Death most definite sds-1 Read online

  "In the back," he says to me, as Sam catches up to us.

  I slide open the side door and scramble onto the hard bench seat inside. Sam's behind the wheel, Don beside her, and we're off with a squeal of tires. Sam takes the first corner so tightly that I'm thrown out of my seat and hit the corrugated metal floor with a grunt.

  "Put your seatbelt on," Sam says. I clamber back into my seat and pull the seatbelt across my waist.

  A car horn honks at us as we shoot past, and Sam gives it the finger.

  "Keep out of the fast lane, ya dickhead!" Don yells.

  Lissa's laughing. "Old people these days."

  "You watch who you're calling old," Don says, "or I'll come back there."

  Sam concentrates on the road.

  "I hate driving in the dark." Don reaches over and flicks on the headlights.

  "Don't you say a word," Sam growls.

  We take another corner like we're a bunch of drunken hoons on a Friday night, and even with the seatbelt on I nearly slide off the bench again. Sam knows how to drive fast, but this van is hardly handling like it's on rails.

  "So you really think Morrigan's involved in this?" I ask Don, as much to distract myself from Sam's driving as for my pressing need to know. The Morrigan argument seems absurd-I saw him wounded and I've known him for as long as I can remember. He talked me out of the nightmare of my break-up with Robyn, he's sat at the table for Christmas dinner. He's walked Molly-possibly more often than I did.

  "He's about the only one who could pull it off. The man knows everything, runs everything. And we let him," Don says. "It's probably not a good idea to trust anyone at the moment."

  Yeah, which is exactly the right thing to say to someone stuck in the back of a van while the two people up front both have guns. Then again, if they had wanted me dead I suspect that I'd be a corpse by now.

  "One thing is certain," Don says, "we need to split up. Morrigan-or whoever's hunting us-wants us to stick together."

  "Here?" Sam says.

  Don nods. "Yeah, here will do." He smiles back at me. "Milton, not a bad suburb to dump you in. At least it's near the brewery."

  Sam swings us off the road, and slams to a halt. Another car beeps its horn as it flies past, but Sam ignores it. "Sorry, Steve. I know you don't want to hear this, but Don's right. Together we're a bigger target."

  Of course she was going to side with Don. They're lovers. "Are you two going to split up as well?" I ask, a little petulantly.

  Sam nods her head, and I've never seen her look so sad. "That was the plan all along. We just wanted to see each other, before-"

  "Before we sort this thing out," Don breaks in, "and make the bastards, whoever the fuck they are, pay." Don's out of the van and is sliding the door open. "Keep breathing. I'm going to try and get in touch with Mr. D. I don't think he knows about this."

  "If he does," I say, "then none of it matters, we're all dead."

  Don nods. "That we're still breathing makes me believe he doesn't. Mr. D has much more elegant tools at his disposal than guns."

  Which is absolutely true. Death stops hearts, and stills brains with a breath. He could have killed every single Pomp with a thought. After all, he is disease, he is misadventure, and he is just stupid bad luck, almost all of which I've encountered in the last thirty-six hours.

  "Speaking of which…" He digs around under the front passenger seat. "Aha!" Don passes something to me. A pistol. "Be careful with that, it's loaded."

  I look at it like it's a scorpion. Sam rattles off some details about the weapon, which bounce just as rapidly off my skull. All I know is that it's a gun. You point it and squeeze the trigger.

  "… You got that?" Sam asks.

  "Yeah, um, yeah. Of course."

  "We have to go." Don shakes my hand roughly and I wince. There might still be a piece of glass in there. Then he pats me on the shoulder. "You'll be fine."

  "Good luck," I say, and wave at Sam. The faux smile she gives me is matched for false cheerfulness by the one I'm wearing. We're chimps surrounded by lions, grinning madly and pretending that the big cats are not circling ever closer, and that it's not all going to end in slashing claws and marrow sucked from broken bones.

  "We'll be all right," Sam says. "You take care, and keep that Lissa with you." She glances over at Lissa. "And, you, look after this guy. He's one of the good ones."

  "I will," we both say.

  Don's already back in the van. I step out and slide the door shut.

  Sam's off, crunching the gears and over-revving the engine, leaving me coughing on the edge of the road in a pall of black smoke.

  15

  Think she needs to get that gearbox seen to," Lissa says. When I don't reply she looks at me more closely. "Are you OK?"

  "I think so." Twin bars of tension run up my neck. I roll my head to the right and the crack's loud enough to make me jolt. I'm edgy all right. If this keeps up I'll be jumping at my own shadow, which might be sensible.

  "Just you and me again, kiddo," Lissa says.

  "There's worse company." My voice cracks a little. "Much worse. You've-I don't know what I'd-"

  "Don't," she says, taking a step away from me, and I know what she means. There's no future for us. There can't be. That's not how this works. No matter what else has happened, she's dead, and I'm alive. The divide is definite.

  But it's bullshit isn't it, because she's still with me. I'm not keeping her here. In fact my presence should be doing the reverse. She's a dead girl, and she shouldn't be here, but she is. That has to count for something.

  "I hope they make it," I say, all the while wishing that Lissa had made it too. Though if she had, I'd probably be dead.

  It's hardly a comforting thought, but there aren't any of those that I can find anyway.

  We get a little further away from the road, closer to the rail overpass at Milton. A black car hurtles past, one of those aggressively grille-fronted Chevrolets that must burn through about five liters a kilometer. Its engines howl like some sort of banshee. I cringe, and drop to the ground. The bad feeling-mojo, whatever-coming from the car is palpable and all I can hope is that, at the speed they're going, they don't feel me. And they mustn't, or at least they don't stop. Maybe I'm not seen as a threat.

  "Stirrers," I say, "a lot of them." I don't mention that one of them looked very much like Lissa.

  Another car follows in its wake, likewise crowded, and this one driven by the reanimated corpse of Tim's father, my Uncle Blake. He's in his golf clothes, and would look ridiculous if his face wasn't so cruel, his eyes set on the road ahead. Once they've passed, I get to my feet and watch them rush up and down the undulations that make up this part of Milton Road.

  In just a few moments they've run two sets of lights, nearly taking out a taxi in the process, and are already passing the twenty-four-hour McDonald's and service station, shooting up the hill past the Fourex brewery, leaving mayhem in their wake. Cars are piled up at both intersections, their horns blaring, shattered windscreens glittering.

  "Their driving's almost as bad as Sam's," I say. Lissa drifts between the road and me. She looks tired and tenuous, her skin lit with the mortuary-blue pallor of the dead, and I wonder how much longer I'll have her with me. Not too much, I reckon. I ram that thought down, push it as deep as I can.

  "Sam was flying, wasn't she?" Lissa says.

  "Don't you mean, 'Miss Edwards'?"

  Lissa's eyes flare, but she doesn't take the bait. "She and Don should be at least a couple of suburbs away by now."

  I hope Lissa's right, but it's out of my control. "We need to keep moving," I say. Then, in the cold and the hard inner-city light, I'm suddenly dizzy. I stagger with the weight of everything; all those pomps. The ground spins most unhelpfully.

  "You right?" Lissa's hand stretches out toward me but she doesn't touch, of course.

  I take a deep breath, find some sort of center, and steady myself. Shit, I need food, anything. A Mars Bar is not enough to keep you m
oving for twelve hours, and I'd been running, hung-over, and on empty all day. Could I have picked a worse night to get so damn drunk?

  "Yeah." I've started shivering, I am most definitely not all right. "I need to sleep." Exhaustion kneecaps me with an unfamiliar brutality. I almost convince myself that I could stumble down to the service station, or the McDonald's-both are open-but it's too soon on the tail of the passing Stirrers. Besides, those few hundred meters seem much, much further now. I need some rest, and a bit more time.

  I look at my watch. It's 2:30. Dawn is a long way off. I walk under the train overpass, find a spot hidden and away from the road and try to ignore the smells of the various things that have lived and died, and leaked down here. Then I curl up under my coat, with my head on my bag, which makes a less than serviceable pillow.

  "If I don't wake up," I say, smiling weakly, "well, see you in Hell."

  "If you don't wake up, I don't know how I'm going to get there," Lissa says.

  "You're resourceful, you'll find a way."

  I slip-no, crash-arms flailing, into the terrible dark that I have no doubt will fill my dreams for the rest of whatever short fraction of life I have left. There's only sleep and running for me now. I'm too tired for self-pity, though, so that's one blessing at least. I wake to the sibilant bass rhythms of passing traffic, with the bad taste of rough sleep in my mouth, and a host of bleak memories in my head. This is the first day that my parents weren't alive to see the dawn. I stamp down on that wounding thought as quick as I can.

  My watch says nine, and the light streaking into my sleeping pit agrees with it. On the other hand, my body feels like it's still 2:30 am and I've been on a bender. I stretch. Bones crack in my neck and there's drool caked on my coat collar. How delightful.

  "That was hardly restful," Lissa says.

  "For you or for me?"

  "I wouldn't call this resting in peace, would you?"

  She points at the space around me, and there is blood everywhere. Portents. Stirrers. I'm not surprised but it's unsettling to see all that gore drawn here from the Underworld. It's a warning and a prophecy. Well, I've seen blood before, even if it's usually in the bathroom, or my own, curling down my fist, potent and ready to stall a Stirrer.

  "I slept. That's one thing, no matter how poorly. How's my hair?"

  "You really want to know?"

  "You're chirpy."

  "What can I say? I am-I was-a morning person."

  "Well, you'll be pleased to know I was once a person who hated morning people."

  "What changed your mind?" Her face draws in close to mine, well, as close as she can comfortably get without me pomping her. I'm treated to the scrutiny of her wonderful eyes. My cheeks burn.

  My stomach growls. There's nothing like a stomach gurgle to change the subject-and this one is thunderous, a sonic boom of hunger. I rub my stomach. "I really need to eat."

  Lissa gestures at all the blood. "Even with all this?"

  I nod. "I can't help it. I have to eat."

  Which is how we end up at a dodgy cafe in Milton, eating a greasy breakfast with black coffee. It's busy, but then again it's Thursday morning. The whole place smells like fat-cooking fat, cooling fat and partially digested fat being breathed out in conversation. That's the odor of the twenty-first century. I grin and bite down on my muffin.

  The city's covered with a smoky haze. There have been grass fires around the airport. Spring's always dry and smoky in Brisbane-storm season's a good month off-and my sinuses are ringing. Everything about me is sore and weary, and even the sugar and coffee isn't doing much to help that. But it's something. Just like my snatches of nightmare-haunted sleep were something.

  My head's buried in the Courier-Mail, partly because my face is on the cover. It's not a great picture, and I'm bearded in it, but it's enough. The article within is brief and speculative in nature. It doesn't look too good, though. I've been around too many explosions of late and too many people connected to me have died. I'm wanted for questioning. There's no mention of Don, Sam, Tim or Morrigan and there are suggestions that this is all part of some crime war. They've got the war bit right at least.

  I give up with the paper. I need to think about something else for a moment, before the crushing weight of it all comes back.

  "Could be worse," Lissa says. She's sitting opposite me.

  "How?"

  "You could be reading that in jail."

  "Thanks."

  "And you're really not that photogenic, are you."

  "What the hell do you mean by that?"

  "I mean, you're much, much better looking in the flesh."

  "You're far too kind."

  "Where did they get that photo anyway?" She peers at it.

  "Facebook."

  "Well, then, it really could have been worse. You've never dressed up like a Nazi obviously, or they'd have chosen that for sure."

  I stare at some kids playing in the courtyard of the cafe, working out their weird kid rules, which generally seem to be about making someone cry while the rest look on, or shuffle off to their parents.

  "You want to have children?" Lissa asks.

  "Not really. OK, maybe, but look at me. I'm sleeping under bridges… I'm twenty-seven years old, with only a small chance of living more than a few hours. Not exactly great parent material." I shake my head, and my neck cracks painfully, again. I feel sixty-five today. "Did you ever want to have kids?"

  Lissa shifts into the daylight, maybe so that I can't see her face.

  "I don't know, maybe, I never felt settled enough. Wasn't much of a nester."

  "Robyn-my ex-wanted kids," I say. "She just didn't want them with me."

  "Then it was lucky you broke up." She doesn't come out of the light.

  I wonder how Don and Sam are going. I haven't felt them pomp through me, so I hold onto the slim hope that they're alive. I mean, I am, and those two are infinitely more capable. They managed to rustle up a hideaway and some alone time. All I'd done was arrive in time to see my house, and then my car, explode.

  After breakfast, I stand in the car park, looking at all those cars, wondering if that's the answer. I certainly need to get moving. A little further up Milton Road squats the bulk of the Fourex brewery. The whole suburb smells of malt and smoke, like a poor-quality whiskey, and though it was only yesterday that I had the mother of all hangovers, I surprise myself by actually desiring a beer.

  I consider mentioning this to Lissa then think better of it. I'm sure she already thinks I have a problem.

  "You've got a visitor," Lissa says.

  The sparrow has been looking at me for some time, I feel. It gives an exasperated chirp. So Morrigan has found me again. I'm a bit nervous about that, thanks to Don. But I bluff it.

  "Hey," I say. "Sorry, little fella." I have to remind myself that being patronizing doesn't improve an inkling's mood. I've never seen a sparrow glare before.

  I reach out my hand and it jumps up, pecks my index finger hard, much harder than is necessary, drawing blood. It'd be a hell of a lot more pleasant if the buggers just needed a handful of seed.

  The sparrow drops its message, then gives my arm another savage peck and strikes out at the air with its wings. I curse after it, then my jaw drops as two crows snatch the bird out of the sky and tear it in half before it can even shriek. It forms a small puddle of ink and brown feathers on the ground. Then, with a black and furious crashing of wings, the crows are gone. It looks like human Pomps aren't the only ones doing it tough.

  The message is brief. Phone.M.

  I hesitate, then look at Lissa, who shrugs. "What have you got to lose?"

  We both know the answer to that. But there is so much more to gain, even if it's just clarifying who my real enemy is.

  I switch on my phone, holding it like it's a bomb.

  It rings immediately. I jump, swear under my breath, then pick up.

  "Steven," Morrigan says.

  I can hear a background rumble of traffic. "Where the fu
ck are you?" I ask. He's not the only one who can skip over small talk.

  "Look, we don't have time," he says. "The phones, they can trace them. And the sparrows, well, I'm running out of tattoos. Something's attacking them as well."

  "Crows," I say. "It's crows. I just saw them then."

  "If someone's using Mr. D's avian Pomps, they're more powerful than I'd thought. This just keeps getting worse."

  "Yeah, it does," I say. "How do I know you're not in on it?"

  There's a long silence down the other end of the line. "The truth is you don't. But how long have you known me?"

  I don't answer that one.

  Finally Morrigan breaks the silence. "Steven, you have to trust me. I'm telling you, Mr. D has a rival. They need to kill all the Pomps, then they can start up their own outfit. There's going to be absolute chaos. Because while that's going on, there's no one to stop the Stirrers. In fact, I believe whoever is behind this is actually dealing with the Stirrers."

  I could have told him that.

  "Which is why we need to get together. If enough bodies stir, the balance will tip. We're talking end of days, Regional Apocalypse. It's not far off."

  That chills me. The idea had already crossed my mind, but I hadn't really wanted to consider it. I may not have the greatest knowledge of Pomp history, but I know about this. Every one of the thirteen regions has experienced one or two of these down the ages. Death piled upon death. Stirrers outnumbering the living. It's a vast and deadly reaving. And there hasn't been a Regional Apocalypse in a long time.

  Sure, there's been some bloody, terrible crap that's gone on in this country, all of which could be considered that way-genocides and wars-but this would be an end to life. All life. Stirrers don't stop at people. They don't even start at them, it makes sense to start at the bottom. Everything from microbes up would go. And it wouldn't be like a motion picture zombie apocalypse, or remotely close to an alien invasion-they're a walk in the park compared to a Regional Apocalypse. Stirrers don't bite their victims, they don't need to touch an unprotected person, they don't even need to be that close to them after a certain threshold point is reached. They're like a black hole of despair, and once they've taken enough joy and light, their victim is gone and there's another Stirrer getting about, snatching even more energy from the world.