Cargo Cult

by Graham Storrs

“That’s right,” said Braxx. “You may have heard of it.”

  “And you got here in a spaceship, I suppose.”

  “Naturally. Matter teleportation is useless over long distances.”

  The verger looked again at the women that surrounded him. All so voluptuous and so skimpily clad. No, no! He mustn’t think of that! He must purge himself! Purge the evil, lustful thoughts! But later. Later. Right now he must get rid of these lunatics before the vicar arrived. Of course! That’s it!

  “Just a moment, ladies,” he cried, scurrying off sideways to a small room adjoining the entrance. He shot inside and immediately reappeared clutching a copy of the parish magazine. “Here,” he said, rifling through it. “Yes!” He held it up to show them an article on page five entitled; UFO Cult in our own Backyard? “There,” he said, that’s the lot you want.” He handed to the magazine to Braxx.

  Braxx examined the object carefully, turning it over, feeling its texture, sniffing it, then looked at the little human. “What is it?”

  The verger was taken aback. “Why it’s an article about that UFO cult out in the bush.”

  Braxx frowned. The number of questions raised by this sentence alone was dizzying. Rather than ask them all, he said, “Explain.”

  “You ladies need to talk to that bloke John Saunders who runs this UFO cult. Look,” he took the magazine back. “This article has his name and the address of his farm and everything. If you’ve come here from space, it’s definitely this lot you want to see, not our vicar.”

  Braxx took the magazine back from him. “This object contains information?” he asked.

  “The magazine article, right. It’s all there.”

  “I cannot interpret this.” He showed it to the others and they all shrugged or shook their heads. “The translation field only works with oral communications.”

  As hard as the verger found it to believe that these weirdos couldn’t read, he wasn’t going to get into a debate about it. “Just you show it to the taxi driver. You’ll be right. Well, I suppose you’ll need a bus, actually. Too many for a taxi, eh? You just go to the bus station and they’ll get you on the right bus.”

  “Bus?”

  “Pardon?”

  “What is ‘bus’? We have no translation for this concept.”

  The verger took a deep breath but held onto his temper. Let them play their silly little game of pretending to be aliens. Once he got them back out on the street, they could have as much fun as they liked. Suppressing a snarl, he smiled broadly and herded them outside. “There,” he said, indicating a large luxury coach parked just up the road. “That’s a bus. In fact, why don’t you go over and talk to the driver. He might show you around.”

  Braxx examined the vehicle. “I see,” he said. “A bus is a large multi-person conveyance. I agree, it would be suitable for my little group. You have been helpful. When our religion dominates your planet, I will see that you are rewarded.”

  The verger smiled thinly and waved them off as they walked off towards the bus. His eyes were drawn to the swaying, bouncing mass of gorgeous, round buttocks and he stared, mesmerised, until he jumped back with a cry of chagrin. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad! He told himself, tearing his wicked eyes away, and ran inside to the cool sanctuary of the cathedral.

  -oOo-

  “Come on, Nick, Douggie’s told us everything,” Detective Sergeant Barraclough was saying. “You might as well come clean. What’s the point of dragging this out all day?”

  His prisoner looked across at the lawyer sitting beside him. “Can he keep asking me the same thing over and over like this?”

  “My client is right, Sergeant Barraclough,” the lawyer said with a heavy sigh. She didn’t believe her client’s ridiculous story any more than Barraclough did but she had to go through the motions.

  Barraclough sighed too. “Right,” he said and the defeated tone in his voice was plain for all to hear. “So you and Douggie were beaten up by a mob of Loosi Beecham lookalikes whom you interrupted in the act of wrecking the ground floor of Steiner’s department store?” He stared into the unwavering eyes of the young thug across the desk for a whole thirty seconds. Then he stood up and walked out of the interview room without another word.

  -oOo-

  Marcus Grogan didn’t like driving buses. If it wasn’t for the fact that he couldn’t get any other kind of work, he would not be there sitting at the front of a Brisbane Holiday Tours air-conditioned luxury coach at seven thirty on a Wednesday morning, waiting for the last stragglers of the Kanaka Downs Garden Club outing to Toowoomba to find their way to him. Marcus wasn’t really a bus driver, you see. He was a writer. He wasn’t a builder’s labourer, either, nor a waiter, a security guard, a fruit picker, or an unemployed person—although he had appeared to have been all of these things in the past couple of years.

  He looked in his big, internal mirror. The old ladies and gents were spread thinly throughout the coach, nattering away happily to each other, or, in one case, to herself. Oh how he regretted the day he had walked out of his well-paid job as a business development manager for a major software company. He still cringed as the memories flayed him yet again. He’d got up early, packed the newly-finished manuscript of his Great Novel into a Jiffy bag and had dropped in at the Post Office on his way to work to send it on its way to the biggest-name publisher he could think of. Then, smiling happily, he had gone straight into his boss’ office and handed her the letter of resignation he had typed up the night before.

  That had been three years ago. The Great Novel was never heard of again and, in the ensuing months, he had sent copies to fifteen other publishers. Only two had even bothered to reply—with pro forma letters saying they were sorry but they never accepted unsolicited manuscripts. In a state of rising panic as his meagre savings had dwindled away, he had started sending it to literary agents whose names he found on the Internet. He targeted fifty such luminaries only to find, as told in the twelve pro forma responses that he got back, that they too had an aversion to unsolicited manuscripts.

  Eventually, his money had run out and his morale had sunk to the floor. He had gone back to his old company and asked for his job back but by then there was another of the world’s cyclic recessions in progress and not only they but every major and minor software company in town wouldn’t touch him with a ten foot pole. That’s when his progress through the city’s low-paid, low-status jobs had begun, landing him here, on a Wednesday morning two miserable years later, with a bus-load of crumblies and a depression which he couldn’t afford the pills to treat.

  A movement by the door distracted him from his self-flagellation. A crowd of women had appeared and were starting to board.

  “Sorry ladies,” he started to say, in a voice dulled by mental anguish, “this is a private...” He stopped speaking and gawped in amazement at the mob of oddly-dressed, identical beauties coming onto his bus. He tried to speak but his brain just wasn’t sending messages to his mouth any more. In the eccentric way of many writers, Marcus did not watch much television. If he had done, he would probably have known the identity that his new passengers shared and would have been even more gob-smacked than he was. As it was, he opened and closed his mouth several times, trying to encourage it to start working before he gave up and just let it hang open.

  Watching him with interest, Braxx concluded that this was possibly the most intellectually inferior species he had ever encountered. Not only were the humans stupid but they seemed to suffer a crippling degree of emotional instability and possibly insanity. How could a civilisation be constructed from such unpromising material? How could these incoherent, volatile creatures build even the crude buildings and machinery he had seen here? Looking at Marcus, Braxx wondered how they even managed to find their mouths to put food in them.

  “We are visitors from the planet Vingg,” Braxx announced, trying to keep it simple. “We require you to convey us to this place.” He thrust the church magazine at Marcus and waited for him to take it.

>   Marcus tore his eyes off the ravishing beauties before him and looked at the magazine in the speaker’s hand. As he did, her words began to penetrate the dense fog in his brain. Visitors from the planet Vingg, he heard, require you to convey us. Strange words, making no sense. He saw his hand reach out and take the magazine from the speaker. Why is she wearing a wedding dress? his brain asked, but there was no-one there to hear it. The magazine was strange too. His eyes caught references to God and prayer and UFOs, none of which helped him out of the surreal treacle he seemed to be drowning in.

  “Is it sentient?” one of the women asked, crossly. He looked up at her and saw she was wearing a short, pink negligée with fluffy pink trim.

  Braxx looked down the aisle of the bus to find twenty wide-eyed faces staring back at him. “This vehicle is a bus, is it not?” he shouted. Twenty wide-eyed heads nodded in agreement. “And its purpose is to convey people around the surface of your planet, is it not?” Again, they nodded. He turned back to Marcus. “Do you disagree?” he asked.

  “No,” said Marcus, without even noticing that he had spoken.

  “Then take us to that place.”

  Marcus looked again at the magazine. It was opened at an article about a UFO cult in the bush outside the city. It named a suburb and a farm. Something was nagging at Marcus. “You mean you want me to take you out into the bush so you can go to this cult place?”

  “It is a religious centre,” Braxx explained.

  “No,” said Marcus. “I’m going to Toowoomba.”

  “You’re going to what?” asked Braxx, alarmed.

  “I’m taking this bus to Toowoomba. These people,” he waved a hand in the direction of the wide-eyed heads behind him, “have chartered this bus for a gardening club outing.”

  Braxx shook his head in frustration. “Whatever that means, you can do it later. First, you will take us to that place.”

  Marcus was coming quickly to his senses. Whoever these insane women were, they were the last thing he needed on a Wednesday morning. Or any morning for that matter. Three years of disappointment and resentment came to the aid of his rising temper. He simmered for an instant, then the dam burst. “Look! I’m not a bus driver you know!”

  The Vinggans looked at each other in confusion. So did the old folk in the back.

  “I’m a writer! I’m only doing this for the money. It’s a stupid, boring job. Look at them!” He gestured again at the Kanaka Downs Garden Club staring at him from their seats. “Do I look like I want to spend my life driving that lot up and down the bloody motorways of South East Queensland?”

  “It seems even more irrational than the others,” said the woman in the pink negligée. “Why don’t we shoot it and drive the vehicle ourselves?”

  Braxx shuddered, remembering his experience as passenger and navigator when Drukk drove them to the department store. “No,” he said quickly. “This one must drive us. We will threaten him into compliance.”

  “Hey, wait a minute!” Marcus bridled. Who did these weirdos think they were?

  Braxx and a couple of the nearer Vinggans drew their blasters. “Somebody shoot something to scare this human,” he ordered. The one in the pink negligée fired through the bus window at a passing car which exploded spectacularly. Another, in a green bikini, sent a shot down the aisle of the bus, vaporising the little old lady who had been talking to herself. There was pandemonium on the bus as the nineteen surviving retired persons screamed and wailed and tried to get as far away from the Vinggans as possible. There was also pandemonium out on the street as the early morning commuters also ran about wailing and screaming. The external pandemonium was made somewhat worse by the rest of the Vinggans who, unable to hear what was going on from the steps of the bus and out on the street, had assumed they were under attack by the humans and had therefore also drawn their weapons and were now blasting away at anything that moved in their vicinity. Elizabeth Street became a war zone, with cars swerving and crashing into buildings and each other, people flying through the air as office blocks and vehicles exploded all around.

  With a cry consisting only of expletives, Marcus tried desperately to burrow under the dashboard. The madwoman in the wedding dress was shouting for them to stop and invoking some deity or other but it still took a little while for the destruction to abate. When there had been no explosions for a whole ten seconds, Marcus peered up at the women.

  “Now,” said Braxx, straightening his dress with dignity. “Will you please take us to that place?”

  Marcus, who was trembling all over, managed to nod his head and grabbed up the magazine from where he’d dropped it. As he struggled to make sense of the jumping words he desperately needed to read, the crazy women filed onto his bus and took their seats.

  -oOo-

  Detective Sergeant Barraclough was standing at a window watching the morning rush-hour building up on Roma Street. He was tired and grumpy. He hated puzzles. That is, he loved puzzles. He just hated puzzles he could not solve.

  Douggie and Nick were lying little toe-rags, they were small-time crooks and big-time hooligans but the one thing they were not was imaginative. How in God’s name could they come up with a story like this one?

  He tried to step back from the problem. He knew he had become too emotional about it and was trying too hard to make the pieces fit his firm conviction that Douggie and Nick had been up to no good. What if they were telling the truth? He fought down his immediate reaction against the idea and tried to consider it but he couldn’t. All right then, what if they were telling some of the truth? That was easier, he could cope with that — as a hypothetical, anyway.

  So Douggie and Nick had set off to rob — not Steiner’s but something. They came across the hole in the wall, just like they said, and went inside to take a look. Here he hit problems again. For a start, those two would not just wander into a hole in a wall out of curiosity and certainly not out of public-spiritedness. So they wanted to be inside Steiner’s for some reason. Maybe they wanted something from Steiner’s after all and they were pissed off to find some other crooks had beaten them to it? Park that and come back to it. So they’re in Steiner’s and they find... what? A bunch of crazies shooting the place up and throwing clothes all over the floor? Some sort of drug party? Some new kind of religious nuts, or terrorist atrocity? Whoever was in that building, they had cut a hole in the wall in a way that the forensic team could not explain and they had carted away a tonne of rubble without leaving a trace.

  He leaned his head on the cool glass. He should go home to a cold beer and forget about all this for a while. But why had they made up that stupid story about...

  “... Loosi Beecham...”

  He whirled around. “What?”

  Two uniformed officers were passing by him, talking to each other. They stopped and looked at him.

  “What did you just say?” he demanded.

  “We were just talking about the shooting in Elizabeth Street, Sarge,” said one, taken aback.

  “What shooting? Why did you say Loosi Beecham? What’s going on?” He had stepped closer to them, his great bulk alone enough to make them nervous.

  “We just got a call in. There’s been some kind of shoot-out over by St Stephen’s. Witnesses are saying that twenty or thirty women looking just like Loosi Beecham have shot up the street and hijacked a bus full of pensioners.”

  Barraclough exploded. “What! Out of my way! Wait!” He grabbed the radio off one of the officers and then raced down to the car park, listening to the pandemonium on the way. As he threw open his car door, he heard what he’d been listening for. The bus was heading west out of the city with every available squad car in pursuit. He slammed his light onto the roof and crushed his pedal to the floor.

  Chapter 11: The Space Station

  Sam threw her mobile onto the seat beside her in disgust. Her editor had stopped taking her calls, the weasel. Well, she’d show him. She’d brought her own camera with her and she’d take her own pictures and she’d cha
rge the weasel through the nose for them!

  She already had some good shots that she and Wayne had taken at the unit before they’d left. The one with Ms Beecham holding up a copy of today’s Courier Mail made her look like a kidnap victim but at least it would prove she was there. She’d also taken a couple of Ms Beecham with Wayne and Wayne had taken one of Sam and Ms Beecham. Then she’d put the camera on the timer and taken one of the three of them together. Unknown to Sam, when she had gone off to get her car keys, Wayne had also got Ms Beecham to pose for a few shots of his own.

  “Which way?” she shouted to Jadie in the back seat as a T-junction approached. She’d picked up Wayne’s friend on the way, realising that, obnoxious little creep as he was, he was the only one she knew who could direct them to the Space Station. He’d grumbled and protested about being woken up before noon and told them he was too busy but, as soon as he’d seen who else was travelling with them, he’d changed his mind and decided to go. Both Jadie and Wayne had insisted on sitting in the back seat with Ms Beecham — or Drukk as she liked to be called — and Sam had had to fight all the way to get Jadie’s attention off the spaced-out mega-star’s body and onto the road so he could direct them.

  It was not helping her mood.

  “Jadie? Which way?”

  “Er, like, what?” he asked but by then the car was screeching to a halt.

  Sam shouted, “Right!” threw open her door and leapt out of the car. For a brief, peaceful moment, the gentle sounds of the outdoors were all they heard, with Sam’s determined footsteps overlaid as she marched around to the opposite rear door and threw that open too. Reaching in, she grabbed her distractable navigator by the ear and dragged him out of the car. Opening the front passenger’s door, she pushed him inside and slammed the door on him. Then she marched back to her own side and got back in.

  She smiled sweetly at the dishevelled youth as he rubbed his ear with an expression of injured innocence. “Now, which way do we turn?”