  He had a deep voice, smoother than Thugly’s.  He’d be good playing a tough guy, Jenny thought.

‘Ha!’ Jim barked from behind her.  ‘US Navy Seals!  And what jurisdiction do you have?’

Without hesitation, the Navy Seal said, ‘I am authorised under the auspices of Force Posture to seize any munitions on these premises.  Now drop your fucking guns.’

The red light played over the group, but it didn’t touch Jenny, didn’t really come close to her. 

The lights from the house, and the sun making its way up from behind them, cast long shadows over the ground.  She could see her shadow almost overlapping with Jim’s.  She could make out Jim’s by the rifle he held across his body.

The Seal painted a red dot on Thugly’s chest.

‘You’d best drop that,’ Jim said.  ‘The moment you pull the trigger, I put one in Miss Lucas here.  Is her death covered under the auspices of
Force Posture
?  Anyway, that’s just a glorified training exercise.’

His shadow shifted, and the rifle-shadow shortened.

‘Not any more,’ the Seal said.  ‘Pia.’

What a queer reply
, Jenny thought.  She was tempted to go along with it, say
not anymore
.  Then there was a wet slap and a grunt from Jim, and his shadow disappeared.  She turned around to see what had happened, a reflex to the sudden movement, and saw Jim twisted awkwardly on the ground.  He looked like he was trying to stretch his lower back. He stared flatly into the sky, clutching his gun as though he was trying to revive it.  His head was resting on a pillow of red and grey mess.  It … it …

Jennifer Lucas, starlet of screen and top-billing Hollywood actress, fulfilled her stereotype by swooning, then fainting, landing on the dewy morning grass back-first, her hands still cradling her belly.

Yvette Winterson ran like her legs were made from glass and her arse had an allergy to the ground.  She moved like that for a full fifty metres or more, arms out for balance, tottering like a poor caricature of impractical vanity, before she eventually decided:
perhaps my favourite Louboutins aren’t as valuable as my life
.

She paused and slipped them off her feet, but held one tightly in each hand like lifelines.  And she ran, properly.  When she ran properly, none of those little looting sprogs could catch her.  She’d placed second in the eight hundred at the state athletics championships in high school, and she’d tried to stay in touch with that form, running every day she could.  She zipped past a small brawl of three or four people.  She dashed around a man in a ski mask, blue wet-shirt, pink board shorts and sneakers kicking at the plate glass window of an ice-cream parlour. She leapt over the prone form of a young blonde girl, maybe in her early twenties, sprawled face-down on the footpath, weakly clutching at her ribs and moaning, capsicum spray drizzling from the nozzle of the can clutched in her right hand.  Nothing was going to slow Yvette Winterson.

Her light guy and her camera guy were both down, and the camera guy was the one with the keys to the van.  She was just going to have to leg it all the way to her house.  She didn’t need keys to get in there.  If she could just get there and barricade herself in, she’d be OK.  She could get the bonds from the safe, wait for the noise to die down, and then take a six month holiday in Provence.

There had been a couple of shots fired, and here was another one now, just nearby.  She reflexively twitched her head in the direction of the blast, and saw — no, it couldn’t be, it couldn’t — Dave Holden going down, the gunman looming just beyond him.

That was … that was … that was fucking
huge
.  She needed to get to her place fast so she could call in a report.  She leaned into her stride, pumping her arms as though she were rounding the final bend at the Holy Shit Olympics.

Biff followed Epoch as he ran after Yvette Winterson with his backpack bouncing around as if it contained nothing more than some spare clothes and maybe some shoes.  Not like it contained enough explosives to make an Epoch smoothie.  Probably a Biff smoothie too, if he stayed as close as he was.

At first Biff had been in front, driving a wedge through the mass of locals at the barricade — it wasn’t much of a trial, they weren’t exactly organised or one hundred percent fearless — but now he fell back a couple of paces, wondering whether they should be chasing Miss Winterson at all.  He couldn’t help it, now that the thought had entered his head.  That had been happening a lot lately, thoughts creeping into the front of his mind and causing him to say,
hold up, wait a minute.  Is this right?
 

For instance, did he really want to be here, taking part in all this?  Epoch might have opened his eyes to the abuse he’d received from Sammo, living under his bullying swing and being treated like little more than a dog, but was that much different to his relationship with Epoch?  Sure, he didn’t hit him, or abuse him … but he did get him to do a lot of things which he otherwise … would he … No.  He did lead him into things he probably would have stayed away from, if left to his own devices.  A good dog follows, but a smart dog might also wonder about things even while it’s being led around by the nose.

Like: was Epoch starting to enjoy all this a little too much?  The random violence, the destruction of property?  Had he started sampling his own product?

Like: why were they chasing Yvette Winterson?  Maybe she had some portable wealth, as Epoch liked to call it, but what were they going to do?  Chase her down and force her to hand it over?

No, he didn’t like where this was going, not any of it.  Robbery was one thing, but mugging someone was personal.  Like when Sammo decided to car-jack Jenny Lucas.  Biff wasn’t too happy about that one either.  But he followed, because that’s what a good dog does.

Dave blinked for the longest time.  Not a flurry of flutters, but one long single drawn out blink.  His eyelids were like a fifty-year-old garage door, rusted and creaking, being lowered by little more than gravity and will.  And they were even slower to come back up again.

He must have been holding his breath during that epic blink, because his lungs felt as though they’d been emptied of air by the pile of bricks dumped on his chest.  That’s what must have happened.  There was a bang, an explosion, he remembered that.  Had someone let off a bomb?  Had a building collapsed on him?

No tall buildings where you are Dave.  Think about it.  What’s the last thing you can remember?

It didn’t matter what happened.  What mattered right then was oxygen.  He had to have some, but he couldn’t remember how to breathe.  He blinked his eyes open and his lungs’ memory rushed back to him with his vision, and it hurt like

he’d been shot

a bastard, but it also brought with it his body’s warm gratitude.  He wasn’t going to die, not that minute.  But it hurt, oh Christ it hurt.  His heart stopped for a second as he brought his hand up to his chest, feeling for a warm wetness which would tell him,
sorry Dave, but this is just a temporary reprieve — best say your goodbyes to this mortal coil
.

He felt his chest, probing the area where the dull throb flared into bright sharp agony, and rubbed his fingers together.  They felt dry, but his chest felt strange.  Numb.  Alien.  Then he remembered the vest.

Holy shit, was there a bullet lodged in there somewhere, or had it bounced off somehow?  Dave decided it didn’t matter.  He pushed himself up off the ground, tried to ignore the all-body pain — and surprised himself by succeeding, mostly.  Once pain became the norm, it was a lot easier to tolerate.

Looters still rushed past, but in thinner numbers.  It must be the tail-end of the group.  Fights were rolling around the street everywhere he looked, one-on-one and two-on-one and three-on-two.  Baseball bats were swung against steel pipes, and Dave saw knife blades flashing, reflecting the morning sun which now lifted its leading edge over the horizon.

He’d been hoping all this madness would fade away in the daylight, like vampires.  It didn’t.

His knee was now completely numb, and he was pretty sure it wouldn’t even flex if he tried to move it.  Yep, like a stiff fleshy log.

He shuffled forward, expecting a blow from the rushing crowd at any moment, one which might put him down hard enough to crack his head open on the road, but the blow never came.  He looked left and right across the street, saw a few others he recognised who were staggering wearily back to town — guy from the bottle shop, lady from the kitchenware store, bartender from the Great Northern.  They were an army in retreat, but the enemy had already overrun them.  They didn’t pose any obstacle to the looters, so they were left alone.  He looked back to the barricade, trying to see if Tino and the other police were OK, but none of them were there.  He heard the flat crack of a gunshot from further in town and wondered if that was the police, or if it was the guy who’d taken his gun.

He wasn’t looking forward to explaining to Pia how he’d lost her pistol.  She’d probably bust his other knee.  Assuming she came back from wherever it was she’d pissed off to.

He made it to the roundabout, passed the petrol station and eventually dragged his feet over the level crossing at a pace which would be as good as stopping if a train were anywhere near coming through.  As he drew near the entrance to the First Sun Holiday Park, he looked up towards the town and saw that a full-scale riot was well and truly underway in the middle of Byron Bay.  The defensive lines which had backed up the barricade were now lining the footpaths, protecting their stores, their businesses, their livelihoods.  The looters sought gaps in this thin wall, and when they found them, they went at the windows with pipes, rocks, feet, anything which might gain them entry to whatever it was they were hoping to find on the other side.  There were apparently a few firebugs in the mix who were busy forcing open petrol tanks of cars whose owners had been foolish enough to leave them parked on the side of the road, slotting in their own home-made wicks which they lit and fled.  A red Holden ute emitted a fiery fart from its back end, and in seconds flame had engulfed over half of it.  There was no grand Hollywood-style explosion, but the sight of a suddenly burning vehicle was more than enough to scatter the nearest defenders.  Seconds later, looters charged the now-unprotected shop-front.

Dave watched a gangly middle-aged man in a red flannelette shirt throw himself feet-first at the glass window.  It wobbled, and his knees folded like a loose hinge on a rickety garden gate.  He landed on his arse swearing visibly and loudly, then he pushed himself straight back up to his feet and threw his shoulder at the glass.  It was personal now, this man’s feud with the glass.  This time it gave with a long crack, and the man fell partway through the narrow opening.  Two, four, six looters pushed ahead into the small gap, widening it until it large sections of it fell in with a scuttering smash.  Dave couldn’t see the guy in the flannelette at first, but then he spotted him: on the ground, half in the shop and half out, curled up on the broken glass.  The other looters simply stepped over him, on him, as if he’d draped himself over the shards of glass like some chivalrous rug.  Dave looked up and took in their target: it was a vegetarian restaurant.

A
restaurant
.  What did they hope to steal from a restaurant?

Dave looked further down the street, saw the rolling wave of chaos surging ahead and branching off into side streets, and he realised there just weren’t enough shops to go around this horde of hooligans.  They would pillage and trash every single clean thing they could soil with their criminal taint.  They would bring the town to ruin.

Banksia Mackie stalked out into the middle of the street, glaring in raw fury at the corruption and desperation around her.  Dave could almost feel her loathing as he shuffled towards her.  She hefted her shotgun and aimed it up into the air.  She fired,
boom
, racked the slide and fired again,
boom
.

The looting and fighting didn’t entirely cease, but it slowed down sharply in that moment.  She appeared to have their attention.  She certainly had Dave’s.

‘Enough,’ she shouted, and by God she was heard.  This was the voice that shouted above the din of stampeding elephants and cacophonous monkey rumbles — a human riot was nothing.  ‘Enough of this
shit
.  You people want a fight?  You want to fuck this place up?  Come on then.’  She racked the slide back and forth five or six times, red plastic shells bouncing off the blacktop.  When the shells had run out, she tossed the gun aside and it clattered on the road like a toy.  ‘I’ll have you all, one by one, you piss weak cunts.’

For a second, Dave thought they were going to ignore her challenge, go back to their senseless vandalism; but one of them stepped out of the bar and began taking long measured strides towards Banksia, almost swaggering.  She was long-limbed, tanned with a dark frizz of hair tied with a single band at the top of her head, and her eyes bore a blue-eyed intensity. She took a swig from a bottle of Bundaberg Rum as she walked.

‘Ya think ya can hit a girl?’ she called out to Banksia.

‘Are you kidding me?’ Banksia laughed.  ‘I’ve pinched out shits more feminine than you, love.’

‘Oh, you’re fucken dead, bitch.’  She smashed the half-full bottle of rum on the ground.  Dave thought she might have just done that to underline her point, but then she bent down and picked up the neck of it, still attached to the bottle’s jagged shoulders.

‘Come on then,’ Banksia said.  She set her legs in a half-crouch, tense, but her upper-body appeared loose enough to be considered relaxed.

The looter charged her, not with a shout or a war-cry but a frank business-like sincerity which chilled Dave far more that the jagged shard of glass she held in her hand.  And Banksia?  Banksia was grinning like a coke-head riding the crest of euphoria.

As Yvette sprinted down the road, clearing the town proper and the violence erupting there, she felt like she’d caught the last wave to shore before the sharks arrived.

She wasn’t safe yet though, not by a long-shot.  Every now and then, she’d glance behind to see that skinny madman in pursuit, a grin or a grimace stretched across his face, and for him the distinction between the two was probably unimportant.  A few paces behind him lumbered his burly sidekick, his henchman, and he wasn’t smiling at all.  Yvette tried to inject some more pace into her stride, leaning into it and pumping her arms.  She didn’t think the Louboutins clenched in her fists were slowing her down, and they were the nearest thing she had to a weapon.

She eventually reached the end of Lawson Street and the beginning of Lighthouse Road, her lungs tightly-filled hot water balloons.  At least that meant she was in the home straight, although the home straight began to climb just steeply enough to make her legs start to scream,
don’t forget about us
.

She risked a glance behind.  It might have been wishful thinking, but it seemed to her that Skinny and Bear were a bit further behind.  Good, she had a chance.  She just had to get to her house with enough of a head-start to get through her home’s security.