The Worm King (40 page)

Glass crunched to the rear.

‘Hey! Hey! Hey!’
Winston tugged urgently at Forsyth’s leg.
‘You hear that?’

A headlight appeared inside the warehouse on
the far side near the main door. More glass broke. They needed to make their
way through to the rear of the warehouse then go next door to the depot workshop,
where the fuel truck was. From there, they could draw the enemy in, and take
them on.

He crouched down next to Winston. As quietly
as he could, told him what they needed to do was:

Z
igzag down our path to the back of the
warehouse and on the way, kill that man we can hear moving there now. Come on! Don’t
let me down here! We need to get to the fuel tanker before the soldiers come
over, so we only have to deal with the ones with the sledgehammers. Your axe’ll
be perfect. Go for their shins. I’ll use my knife and save the glocks for last
resort, then we’ll hunker down with the tanker—hopefully the others have got
there too—because that’s what they want and they won’t want to blow it up, or
they wouldn’t all be crawling around out there like that in the first place, so
if we stay close to—

‘Holy fuck!’ the dwarf exploded. ‘That’s the
best you’ve got! I got shit-all interest in that plan, I’ll give you the big tip!’

Ssssshhh!’
Forsyth jammed his hand hard over Winston’s mouth.

Despite Winston’s initial reluctance, the
strategy came to pass much as expected. It degenerated into a series of
stumbling, brutal encounters, each more desperate and frenzied than the last
until both men felt literally drenched in gore.

Wiremu and his Tamworth team managed to hold
the sledgehammerers at bay from the fuel truck using an assortment of shovels,
iron bars, pickaxes and chains, for the loss of three men. Forsyth shot five of
the attackers, getting four in the stomach before the others scarpered to
regroup. If you go for the belly they’ll scream like mad and it ensures a
second man’s usually tied up carrying off his comrade, although all would’ve
died anyway. A glock 9x19mm slug only weighs 8 grams but when it’s travelling 1,300
feet per second it makes a real bitch of a mess at close range.

In the early stages, as they were fanning
out, the soldiers killed three of Francesco’s eight men. They were caught
within the confines of Pedros and only Francesco, Zelda and two others managed
to flee through a kitchen window then dash over the road to the depot workshop.
The two Yass guards, who Forsyth gave chocolate less than two hours previously,
regrettably decided to make a run for the safe house and fell victim to
sledgehammers. It wasn’t a pretty sight. Their .22 lay beside the bodies, its
five-shot cartridge empty. He’d never even heard it go off, which could’ve
easily faded into the overall background noise.

One unfortunate from Dick’s team tripped and
fell in his haste to retreat. The unsheathed knife in his belt spiked through the
femoral artery at the top of his thigh and he died eight minutes later and
twelve liters lighter. The opposition hadn’t counted on the ferocity of a Tūhoe
warrior charging whilst yelling a war cry and swinging a pickaxe, so several of
those with sledgehammers simply dropped their cumbersome weapons, turned tail,
and bolted.

Wiremu managed to grab one of the soldiers,
and cut his throat from ear to ear. As the man fell, bubbling, another Māori
bludgeoned him over the head with an industrial tire iron, first smashing off the
helmet then pulverizing the top of the skull, hitting him again and again and—

That’ll teach him

Until it was just neck, with an unshapely
lump of meat wobbling and squirting on top.

The soldiers and the remnants of Dick’s men
made one unsuccessful bayonet charge but in the end, for the soldiers, it
became less a strategic-training slash motivational exercise and more a fight
for survival, so exactly forty-two minutes after their arrival, the trucks
departed. And so endith the tactical, rolling maul, in-the-dark version of
hand-to-hand combat. A game the whole family can play. Difficulty level:
Savage. Quarter given: Zip.

Dr Azziz, the gentle Egyptian, bent to help
an injured man and for his troubles was stabbed up through the ribs by a
sergeant of the 3
^rd
regulars dossed out in full battle regalia. The
bayonet gouged into his left ventricle and Azziz died within seconds. The
cricket playing chaps, Nigel and Alistair, declined to wait in the bus because
it smelt and as a result both died violently. Alistair sat in Zelda’s sofa-chair
and when they lifted him off and laid him on the ground there was a wide, soppy
stain over the seat and back and armrests and all down the sides, so they had
to chuck the chair outside. Now the only furniture in the safe-house was the
empty beer crate, and even that had splatter on it.

Old Pedro got shot in the forehead. Not
bayoneted, as they’d obviously done with Alistair and Nigel, showing a modicum
of compassion you’d have to say.

Oh happy day.

One has to be grateful for small mercies.

Dick and Bob left without the tanker and the
soldiers never found the bus, parked well out back. They didn’t bring the
twins. Shop mannequins: dressed up in kid’s sweaters, blonde wigs and woolly
hats. One mannequin was much further up the road than the other so they’d
obviously tossed them at speed. The second one had a gigantic kitchen knife
stabbed through its plastic forehead. Francesco said the knife definitely
hadn’t been there when the Falcon first drove past and pulled up in front of
Pedros, meaning Bob took the time to do it as they roared off. The mannequins
were naked from the waist down.

Chapter Forty-One

Watermelon

I
t was so quiet and still in the hotel room that Natasha began to
worry everyone in the whole world might’ve died because of something else
really bad that’d happened, even worse than the comet, and maybe they were the
last two kids left alive anywhere.

No food or water had been brought for ages,
and they’d banged and banged and banged on the door but no one came so eventually
they gave up. She hadn’t seen Mrs Sheng, or the man with the funny lisp, for a
long time, although it was impossible to say exactly
how
long because
you couldn’t tell day or night and they didn’t have a watch and even if they
had one, you wouldn’t be able to see it. Once she’d seen a blind man in some
film (which she didn’t remember the name of) telling the time by feeling the
hands on his watch. Natasha supposed that if they
had
a watch they
could’ve busted the glass off and felt the hands too. But then how would you
know whether it’s eleven o’clock in the morning, or eleven at night? Everything
seemed so upside down and around about that it was impossible to work out what’s
what.

She was so hungry, but more than anything,
thirsty. Was that a noise outside, in the distance? Someone shouting. ‘Did you
hear that?’ she whispered.

A lengthy pause. ‘No?’

Must’ve imagined it. Many hours ago—or maybe
it was days ago?—they’d heard lots of yelling, and popping sounds like a car
backfiring but hadn’t been able to tell where they’d come from. Definitely outside,
rather than in the hallway, although whether from the front or back of the
hotel they didn’t know even with ears pressed against the window.

The feeling they were being watched came,
and went; Natasha grew to realize this simply couldn’t be. It was so dark in
the room though, you couldn’t tell.

Her mouth felt dry as a bucket of sand and
she’d a splitting headache. An evil little elf kept trampling around up in her
brain going
thumpity, thump, thumpity thump, thumpity, thump.

All they could do was snuggle under the
solitary blanket, and wait. A horrible stink came from the toilet in the bathroom.
Someone had done number two’s in there—quite a few times by the look of it—and
the flusher didn’t work. It was like being locked up in a big stinky box: like
a coffin, and she instantly regretted letting her mind wander down
that
darkest
of paths.

When the girls were eight their grandfather died,
and Natasha had to go to the funeral without Krystal who was in bed with the
flu. Their mum said everyone had enough on their plates without getting the flu
so Krystal had to stay home and be looked after by Aunty Emily who was always
grumpy, and never let them watch TV when they wanted. Natasha didn’t want to go
to the funeral either because she’d always been a little scared of their
grandfather who was even grumpier than Aunt Emily. She thought if he was scary
when he’d been alive, he’d be a lot scarier to look at when he wasn’t. She’d
said goodbye to her sister on the morning of the funeral and rubbed her face all
over Krystals, hoping to get the flu as well so she wouldn’t have to go but it
totally didn’t work.

Prior to Granddad, the only funeral she’d
been to was when Dad buried their cat Mindy in the back garden after she got
run over by a car going past the house. That’d been awfully sad, but at the
time Dad explained how Mindy was now in this enormous cat heaven with heaps of
mice to chase, then afterwards they went to Burger King and had cheeseburgers
and chocolate ice cream sundaes, so the day ended up being sort of okay. However
there was nothing happy whatsoever about Granddad’s funeral. As she watched the
casket being lowered into the ground, a terrible reality struck that this would
happen to her one day too, and for a few moments was more scared than she’d
ever been in her entire life. Being buried in a dark, wet hole forever must be
the worst thing that could ever happen to a person. Fear rolled over in giant waves
like at the beach but instead of saltwater, this thick black sticky stuff, giving
her a huge stomach cramp and seconds later she began shaking uncontrollably and
burst out crying, so her mother had to take her back to the car before the
priest who was standing at the head of the grave had finished his talk. On the
way home, her parents had an argument and Natasha got the impression Mum hadn’t
even wanted her to go to the funeral in the first place.

The day after this, she did get the flu, and
had to stay in bed for three days which made her miss a school field trip to
Maroubra beach which she’d really been looking forward to.

There it was
again . . . that feeling someone stood there . . . watching.
Her mind must be playing tricks. If she were wrong about that, maybe it was
wrong to just sit around and wait for help to arrive too. When Francesco was there
he’d spoken with Astrid about unscrewing a leg from the bed and using it to
smash the window, then scale down to the ground with the blanket after tying
knots in it. He said it probably wouldn’t work because he’d seen men outside
with torches and they’d get nabbed before they could all get out the window,
let alone run away from the hotel. But the girls hadn’t spotted any lights
outside for quite a while, so maybe it
would
work now? On the other hand
deliberately smashing a hotel window might get them in even more trouble than
they were already, so Natasha was reluctant to resort to this. She missed
Francesco. She even missed Winston, the foul-mouthed dwarf. More than anything
she missed her Mum and Dad and wondered again for the zillionth time where on
earth they were, and why they hadn’t come.

Someone was at door: whispering.

Without saying anything they edged off the
bed and felt their way over. Krystal held her arm so tightly Natasha could feel
fingernails digging into her flesh.

‘Do wu want thum watermewon?’

A watermelon! Choice! It was the man with the
lisp and weird eyes who they didn’t like, but a watermelon! She couldn’t
imagine anything better.

‘Get back fwom da door, I’m not awowed in. Wight
back, against da far wall.’

They moved away as instructed, until touching
the wall by the window.

‘I’ll weave it in a bag,’ he said, louder. ‘And
a wittle torth for wu too. Don’t towel anyone dough.’

Natasha heard the door being unlocked then opened.
No light came in, so it must be dark in the hall too. Plastic rustled. A few
seconds passed, the door slammed shut and the lock clicked. Silence.

They scuttled over, each with an arm
outstretched feeling the way. Natasha found the torch first and switched it on.
The batteries were so flat they barely worked. She picked up the bag. It was
about the right weight, but didn’t feel like a watermelon: kind of soft, and
not completely smooth and round like a melon ort to be. She opened it while her
sister eagerly tugged at the edges.

Mrs Sheng’s severed head stared up
sightlessly.

A chuckle came from the other side of the
door and Krystal screamed.

Natasha fainted.

Chapter Forty-Two

God

A
t wake for Azziz the Hat’s head lay bare. The bald patch made him look
like a Monk. John the Monk? Strictly speaking a ring rather than a patch, where
the slouch hat normally sat. He seemed uncomfortable and Forsyth realized it
was the first time he’d actually seen it off. It rested uneasily in his lap. He
fidgeted with the brim and any second it looked ready of its own volition to
pounce back onto his head.

It certainly appeared to be an authentic, felt,
military-issue slouch hat. They’ve been made in Australia for the forces by the
Akubra Company for many years and have a uniquely distinctive shape to them. Could
even be a genuine Grade One. He had to give him credit, the crown was nicely
creased. A lovely square at the front and excellent indents on the top and side
corners. He’d even got the tricky half-indent correct, the one on the side of
the crown towards the lower front which holds the leading square firmly in place.

That’s about where the similarities ended. Usually
there’d be a regimental Rising Sun badge pinning the left-hand brim up against
the crown (so rifles could be shouldered without brim damage) however John’s
badge read: “Lose Weight Now—Ask Me How!” A number of Australian units such as the
cavalry and light horse wore an emu plume behind their Rising Sun, dating back
to World War One when they’d chase down emus and pluck out feathers as a mark
of riding skill, as you do. John’s inserted feather was a tatty, off-black
affair with tines missing and bent, possibly from a crow or raven, but no way emu.
Around the torso of the hat would normally be wound a seven-band puggaree
representing the six Australian states and territories. Instead, he’d half a
dozen winds of orange day-glo insulation tape. You couldn’t see the right-hand
side of the crown, where a soldier’s unit color patch would normally be, but if
Forsyth remembered correctly there was nothing there anyway, just more tape.

John raised the Hat and eased it back on,
heaving a sigh of relief. He lifted his glass.

They were holding the wake at an abandoned
furniture shop on the main street of Yass. Lord Brown possessed a wino’s nose
for sniffing out liquor: he’d unearthed a bottle of Bundaberg rum, two of gin,
and one of Mexicanõ de la Squealer, complete with pickled worm. The owners had left
the showroom reasonably well decked out and clearly when the catastrophe struck,
people opted to track down food rather than a free sofa. How very bouché of
them. It was the wake for Azziz!

It was the wake for Azziz, and others who
died in the Battle of Yass. Or would you call it Battle of Yass, Part One? You
can never really tell unless you kill every single one of the other guys, plus
their families, and acquaintances. Anyone that even
looks
like them. Otherwise
it just becomes an ongoing struggle fading into a multi-family niggle and
gradually forgotten only when long generations pass.

‘My great, great uncle Bill wore one exactly
like it at Tobruk, in 1941. He was at the siege.’

‘What siege?’ asked Āmiria.

‘Siege of Tobruk. It lasted two hundred and forty-two
days.’ He looked far more comfortable with the Hat back on. One might say proud
even, although that could be because it covered up the balding, ring-patch
arrangement he had going on up there, which the insidious hat created anyway. ‘He
ran in the Benghazi handicap, when Rommel chased the 9
^th
back from
El Agheila to Tobruk with his panzers. Uncle Bill got killed taking on a kraut
machine gun nest by himself at Ed Duda ridge three days before the siege ended.
When I was fifteen, my Dad took me to his grave in Libya and I’ve worn one like
his ever since.’

Winston held up his glass in a short-armed
salute. ‘Haven’t stopped drinkin either!’ The Hat appeared to take this as a
complement, nodded, and drank in return.

As an afterthought the Hat raised a toast of
his own: ‘Here’s to Azziz and me great, great Uncle William the Hat!’ A
staggered chorus of “Azziz,
mumble, mumble
 . . . the
Hat!’ erupted from the fifteen or so mourners scattered around the drinks table.

Lord Brown, Winston, Astrid, Wiremu and his
daughter, and Sgt Kevin and his son reclined with the Hat on a huge,
eight-seater, L-shaped leather sofa. Opposite them Geoff, Tamati, Rangi, Hemi and
Murray lounged on a luxurious merino couch. A least two dozen others were scattered
around the showroom: from Griffith, Tamworth, Peak Hill and a couple from Yass
who didn’t have anywhere else to go. Four electric lanterns lit most of the room
apart from the darker corners. These were charged up periodically on a petrol generator
run from the fuel truck, now parked out behind the showroom. Forsyth’s own Grandpa-style
chair with adjustable footrests and lumbar support faced the back of the room,
where he figured any surprise attack might come from, not the windows at the
front because others would see that quicker than him and raise the alarm. Facing
the rear also lessened the chance of catching a sneaky pot-shot from the road.

Outside it remained dark as a tomb and cold
as one too. A wasteland. Late-December, and the comet landed exactly eighty-seven
days ago according to Lord Brown. Only 87 days! This seemed so short, yet the
devastation so immense. It’d been more than just 87 days without sunlight. It’d
been the king-hit combo of the earthquakes and the tsunamis, and no power or
water or phones and bugger all in the way of transport. And the cold. The lack
of light wasn’t just starving people to death, the darkness changed their
psychology along the way making them more prone to bad decisions and magnifying
the negative impact. It’d led to a catastrophic seizure of all economic and
social systems, crippling even the most basic activities. Akin to a heart
attack, Lord Brown thought. He said the human population will have been pared
back to less than 5% of where it stood three months ago. Perhaps only 1%, which
equated to 70 million survivors worldwide.

True, an insipid speck of sunlight
had
wormed its way through, three or four times in the last month, and each time the
bearing seemed about where the sun ort to be. But there was no plant life left alive
whatsoever, and everything lay grey and damp and dead. A dangerous, silent wasteland.

Wiremu asked Forsyth about “ordnance.”

The matter of ordnance arose because Astrid raised
the question of the twins, and Tamati expressed an opinion they should immediately
strike back: have another go at Snow, so Forsyth replied they were low on
ordnance, more to put them off than anything. Often if you use technical terminology
like “ordnance” rather than “ammo”, you’ll throw someone off the trail easier. Unfortunately
that didn’t work with Wiremu, which he should’ve anticipated. The Māori
wouldn’t tolerate plain old running-out-of-ammo while he still had shovels and
chains and rakes or whatever.

‘Hang on,’ said Āmiria, before he could
craft a suitable answer. She began rummaging in her backpack. Wiremu frowned. The
bus wasn’t deemed safe enough to leave personal belongings and most bags were
dumped in piles near the lanterns so everyone could keep an eye on them. She
withdrew a towel, and unwrapped two hand grenades. One remained on the towel
while the other she picked up and rolled nonchalantly in her palm. ‘Is this
ordnance?’

‘Hey girl, I told you to watch out with those
things!’ her father exclaimed angrily.

Astrid sat beside Āmiria, and looked down
in disbelief. Her eyes must be deceiving her? Surely this child can’t be
allowed to play with explosives! She raised her glass and took a deep swallow
of Bundy.

Forsyth had to admit to qualms himself, and was
tempted to step straight over and take them off her, but for some reason it
looked like she’d been carting them around for a while, the way she fingered
that Australian-made Thales F1-class anti-personal fragmentation grenade, and hopefully
she’d be able to squeeze another couple of minutes out of it before doing
something silly and blowing them all to hell.

Without any due haste her father reached
across Astrid and took the one out of her palm, then the one from her lap. Forsyth
relaxed somewhat. Wiremu held his hand out again, clicking fingers, and she
passed the towel and pack. He wrapped the grenades and re-stashed them in the
side-compartment. Āmiria put on an exasperated expression and folded her
arms but didn’t offer any real complaint.

The Hat sniggered and said something about
“that mason in the bog”, which Wiremu was none too pleased at.

‘And if there’s any more of
that
behavior,
I’ll take them off you for good!’ he warned sternly. Astrid spluttered into her
drink. Āmiria looked contrite. Nobody spoke for three or four minutes then
someone on the leather sofa farted, and everyone laughed.

‘You know what we should do?’ said the girl,
regaining confidence with fearsome speed. ‘Just give the ratbag the truck! As
soon as we’ve got Natasha and Krystal back, chuck the grenades at him the
minute he’s in the truck, and blow him up! Before he can double-cross us again.
Then at least we’ve got rid of him and he can’t do any other bad stuff, you
know. Even if he doesn’t bring the twins, like last time, he’ll take the truck
and we’ll still blow him up, and we’ll just have to go and collect the girls
from that hotel you said they’re at.’

‘The Hyatt,’ assisted Forsyth.

After a brief, fruitful discussion, the
consensus arrived at a view that her plan was so, so dangerous, it was
unparalleled in the field of dangerous, idiotic schemes.

He considered the angles; not because it struck
him as a serious option, but as a professional soldier he’d a responsibility to
scrutinize all schemes of a military nature. That’s the job. A bell rang . . . her
structure: he’d seen it before. Where?

It was a solution invariably ending in violence.
The plan at the depot had been based around the
avoidance
of violence
and it’d ended in a bloodbath. The girl’s idea aimed straight for violence
right from the get-go. It was one of those plans that on the face of it, looked
a shocker—elegant, it was not—but the more you drilled into it, and tried to
pin down the chance of success, the more you might go hmmmmm . . . 

He remembered! Where he’d seen a structure
akin to this before. An Israeli soldier who worked with Mossad had done something
similar with a grenade in his quest to rid the Middle East of those who didn’t
agree with his general philosophy. It occurred to Forsyth that while Mossad are
undeniably a tough bunch of wankers, this little Māori sheila is not
someone you’d want to screw with either.

In order to downplay the allure of her plan
and try and set the girl straight, he explained quietly and succinctly what
Paulie Schwartz constructed that day in an East Jerusalem street in the suburb
of Sheikh Jarrah. Then he told her about the grenades impact on surrounding
houses, and people. Instead of putting her off with a healthy dose of the
horrors of war—as he’d intended—she looked intrigued.

‘Is there a stationery shop in Yass?’ she
asked Francesco.

This darkness—Oh, this darkness has brought
very bad things to the surface. An enormous, global festering. Should it be his
job to lance this? It must be, given the occupation he’d ended up in: wandering
the world gunning down people he didn’t know for a scrawny handful of miserable
cash. His time must’ve come; these events are tailor-made. Now he couldn’t even
remember when he made the decision to do this, to take on this lifestyle. After
all, there must be a point in every boy’s existence where they say to
themselves: “I want to be a farmer,” or an engineer or a doctor or whatever
grabs their adolescent fancypants. When did
he
make that conscious
decision? What was happening on that particular day, when the sinister thought seeped
into his brain and the little voice said:
“
I want to execute people I don’t know
.”
Had his parents just given him a hiding? Maybe it was in Mr.
Denisen’s death-by-boredom science class, or after the old swine had just handed
out the hundred and shittyith detention for the week. Was it simply raining
that day, and he was down in the dumps? There had to be some logic, or reason behind
why you become a soldier.

Please Sir, what have I done to you?

Nothing. But I’m going to kill you anyway
because it’s my job, and a job’s a job.

He’s no different from Dick Snow and the
realization of this hit Forsyth like an ice-cold jolt tearing up his arse and ripping
round his spine shredding everything along the way. He splashed more gin into his
glass without any pretence of measure then walloped it down the hatch, leaving only
the harsh, jarring snarl of juniper and it didn’t warm him one little bit.

Āmiria had left with Francesco, Sgt
Kevin, Tim and the dog to visit the local bookshop, approximately five minutes
walk down the street. Funny how these days you needed two armed guards and a
dog to go do your shopping. They never warned us that was on the horizon at the
last elections.

‘You ever been in anything worse than that,
at the depot?’ slurred Winston. Being of shorter stature, the drink went to his
head pretty quick. Astrid wasn’t far behind, having picked up her run-rate on
the Bundy considerably. She’d also been making openly overt movements—touching Forsyth’s
arm and the like—and he wasn’t too comfortable with this because Francesco had mentioned
earlier that Winston “had thee hots for the little redhead,” although Winston
himself didn’t seem perturbed by her actions. Still, no point in stepping on
anyone’s toes unnecessarily. She was about a meter too short for his taste
anyway.