The Worm King (30 page)

In the dining area, Wiremu and his team spooned
down their meager rations. All eating now had to be done in one corner of the
gym that’d been cleared of bedrolls, where a double trestle-table was erected
to serve up the nosh. They’d sectioned off this area with six elaborate, waist-high
brass poles on stands, each joined to the next by a red velvet-wrapped chain. It
gave the impression one were lining-up to enter the Academy Awards, rather than
getting served slops in a bowl. Upon receiving the food, diners sat on the
floor tightly bunched around, and sometimes under, the tables, and ate as
quickly as possible.

Yesterday the surly fellow ladling out the
gluggy rice and single, mushy canned sardine, said harshly to Lord Brown, ‘Hurry
up, damn you! Take it and eat it, pronto!’ Surly sported a luxurious carpet of
dandruff across both shoulders, which the crème-tinted table lantern displayed beautifully.
It could almost have been sand, sparkling on a moonlit beach. Lord Brown wondered
whether much ended up in the rice: it’d be extremely hard to tell. Maybe that’s
why he got the position in the first place? Perhaps that’s all Surly
could
do? It wasn’t hard to imagine: the foreman would’ve seen the applicants, and
immediately shouted, ‘Whoa there, Sprinkles! You’re perfect. Hey, put this one
on the rice line! Outta the way; Ricey coming through!’

‘Thanks Ricey,’ he said, when the dollop plopped
into his bowl. Surly looked terribly dark, even for Surly. Chances are, he’d
been called Ricey or Surly before. The entire gym had to eat in staggered
intervals up at the trestle tables following several unsolved cutlery-throwing
incidents.

The diners were finishing up, the Hat and
Geoff already making their way back along the wavy path between bedrolls. He
thought the girl would be relieved, knowing her father had returned safely. ‘You’ll
be pleas—’

But she’d vanished. He hadn’t seen her leave,
however looked around in time to see her head disappearing into the changing room
at the other end of the gym. The dog was tied to the changing room doorhandle. Before
Wiremu left, he’d told her to get that toilet sorted before he got back, or
they’d never hear the end of it from the bloody Mason. She certainly knew how
to cut it finely, leaving the distasteful job right till the last minute, but
still doing as instructed. Wiremu wasn’t a man you ignored lightly.

The Hat plonked himself down, then Geoff. Neither
spoke, both coated from head to foot in filth and grime, although no one in this
grubby enclosure could be called clean to any real degree, so the pair didn’t
stick out especially. Wiremu dumped his bowl and spoon in the washing tub at
the end of the trestle table and began making his way over too. Lord Brown turned
to the other end of the gym, just as the girl reappeared then untied the dog,
and leant against the wall beside the changing room, crouching down and putting
her arms around the animal. It occurred to him a cleaning job done that quickly
was unlikely to appease her father, or the Mason—

BOOOMPfffh!!
A
discernable shudder ran through the floorboards and the dull crump of an
explosion rattled the gym. People stared around: bug-eyed, cringing, and unsure
what new calamity had overtaken them. The majority focused on the changing room
end, where the sound appeared to emanate. The dog began barking and the girl
grabbed it’s muzzle. Her left hand reached up and opened the changing room door.
A thick waft of smoke poured forth and she immediately shut it.

‘What the hell was that!’ some frightened
voice gasped nearby. Others scrambled to their feet, preparing to bolt in case
the whole building came down. One fellow stood near the main door by the
Mason’s tower, yelling frantically and pointing a tennis racquet in the
direction of the changing room. Wiremu raced towards the source of the blast,
ducking and weaving between the throng. For a brief, unsettling instant, there
was so much upheaval, and it’d become such a tumultuous shambles, that Lord
Brown couldn’t have told you within twenty heads exactly how many people were
in that space. He stood on tiptoes and ran another tally.
A hundred and forty-five?
Who knew. In the seconds it took to recount, the girl and dog had disappeared
and weren’t in the vicinity of the door, so must’ve reentered the changing room.

Ken’s anxious face blocked his view. ‘What
was it? What’ll we do?’ The Hat and Geoff had gone, already halfway to the
changing room.

Jerry appeared alongside, tugging Ken’s
sleeve. ‘Come on, let’s go see.’

 ‘No!’ ordered Lord Brown. ‘Wait. They’ll be
alright for a minute, just wait here. We need to get back to first principles.’
Both men paused, puzzled. ‘We have to . . . yes, we have to
find soap!’

Confusion replaced Ken’s fear. ‘What? Find
what?’

‘Soap. We urgently need soap.’

Jerry reacted first. ‘I don’t have any. Used
it all up. Why?’

‘Where can we get some then?’ No time for elaborations
or explanations or any of the other complications. ‘Where? It’s critical!’

Jerry pondered amidst the mayhem, pulling on
his bushy moustache. ‘We might get some in there?’ He pointed at the changing
room. ‘There’s showers in there.’ Wiremu, the Hat and a number of others had already
entered, and the Mason was barely meters from the door.

‘Of course! Go! Go!’ Lord Brown needed one
more item besides the soap. Supportive documentation. He went to the Hat’s vacant
bedroll and lifted the edge. Yes! The original book of crazy first principles.

Jerry and Ken stood watching the girl when Lord
Brown walked in. She appeared to be coming out of shock, only just beginning to
talk. The room felt cold; colder than the gym itself because the explosion had
blown out the window above where the dunny used to be, and a damp wind now
blustered through. The wooden walls of the cubicle were buckled outwards, pockmarked
with holes and splattered in faeces. The door of the cubicle was completely off
its hinges, flat on the floor near the shower stalls. Pieces of broken
porcelain lay scattered about and a short, jagged section of pipe protruded
from the floor at the back of the cubicle. The Mason held his lantern high,
surveying the scene.

The girl rubbed her eye with the heel of her
palm, staring at the remains of the toilet, perplexed. ‘That pipe must’ve gone
up! I
thought
I could smell gas. I was cleaning it, you know, like you
wanted, and having a ciggie with the window open and there was this weird smell,
so I left me smoke on that sill up there, and went out for a second. I didn’t
want to put it out cos I only had one match. Must’ve been the gases, set it off.’

The Mason gaped open-mouthed in disbelief at
the cubicle walls, then turned to the girl’s father. ‘You let her smoke as well?’

Wiremu gave his daughter a hard stare. ‘Sure.
Why not.’

She pulled a packet from her top pocket and nonchalantly
flipped the lid with her thumb, then held it out to the Mason. ‘Sorry mate. You
want one?’ He shook his head vehemently. Lord Brown was impressed. The
cigarettes showed premeditation
and
cunning. Style too. He had no idea where
she’d obtained the actual dynamite, or whatever it was she’d used to demolish
the lavatory.

The Mason held his lantern higher, studying
the walls. ‘At least no one was hurt, I ’spose.’ He entered the cubicle.

‘Found a bit!’ shouted Ken from a shower
stall on the other side of the room, but no one paid him any attention. An
acrid, firecracker stink lingered which smelt nothing at all like methane gas. Rank,
putrid water shimmered nearly ankle deep over parts of the concrete floor and
soon everyone’s shoes were soaked.

‘Well, at least no one’s hurt,’ repeated the
Mason lamely, his voice echoing and dull off the wet walls. They weren’t even
using the room, so who really cared? He turned to leave the cubicle. Lord Brown
fell to his knees in the doorway, clutching a book to his chest and blocking the
Mason’s exit.

‘I think
I
be hurt, sir,’ he pleaded,
eyes stretched wide and fearful at the Mason. ‘I think I be pox.’

The Mason recognized the book, and the old
man looked all too familiar. ‘What did you say?

‘I be pox!’ grimaced Lord Brown, louder, and
holding out the book. ‘I be pox!’

‘I know you! You were going around yesterday
asking everyone about “Boogiemen” weren’t you!? I had more than one complaint
about that! And isn’t that my—’

‘Yes! Yes!’ Yellowy, pus-like foam bubbled
freely from the corner of the old man’s mouth. He coughed, and bubbles shot
from his nose straight at the Mason, who tried to backstep, tripped on a
section of broken toilet and was forced to put his hand on the buckled wall to
regain balance.

‘The pox! The pox!’ The Bible waggled in the
Mason’s face. People were leaving the changing room at a rapid rate of knots. The
book was held open at Leviticus, where the Hat had glued (using chewed-up rice)
the torn out figure of Hand-crank girl. The Mason made a grab in horror for his
Bible, before realizing it was completely splattered in foam and withdrew smartly
without touching it. He held the lantern at full stretch, looking for a way
around this accursed, diseased old man and out of this awful cubicle.

What had he done to incur wrath of this
magnitude? It must’ve been something truly dreadful to offend God this badly. He
scratched his cheek, almost wonderstruck at how shockingly his life had
deteriorated. This insane old man, his Bible, that awful girl . . . ?
This must be absolute rock-bottom: whatever happens from here, nothing could possibly
be worse. But if these people stay, things were almost guaranteed to continue
to deteriorate. There was only one solution: they must go. His cheek felt
sticky. He licked his lips nervously, the taste foul beyond belief. He lowered
the lantern, seeing his fingers dappled with faeces from the toilet wall.

An hour later they gave the bus back to
Jerry. Delivered it right to the door of the gymnasium and even threw some extra
diesel in the tank. Lord Brown, and all his associates, plus a number of people
who’d even been sitting near them, were ordered on no uncertain terms to leave
Tamworth on the double, chop-chop.

Pronto!

At one minute past midnight the Masons hung
the looter. They bound his hands then tied a lantern to one side of a power
pole, and the rope to the other, which is a very poor way to hang a man but
they’d never done it before. A crowd of seven watched silently; he cried and
begged when they did it, so no one enjoyed it much. Halfway through he managed
to twist his body and wrap his legs around the pole, where it seemed he might dangle,
gurgling forever, until the newly-elected Mason’s deputy from the gym was told
to crack his feet, with that tennis racket, and eventually the looter let go
and just hung there, jerking, and twitching, in gradually fading spasms.

It took twelve, long minutes for him to slowly
strangle.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Vodka

T
he Hyatt’s foyer was cold and unwelcoming with the depressive ambiance
of discount morgue on a Monday morning. A concierge wearing a grim, steely face
and grubby uniform lounged against his podium beside the reception counter,
while a bellhop leant on a baggage trolley with nothing on it. Forsyth had passed
the restaurant on his stroll here and it’d been closed. Most of the internal lights
were switched off apart from every second or third overhead tube in the main
hallways.

No one manned the reception desk, so the
bellhop straightened himself with enormous reluctance, swung up the edge of the
counter and ducked beneath, disappearing through a cunningly disguised wood panel
door behind the desk. Forsyth assumed this was to fetch someone to attend to him,
but not feeling in great need of attendance, he opened the front door and stepped
boldly into the breach.

The veranda stretched left and right, ten meters
in either direction. Only one man: four meters to the right, reclining in a
chair pushed back at a precarious angle with his feet lazily propped against
the rail. A spluttering lantern flickered on the deck beside him and his chair looked
padded in some embroidered silky, gold fabric which was far too stylish for a
veranda, even at the Hyatt, so clearly purloined from indoors. He gave Forsyth
a nod: the combat fatigues seemed to warrant a second, bored, up-and-down glance
before he returned to staring blankly into space.

Out the front of the hotel a fog lurked and
the very wispiest of breezes swirled, driving the mist around aimlessly at a
snail’s pace in toxic, soupy drifts. The temperature had to be near zero. A
more pronounced puff momentarily opened a break and he saw two lights: one at
the front gate at least eighty meters distant, and a second coming from a shack
on the front lawn. A moment later the fog closed and both vanished. He recalled
seeing the shack when driving in with the Brigadier.

Another eddy parted the fog and the shack reemerged.
It might be worth ascertaining who dwelt there. The breeze eased back but the flicker
of light remained, suggesting the fog could be clearing. If he moved now, it should
be possible to stroll quietly in that direction without alerting the guards on
the gate. The man on the golden chair may be more problematical.

The longer he hesitated, the more suspicious
it’d be when he
did
move. A diversionary plan was required. Without
further ado, Forsyth began whistling a regimental marching ditty and strode
down the steps, hands clasped confidently behind his back. He stopped two
meters from the base of the steps. ‘Righto!’

The chair scraped forward and the man leant
over the rail to see what was going on. He watched, bemused, through half a
dozen star jumps, a series of burpies and a frantic burst of triple-time on the
spot. As expected, after sixty seconds he shook his head and dragged the chair
back to its original pose. Only then did Forsyth ease up a smidge. Perfect.

He executed a smooth 180 degree turn, at time
and a half, until facing the shack; puffs of breath coming harder now, clearly visible
against the cracks of light. A shadow crossed the corner of the shack and he immediately
slowed, in order to focus. It’d been a squat, slinking shape, pressed low
against the wall. Perhaps a person doubled over, or a child or an animal? The
silhouette moved again, coming to a halt at the right-hand corner of the
building. It definitely wasn’t a roo or dingo, more like a child. Out playing? He
glanced around, taking in the darkness, and the cold and the fog, and realized no
kid’s going to be out doing playsy’s in this shit.

A car engine burst into life, not from the
direction of the main road, but around the side of the hotel, perhaps two hundred
meters. It revved angrily, over and over. Headlights swept around the corner
and a late-model 4WD sped past the veranda, veering dangerously close and forcing
Forsyth to take a step back before it ground to a halt on the asphalt, some sixty-odd
meters from the hotels front door. It’d pulled up behind a small truck that
until then hadn’t been visible. The engine was switched off, then the headlights.
He waited for the driver to get out but no one emerged.

The man in the golden chair leant forward, also
checking out the 4WD. He didn’t seem overly perturbed and merely cupped his
hands, blowing into them in a futile effort to warm up, while watching the
vehicle and totally ignoring Forsyth. Without warning, he got up and left, withdrawing
into the hotel. He didn’t take the lantern or chair so apparently neither were
his in the first place, although it still seemed wasteful to leave them like
that.

All that palaver with the exercises hadn’t
even been necessary then. At least it’d warmed him up. The shape beside the
shack still hadn’t moved and
did
look distinctly like a person lying
there doggo; maybe listening, or peeking surreptitiously through a gap in the
walls.

The knife taped to his right calf was giving
him gyp and itchy as all hell. A flat, 4-inch Ukrainian spring-loaded flick-blade:
the sort of weapon you’d normally only wear for the briefest of periods (one
would hope) but his had been on for four days running, and the ingrown hairs were
driving him insane. He had no tape to spare and never really felt safe enough at
any point to remove it permanently, being largely an emergency tool. A standard
issue, 9-inch combat knife was obviously still strapped to the left side of his
belt, but the flick-knife had considerably better surgical precision for the
more fiddly jobs, like peeling oranges and gutting etc, which is why you’d say “largely”
emergency. He lifted his leg and scratched the offending calf. A lot to pay for
a nicely peeled orange. Mind you, he’d probably shag the Brigadier’s Alsatian
right now for even an averagely peeled orange, so price is a very relative beast,
isn’t it?

The 4WD stood barely within the hotels
sphere of light. The man from the golden chair appeared to have gone for good, so
Forsyth opted to modify Plan A, and have a preliminary chat with the driver who’d
almost bowled him before checking out the shack. The mysterious shadow lying
beside it hadn’t budged an inch.

With a rolling gait, and hands behind his back,
he casually strolled over then knocked lightly on the driver’s side window. After
squinting for longer than you’d think was polite, the driver wound down the window.
He had a pinched, ratty face and dirty overalls so probably wasn’t part of the official
Hyatt entouragé.

‘Hello there, is this a hotel car? I’m
trying to get a lift into—’

‘Fuck off. It’s spoken’f. S’mister Snow’s
car.’ The earthy aroma of vodka gushed forth and Forsyth could make out the profile
of a bottle in his lap, tilted against the wheel. Vodka doesn’t have much odor
so he must’ve whipped back a skinful for the cab to reek like that.

‘Alrighty.’ He smiled agreeably, touching a
finger to his hat. ‘I’ll check with Mr Snow. Sorry to bother you.’ And just to
let the chap know he hadn’t got it all his own way, finished up with, ‘Carry on
there then.’

‘Right. You fucken check then.’ The driver
wound up his window.

That went well. He sauntered back to the
veranda, hands clasped rearwards again because without doubt the man would be
watching. The shape by the shack remained frozen, which makes your objective
extremely difficult to analyze, as any sniper worth his or her salt will warn
you, but now that he could see from a slightly sharper angle, it looked even
more like a person. Just before reaching the veranda steps, he swerved away,
towards the shack. Snow’s driver was hopefully more concerned with his vodka
party-for-one to notice the late change in tack. The closer to the shack he got,
the more certain he became it
was
a person, and the louder his footsteps
seemed . . . 

Less than two meters away, the figure
finally moved. He darted in for the attack. A child!

‘Let go ya cunt!’ the kiddie rasped, in a
very un-childlike fashion, and a voice far too deep. It was an extremely short,
stocky man; shivering like some mad thing, then a moment later he collapsed, completely
limp.

The woman inside the rusty, corrugated iron building
took off the dwarf’s wet clothes and put a set of her daughter’s dry clothes on
him, then one of her husband’s jerseys, followed by a blanket wrapped around toga-style
for good measure. He was scarcely four foot tall with an oversized head like an
upside-down pyramid, topped off with an unruly mop of wiry, jet black hair. In
better days you may’ve said he had a certain rugged handsomeness, but with only
one ear and coated head to foot in more dirt than Forsyth had ever seen on
another human being, he was certainly no oil painting now. And the smell!! Good
god, it was bad! Numerous angry, inflamed scratches and bites covered his head,
neck and arms.

She said it could be hypothermia and they
ort to keep him awake. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Winston. What’s yours?’

‘Kate.’

His smile might’ve been construed as
lecherous, except for the bright-yellow knitted girl’s scarf, and hat with
bunny ears, and the dirt, which made it just plain funny so everyone laughed. It
seemed a long while since Forsyth had heard a group of people spontaneously laugh.

‘You got any nibbles?’ the wee man asked.

The four refugees in the shack had arrived off
a boat from New Zealand. They’d turned up on a long-range trawler out of New
Plymouth, which took eighteen days to cross the Tasman then promptly sank after
running aground inside Sydney heads on a reef that never used to be there,
according to the skipper’s charts. Peter and Kate Nicholson introduced
themselves as dairy farmers from central Waikato, along with their daughter Scarlett,
who formally offered her hand to shake. Murray, also a farmer, was older, maybe
in his sixties. He politely shook hands too.

‘I knew the bloke had the trawler. We lost
track of all the others at Rushcutters Bay,’ explained Murray. ‘Haven’t seen
hide nor hair of ‘em since. Not a one.’

‘How many of you came across?’

‘Twenty-three. She was a bloody shambles in
Sydney, I’ll tell ya. When we found a cop that knew what was goin’ on, they
pretty well whisked us here straight away.’

‘Been here ever since,’ added Kate. She lowered
her voice and stole an anxious glance over her shoulder, at the door of the
shack, as though someone were there. ‘I don’t think they’ve heard hardly
anything from back home.’

‘We reckon that’s why they wanted a word
with us,’ reasoned Murray. ‘We’re the only ones. I’ll tell ya, she’s all
looking a bit grim, if you ask me.’

‘That’s right,’ agreed Kate, nodding. Scarlett
laid a single bowl and tablespoon on a box-crate in the middle of the pressed dirt
floor. Peter helped the dwarf prop himself up in front of the crate.

‘We had newspaper laid down till we found a
snake under it, so we got rid of it altogether.’ She brushed at a flyaway strand
of blonde fringe and shrugged, then smiled, crinkling her flawless olive skin and
putting a distinct twinkle in those huge hazel eyes. In Australia you’d guess
she was a surf lifesaver, or a model, but in New Zealand she’d ended up a dairy
farmer’s wife helping out with milking at four-thirty every morning, seven days
a week. Must be like being in the Foreign Legion.

While Kate stirred half a cup of macaroni into
boiling water on the primus stove, Murray gave the lowdown on developments in New
Zealand. ‘The tidal waves you lot got here weren’t as bad over there, but the
earthquakes were worse, and a whole stack of volcanoes went off around Auckland.
Rangitoto in the Hauraki Gulf re-erupted after being dormant 600 years, and
another one, right in the middle of Auckland itself. One bloke we spoke to said
it was Mt. Eden, and someone else said Mt. Albert, so we never got the full
story on that. We know some big ones by Rotorua and Lake Taupo went up. You
could see the glow from the Taupo eruption way out where we were, in New
Plymouth, so it must’ve bin a monster. The ash got so bad in the end we
couldn’t a stayed any longer if we’d wanted’t.’

Kate drained the water from the pot, saving
it into a billy next to the primus, then tipped the steaming macaroni into the
bowl on the crate. The dwarf grabbed it and began shoveling the food down with
a vengeance, stopping every few seconds to blow in and out rapidly to cool his
burnt mouth. In addition to being a tad grubby, table manners clearly weren’t
his strong point either. ‘It’s hot,’ she said.

‘At least we could see a few feet in front
of us there,’ Peter muttered.

‘You know the story,’ growled Murray. ‘When
the only light you’ve got is comin’ from molten lava, it’s time to move.’ The
four New Zealanders went quiet, the silence only broken by the dwarf repeatedly
gobbling and blowing on the stodgy pasta.

Scarlett stared at Forsyth, eyes wide. ‘It was
really scary.’ He wondered how it would’ve been: sailing off in some rickety
old boat on a wild, churning sea into a black horizon with your whole country
erupting and blazing behind you, knowing there was no way of ever returning.

‘She was pretty touch and go,’ agreed
Murray.

‘What’ve they said to you here?’

‘Nothin!’ he exclaimed. ‘Bloody nothing! A
bloke spoke to us when we arrived, and I don’t think he even knew where New
Zealand was. Thought it was part a bloody Tassie! Then this other bloke spoke
to us, just yesterdey, and he was a lot more switched on. Minister of met-her-a-logical,
something-a-rather, I don’t know, but he—’