The last three passengers from this facility to step on board included a freshly scrubbed gentleman Marie had never seen before wearing loose-fitting trousers and shirt quite a bit like pajamas. Marie presumed the older woman boarding with him to be his wife. She thought this woman might have been on the earlier transport going into the sanctuary, one of the few who had sat quietly letting others voice their hopes and experiences. Another attendant, a tired but muscular male this time, boarded last, his eyes fixed on the woman’s fresh-faced husband.
The three sat together in the opposite row. Marie didn’t mean to stare, but this newly repaired man looked so fresh, so clean. Beside him his wife appeared ill-kept, almost slovenly. And there was something else about the husband—he looked much younger than she. Decades younger.
The transport rolled on to the parking lots through absolute darkness, a bubble floating through the night. Suddenly off in the distance dropped a series of shooting stars. Everyone turned their heads to watch, except for this newly awakened man, who Marie supposed was still preoccupied with mysteries that lay closer to home.
Copyright © 2010 Steve Rasnic Tem
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Short Stories
INTERLOPER
Ian McHugh
Ian McHugh is a graduate of Clarion West. His fiction has received the Writers of the Future Award and Australia’s Aurealis Award. Readers can find more of his work at ianmchugh.wordpress.com. The idea for his outré new tale of the Australian outback was “concocted over the course of a very tedious work-planning day with my friend Erin Murphy. This story is presented with apologies to the Tinas.”
Shouts erupted from behind.
Barnestable turned in time to see a pair of Tinas roll off the top of the following van, punching and clawing at each other even as they hit the road and bounced onto the verge. Their sisters yelled indiscriminate encouragement.
“Oh, for crying out loud.” His head throbbed mercilessly. The sunlight bouncing off the pale bleakness of the countryside hurt his eyes.
With a groan, he leapt from his perch on the driver’s bench beside Monkey, landing heavily on his feet. The impact sent shooting pains up his neck and through his skull. He almost vomited. One of the troodons kicked the bars of the van beside him. Still lying on her side, the trood clung onto a bar with the sickle claw of her inner toe and raised her neck feathers like hackles.
The trood yapped a hostile reply to the disruption. Monkey unfurled a simian arm to bang on the roof, which just set all three troods yapping. The camels belched and groaned.
“Shaddap!” Monkey bawled.
Barnestable set off at a staggering trot towards the fighters. Turtle beat him to the fray, grabbing the backs of the Tinas’ shirts and holding them up so their toes just brushed the dirt. They spat curses and kicked at his armored legs.
“What the hell is this?” Barnestable demanded, pressing his palms against his pounding temples. “Aren’t you all one person? You’re fighting with your bloody self!”
The Tinas shook themselves free of Turtle. Both of them were bloodied, their clothes and nests of black hair smeared with salt and dust. They scowled down at Barnestable.
“Screw...”
“...you.”
“Yeah, screw you, Barnes,” their sisters chorused.
Barnestable watched, flummoxed, as the battered two rejoined the other six on the van. “I don’t deserve that.”
Turtle didn’t respond. Flies gathered on the tattooed shell of his head. Black tattoos over the interlocking plates of his exoskeleton made him seem more like some Brutalist artwork than a human being. Barnestable followed his gaze.
Partly-covered steel skeletons of prefabbed buildings broke the monotony of the plain, a distance back from the road. Preoccupied with his migraine, Barnestable had taken them at a glance to be old farm sheds and paid no further heed. Turtle’s interest made him look more closely. The tattered mesh of a perimeter fence hinted at the possibility of something more secretive and secure. Concrete stumps around it might’ve have supported auto-defense towers.
All around was nothing but rolling desolation—stands of pale feral wheat at the top of every low rise of the plain, saltpans in every trough between.
Like bloody Judgment Day. Barnestable wondered what the hell had been worth defending out here.
The compound spread some way beyond the ruined sheds. Farthest back laid a black tarmac landing pad and a large, irregularly stepped circular foundation. Barnestable frowned. Or what needed hiding.
“That wasn’t in the bloody briefings,” he said. He might as well have been talking to the replica of Turtle they lugged about with them as to the real thing. “Turtle?”
Turtle peered down at him. His inked slab of a face was hard to read, a graffitied brick with eyes.
Barnestable watched him stride away. “What is with everyone today? Rhone, what’s with everyone today?”
The last caravan had just passed. Barnestable gritted his teeth and jogged to catch up. He leapt for the running board and clung with one hand around an awning strut. The camels towing the van bawled complaints at the minuscule difference his weight made to the vehicle.
“Dammit, Barnes,” said Murph, as he hauled himself up to where she sat on the driver’s bench with Rhone.
Barnestable ignored her. Rhone shuffled across reluctantly to make room and he squeezed onto the end of the seat. “Well?”
Rhone was covered from head to toe in a blue chador. Barnestable could just make out the profile of her face through her gauze veil. Seated, his eyes came just above the level of her breasts.
“Aw, c’mon love,” he said, “you can tell me.”
“I’m not your love, Barnes,” said Rhone.
“I’m wounded. Wassup?”
At the opposite end of the bench, Murph rubbed at the bridge of her nose. A lanky woman with fair skin that tended to freckle, she wore a wide straw hat to keep the sun off her face.
Rhone hitched her cuffs sharply, causing a momentary bounce on the front of her chest.
“Shit, Barnes, don’t you ever think of anything else?”
He plastered on an ingratiating smile. “Only you, love. What is it? Woman stuff?”
“Troglodyte.” She rose abruptly and climbed over him and down from the van. “It’s not my stuff.”
“What, then?” he called after her. He pointed in the direction of the abandoned buildings. “Is there a cracked seal over there that I should know about? Rhone?” He didn’t think so. If there was an unsealed break in the Veil nearby the troods would be letting them know.
“Slick, Barnes,” said Murph. “Slicker than duck shit.”
Barnestable waved f lies away from his face while he watched Rhone fall into step beside Turtle. His skull felt like it was cracking at the seams. Rhone was walking very close to Turtle. Barnestable frowned.
“It’s coming from Turtle? What the hell is she doing projecting his feelings?”
Murph grunted. “Really, Barnes.”
Up front, Goat Boy wove the solar off-roader, the troupe’s only powered vehicle, with stately slowness across the full width of the road. The resin statue of Turtle rocked gently on the trailer behind it. Loops rested her furry chin on her elbow over the side of the car door, nominally supervising his driving.
From the top of his van, Monkey called out, “Town’s ahead.”
Goat Boy whooped happily, the only member of the troupe immune to Turtle’s projected mood.
The caravan crawled down the shallow slope of the escarpment to the sand flat at sea level. Barnestable inhaled the sea air, hoping it would clear his head.
“Nice beach,” he observed, back on his seat on the troodon van beside Monkey. The beach’s cleanliness was marred at the southern end by sun-hardened hunks of tar from an old slick.
“Pity about the town,” said Monkey.
Which summed up most places along the west coast, outside
of Perth’s tarnished glitz and suburban sprawl.
This town was bigger than Barnestable had expected, the tin-roofed houses sprawling along the beachfront and up the lower slope of the escarpment. He guessed its population to be pushing five figures. As they got closer, he revised the estimate down. The houses along the outer fringe were all empty, either boarded up or simply abandoned. The hairs rose on the back of Barnestable’s neck. There were plenty of ghost towns, back East, neutron bombed after the Veil had torn and Interlopers run amok. Empty houses held a different kind of silence to the desert.
There was still life here, though. Closer to the center, maybe two in three buildings were still occupied.
Barnestable put on his ringmaster’s top hat and frayed red coat. Turtle and five of the Tinas were already hidden away inside the caravans, squeezed in with the tents and gear. Everyone else was in their places up on top.
“What the hell are these people still doing out here?” Monkey said softly. There was no mine nearby, and this wasn’t an ore port.
Of the people they passed, more had gray hair than not.
Barnestable massaged his neck with his fingers. “Waiting to die, mate. Just waiting to die.”
The highway morphed into the town’s high street. Monkey hammered on the roof of the van to stir up the troods. The vehicle shuddered as one of them head-butted the bars. People on the porches of the threadbare stores and eateries gasped at the geneered saurians. Barnestable sighed inside, as he often did, at the depth of their provincialism. Still, he told himself, what chance did they have? The mining cartels that claimed this end of the continent filtered all information coming into their zone of influence according to their own myopic self-interests.
He noticed a different reaction to the statue of Turtle, chained on top of the offroader’s trailer. Instead of the usual exclamations of surprise, the locals’ response was to laugh and nudge each other knowingly.
Bloody useless intel, Barnestable thought. And what the hell’s got up Turtle’s ass that he couldn’t let us know?
“Ah, well,” he said to Monkey, “they can’t all be complete rubes.”
He stood up and raised his bullhorn. Suppressing a wave of nausea, he launched into his spiel. “Roll up, one and all, to Barnestable’s Traveling Mutant Freak Show and Circus . . .”
They set up camp on a scrubby sports oval beside the town’s derelict shopping mall. They parked the statue of Turtle outside and Goat Boy pegged out the camels to graze while the rest of them got the dome of the big top up on its ultralight polymer frame. The caravan annexes were joined up to the tent to make a covered village. Then Turtle and the other Tinas could emerge to help with the rest of the set-up.
The evening performance began with a tumbling routine from three Tinas. Barnestable cringed, watching from behind the stage curtain as they missed their marks and almost overshot their landings. The crowd didn’t notice, applauding every trick. The bleachers were packed; they’d pulled a good couple of hundred customers. There was one gap in the front row. Beside the empty place sat a sixtyish man with a full head of iron-colored hair. A suntanned, mouse-haired waif of eleven or twelve sat on his other side, watching the performance with an expression of unabashed delight.
Barnestable looked up at Rhone. His headache hadn’t abated, so he couldn’t work up more than a mild disappointment she was still in her chador, waiting until the last moment to strip down to her show costume.
“Ready, love?”
After a pause, she nodded and murmured, “Already started.”
He could hear Murph and Loops bickering backstage. Rhone still had everyone caught up in Turtle’s funk. “You need to shut that down,” he said. “We can’t afford to be going flaky if we turn up a candidate or, God forbid, a bloody Interloper. And how come you’re giving me this bloody headache?”
“Because I don’t like to touch your mind, Barnes,” she said.
“Well, bloody shut it down.”
“I’m trying.”
Barnestable stepped away from the curtain. “Where is Turtle, anyway?”
“Barnes, leave him.”
He ignored her.
The replica Turtle lay on its back beside its trailer, but the real article wasn’t anywhere in the immediate backstage area. Barnestable kept searching.
Low voices caught his attention in the shadowed aisle between two vans. Turtle’s bulk was immediately recognizable. With him was a middle-aged woman who held Turtle’s hand in both her own.
The woman saw Barnestable and gave Turtle’s fingers a squeeze. She leaned up to say something that Barnestable couldn’t hear, then turned and ducked through the canvas flap that led outside.
Barnestable folded his arms across his chest. “Christ, Turtle, you know better.”
Turtle stared at the ground. “She won’t give the act away.”
“I wasn’t talking about the bloody act,” said Barnestable. “You know her.”
Turtle nodded. He chewed his words a while before spitting them out. “I was posted here, before the state government collapsed. Guarding the place we passed on the way in.”
“Figured that out for myself. Thanks for the advance notice, mate.”
Tattooed plates shifted on Turtle’s brow. “It was in your briefings, wasn’t it?”
“They skipped the bit about there being a facility out here,” Barnestable said.
Turtle snorted. “Bloody intel.”
“Did they get through?”
“The Veil? No.” Turtle shook his head. “No, there’s no seal over there. They cleared us out when the mining cartels took over.”
Barnestable considered him. “And the rest of it?”
Another silence, then Turtle said, “I had a woman in town.”
“A woman? You?” He turned it into: “You mean her?” Barnestable thought the woman was too old. But then, it was over a decade since the miners booted out the government in the West.
Turtle looked at him sharply. “A made man like me, you mean? As opposed to a natural-born freak like you. I got everything you got, Barnes,” he said. “Only bigger. And no, that’s her mother.”
“She’s not in town anymore?”
“She died.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, mate.”
Turtle shrugged and pushed past.
“Just keep your mind on the job, eh?” Barnestable called to his retreating back.
He heard a muffled laugh. Goat Boy wriggled out from under the caravan beside him. He grinned and jiggled his horns. “Bigger,” he said, and scampered off after Turtle.
Barnestable started to shake his head, stopped with a wince. “Geek.”
He stumped back to rejoin Rhone as cheers marked the end of the Tinas’ performance. Monkey and Goat Boy raced past him and burst shrieking into the ring with Loops in hot pursuit, clutching outsized cutlery and with a napkin tied around her neck. They pranced about, earning laughs while the Tinas packed up their gear. Barnestable watched Turtle’s mother-in-law rejoin her—he assumed—husband. He frowned at the kid sitting with them.
No way.
Goat Boy fled backstage. Murph arrived with her cases of knives and Rhone chose that moment to start shucking her chador, distracting Barnestable when he should have been bracing himself.
Goat Boy landed on his back, sending him stumbling into the open.
“Faster, piggy!” Goat Boy cried, slapping Barnestable on the backside with the butt of his Styrofoam lance.
They chased Loops around the ring a couple of times, until Monkey stole Barnestable’s ringmaster’s hat and announced, “The Mistress of the Blades!”
Rhone acted as Murph’s assistant for the first part of her act, while Murph juggled knives and cleavers of varying size and ugliness.
Loops and Monkey wheeled out the wooden target wheel, then pretended to sneak up on Rhone. She struggled feebly as they towed her over to the wheel and strapped her on. The theatre had its desired effect on the crowd. A hush fell in the tent. Rhone had
a high forehead, full cheeks, and curved little nose that made her face look like a kid’s. The rest of her, in Barnestable’s frank opinion, looked like she’d been designed by a man. Which, now that he thought of it, she probably had.
Possibly even the same man who’d designed Murph, he mused, watching her stand, hip cocked, in her red leathers and thigh-high boots while she made a show of selecting knives from the case Monkey presented to her.
The five blades went up in a high arc then, in a blur of movement as they came back down, shot across to thunk into the wheel around Rhone. Barnestable flinched. The knife that should have landed between her knees had struck not more than a finger’s width from the inside of Rhone’s thigh.
Murph tossed a couple of samurai swords around while Monkey retrieved the knives.
Something like an invisible mallet smacked into Barnestable’s already hurting brain. His knees almost gave way. Monkey dropped his armful of knives. Cries of surprise and alarm said that at least some of the crowd had caught Rhone’s mental cry.
Interloper!
Barnestable was about to yell it aloud, thinking they’d have to slaughter a quarter of the crowd to save the rest. But no: the troods were still quiet. This close to an Interloper, they’d be chewing through the bars of their wagon. His heart rattled inside his ribs. Murph was stock-still in the ring, a sword in each hand and staring fixedly at Rhone, ready to leap into the bleachers and begin the bloodbath. Minutely, Rhone shook her head.
Murph stabbed her swords into the ground and beckoned imperiously for Monkey to bring the knives. Monkey’s simian face was wrinkled with worry as he cranked the handle to set the target wheel, with Rhone on it, spinning. Barnestable could scarcely bear to watch. This time Murph was focused. The blades smacked into the wood perfectly on target. The crowd roared their approval.
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