Ishtar

by Deborah Biancotti

  “A souvenir,” Grace says.

  “How...long?”

  “Seven months, about,” Grace says. “Haven’t actually gotten to a doctor yet. Life is...busy.”

  Grace leaves Nina and Adrienne at the table, nursing empty glasses. Adrienne realises the kind of tiredness she’s feeling now is more like the beginning of defeat.

  Her phone rings and she answers it without thinking.

  “Where are you on Google Maps?” Steve asks without preamble.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Checked your data downloads lately?”

  Adrienne sighs. “I’m having a tough night. Get to the point.”

  “The Internet, she’s a goner,” Steve supplies.

  Adrienne thumbs her phone to data mode and types ‘Ishtar’ into the Google search bar. The screen stalls for several long seconds before she flips back to her call.

  “I’m getting nothing,” she says.

  “I know. You’re getting the same thing as almost every-damn-body in the country. Something’s knocked out the Internet links between Australia and the rest of the world. Whatever mirror sites we’ve got locally are being overwhelmed by demand.”

  “How in hell do you knock out the entire Internet?”

  Steve lets out a groan like he’s doing complicated mathematics in his head. “You don’t knock out the entire Internet, just our part of it. Smash the cables on the ocean floor. That takes out most of it. Then you let the rest of us go all Fight Club for what’s left. You following? Happened to Egypt a few years back.”

  Information warfare, Steve calls it. He says it’s not a big deal to pull off, either. The data cables are only reinforced near the shore, close enough in case boats accidentally snag the line. Further out in the ocean, they’re often less than two centimetres across. “You need to get right to the floor of the ocean, though. We can’t reach Japan at all. Singapore, Hawaii — even New Zealand’s out.”

  “You’re a font of information,” says Adrienne.

  “Yeah, but I had to find all this out the old-fashioned way. By phone.”

  “So right now it’s just us? Australia, I mean. With busted cables?”

  “Far as I can tell.” His tone is dry. “But, I mean we have to call these places one at a time. You know how hard it is to get a phone line when the whole country’s trying?”

  “Who can we reach?” Adrienne asks.

  She can hear Steve flipping through his notes. “New Caledonia.”

  “Fuck,” says Adrienne.

  Nina frowns, trying to get Adrienne’s attention, but Adrienne holds up a hand. Steve continues, “Could be a spy submarine, if those things still exist. Or terrorism, of course. ACMA is looking into it.” In case she doesn’t understand, he adds, “Australian Communications—”

  “I know,” says Adrienne. She takes a breath. “They’re isolating us.”

  “ACMA?”

  “No. The army.” Adrienne presses her fingers to her temple. “But how’d they know where to find the cables?”

  “Are you kidding? They’re listed on Wikipedia. So ships can avoid—”

  She cuts him off, tells him to meet her and hangs up. She stares past Nina for a full two minutes before Nina says, “Bad news?”

  “The worst kind of bad. This goddess of yours,” she says. “She’s smart.”

  Nina grunts. “Honey, she’s not my goddess.”

  Looking at the tattoo on her hand, Adrienne wonders when she stopped pretending Ishtar wasn’t real.

  ****

  Steve proves he doesn’t need Google Maps to find his way back to her. Adrienne feels his slap on her shoulder less than ten minutes later, and hears him claim he has a photographic memory for pubs. He nods hello to Nina and Grace. Grace nods politely in return, but it’s clear she doesn’t remember him.

  “We were at school together,” Steve says. “I guess I’ve put on some weight since then.” He rests a hand self-consciously on his stomach, but Grace only continues to give him a polite and distant smile.

  The pub has filled up, locals piling in, jostling each other for room. It’s mid-evening, but the communication outages have drawn people out of their homes. They’re congregating in public places, waiting for an answer, holding onto each other.

  “Grace has some interesting photos,” Adrienne says.

  As her sister does a show-and-tell, Adrienne fills in the gaps with the Ishtar story and the army marching across the bottom of the ocean.

  “So,” says Steve, “you think an army of dead babies has kicked out the Internet cables so they can play war games uninterrupted at our place?”

  Adrienne shrugs. “Makes about as much sense as anything else.”

  “Great. So she’s controlling them, this Ishtar bird?”

  “Who can say? She was a very powerful goddess, apparently,” says Nina. “Had a habit of killing her lovers and taking her holidays in Hell. So, you know, controlling dead foetuses shouldn’t be such a big deal.”

  “I guess we find her and ask her,” Adrienne’s glass is empty but she feels too queasy for a re-fill.

  Grace looks from one to another. “You know where Ishtar is?”

  “We’ve come across her,” Adrienne confirms.

  “What’s she look like?”

  Adrienne shrugs. “Human.”

  Grace waits, but when Adrienne falls silent she says, “Well, I guess that makes sense. She had a human form once. All the gods and goddesses did, but they were more powerful. And they liked to be worshipped, of course.”

  “There’s that,” Steve acknowledges.

  “Thing is, how’d she get here?” Adrienne asks.

  “Well, the most popular way,” Grace says, “is to fly.”

  “So you’re telling me,” Adrienne says, “that an ancient goddess got herself a passport, checked out a text book on modern geography—”

  “Google Maps,” Steve reminds her.

  “—and hopped a plane to Australia?”

  “Probably saw it on TV,” says Steve.

  “If you think about it,” Grace says, “it makes sense. We have so many tools nowadays that we take for granted, right? TV, the Internet. Enter some revenge-mad goddess looking for — what did you call it? — a training ground, and hey, presto!”

  “So, where is she?” Nina asks.

  No one has an answer.

  “One of us should tell the chief,” says Steve. “He’s gonna have to talk to the military. Explain what’s coming if that army’s really walking towards Sydney.”

  Adrienne doesn’t respond.

  After a minute Steve adds, “Flip you for it.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Adrienne argues that whatever the chief’s contribution will be to their adventure, it can wait until morning. They have no evidence for their crazy theory, and no real leads on where Ishtar or her army is, apart from ‘maybe somewhere in the ocean, kicking out cables’. They sit and barely talk until it’s about ten o’clock at the end of a very long day.

  Nina retires to her flat in the city, Grace heads to her hostel, despite Adrienne’s protestations. Only Steve and Adrienne remain, making the long trek to Steve’s car. Parking was hard to find with everyone heading into town — apart from the doomsday-sayers, who’ve fled to the mountains and ultimately, probably, the desert beyond.

  Steve’s parked behind the State Library on a narrow street near the strip of parkland called The Domain. It’s a space largely used for outdoor concerts or visits by the Dalai Lama. In between there’s often amateur football games, but at this time of night, it’s empty and dark.

  Adrienne feels eyes on her. She turns in a slow circle, making it look casual, making it look like maybe she’s searching for a late-night coffee shop while simultaneously checking the sky for falling stars.

  She sees it, a black limo. Or, not a black limo, the black limo. The one that freaky bitch fled in while Adrienne was left behind heaving her guts into the gutter.

  “Ishtar,” she mur
murs.

  “What?” Steve asks.

  “Stay here.”

  Adrienne walks towards the old sandstone Sydney Hospital, across its courtyard and through the iron gates out onto Macquarie Street. She flaps her badge at a startled security guard with cheeks like thick pockets. Then she sprints past the rest of the historic buildings on Macquarie Street and rounds a corner, coming out onto the edge of the Domain parallel to where she estimates the parked limo to be. She’s spot on.

  “Police!” She slams her fist against the opaque window.

  Steve is still a hundred metres up the road. He turns at the sound of her voice and gives her a look of pure surprise. When he sees she’s pulled her gun, he does the same.

  The window rolls down but no face appears from the gloom of the interior.

  “Come in,” says a voice. It’s earthy, husky, old. It has some kind of accent, but she’s hard-pressed to say which one.

  “You come out!”

  There’s silence. Then the sound of satin sliding on car upholstery. Someone emerges, a tiny woman with thick wrists and gold jewellery on every limb. She wears a long black gown with spaghetti straps and a flat silver brooch with a familiar-looking eight-pointed star in the middle of her chest.

  “Name!” Adrienne’s voice is louder than it needs to be, but there’s something sinewy and unnatural about the way the woman moves and it’s freaking her the fuck out. “Tell me your name!”

  “I am Ishtar, your goddess!” The woman seethes. “And you should bow to me!”

  Adrienne’s knees weaken but she fights it, wobbling on her feet. Steve is at the limo by now, but Adrienne gestures him back. Ishtar mistakes the gesture for something more disrespectful. She reaches out a hand and Adrienne’s stomach rolls, her vision blurs. She gasps.

  “You’re surrounded!” Steve must’ve learned that from a cop show.

  It works, briefly. Ishtar turns around, chin first, the rest of her body following. She casts Steve a quick look and then raises a hand. His eyes roll back in his head and he flops to the ground.

  “No!” Adrienne shouts.

  She leaps onto Ishtar, wrapping arms around her shoulders, holding the gun to the woman’s neck. She hopes she doesn’t have to use the thing because if it goes off now, she’ll probably blow her own head off, too.

  Ishtar smells of snake skin, of oil and blood and the tang of something worse. She lets Adrienne hang there, and Adrienne finds she’s unable to move the woman even a fraction of an inch.

  “You think you can stop me?” Ishtar’s voice reverberates throughout her frame like she’s hollow. “You, with so little power.”

  Ishtar spins, knocking Adrienne off. Adrienne staggers back, but stays upright. Ishtar reaches out, too far, the skin pulling tight as her arm lengthens. She grabs Adrienne by the shirt and rips it in half, leaving it hanging from her trousers like strips of sunburned skin. Despite herself, Adrienne cowers. She raises a hand over her face as if that would help, angling her forearm in a classic martial arts defence pose. Useless, she knows that; even so, the animal brain can’t help but want to live.

  But Ishtar’s hands only clench and unclench, a snake testing the air with its tongue.

  “What’s the matter?” Adrienne asks. “You don’t hit girls?”

  Ishtar doesn’t smile. Adrienne can’t imagine her smiling. But she sneers and bares her teeth and Adrienne thinks ‘animal brain’ all over again.

  “Not yet,” Ishtar says.

  “What are you waiting for?” Adrienne asks.

  But Ishtar turns and gets back in the car, her long gown dragging behind her.

  “What are you waiting for!” She keeps shouting until the car is out of sight. Her skin is exposed, cold, her hands are still caught in the cuffs of her ruined shirt. She feels momentarily manacled, until she rips her arms free and tosses the shirt to the ground.

  Steve is lying on the ground, muttering “Ow, ow, ow” over and again.

  “Lover’s tiff, darlin’?” comes a stranger’s voice, gruff and masculine.

  “Fuck you!” Adrienne suggests.

  “Aw, that can be arranged, sweetheart.” The stranger moves in, eyes her sports bra, hands moving restlessly in the pockets of his trousers. He’s homeless, Adrienne realises, and that’s all that stops her from falling into a kung fu crouch. It’s just a threat; she doesn’t know kung fu. But she does know how to bring a man down with a well-placed kick or a fist to his windpipe.

  “You’re under arrest,” she says, “for vagrancy, intent to harm—”

  “Hey! You’re the one with your boobs out, bitch. That’s entrapment!”

  “Yeah, but in court I’ll be in a suit, and you’ll still stink of scum and booze. Now, fuck right off.”

  The homeless guy propels himself away, mumbling and cursing.

  There’s a groan from Steve as he rolls to his side and tries to get his knees under him. Tears pour from his eyes, but he doesn’t seem to realise. He stands unsteadily and looks towards Adrienne.

  “What in fuck happened to you?” he asks.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It’s the middle of the night, but Adrienne is high on adrenaline. Everywhere the streets are full of people equally alert, alarmed and awake. She gives Steve forty bucks to find her a new shirt, and he returns with a baby doll style black t-shirt with the pink outline of a cat on the front. The cat is smoking a pipe. For no apparent reason.

  “Where’s my change?” Adrienne asks.

  She’s sitting in the front of the car with Steve’s jacket on backwards to cover her bare torso.

  “You don’t go shopping much, do you?” Steve asks. “You owe me ten bucks.”

  They head first to The Pitt, the place where Timothy, between sobs, had claimed he’d met Ishtar. There’s no sign of her, so they check up and down Pitt and Bridge Streets in the CBD before heading to the famous club scene of Oxford Street. Most of the bouncers they meet don’t have an interest in helping the constabulary locate a short woman in a long black dress. Most of the patrons they stop and talk to feel the same.

  “Find someone else’s party to ruin!” one drunk girl shouts.

  Her friends drag her off Steve and they trip, laughing and screaming down the street. The pubs are loud with humanity apparently enjoying the excuse not to email home. People pull out their phones and shake their heads, unable to get through to friends and family. The atmosphere is more festival than funeral, but there’s an element of both in the night air.

  Steve refuses to leave her side, though he keeps one arm wrapped around his ribs. Adrienne has tried calling the office to find out about the numberplates she’d reported earlier, but there’s no accessing the database except manually. Data lines even within the country are clogged with people looking for answer, and the list of requests in front of her is long.

  When dawn weeps its spilt-milk colour across the sky, they’re still questioning stragglers, bedraggled club-goers who stare blankly.

  Finally they meet a bouncer in front of The Parlour nightclub who claims he’s seen the woman they’re after.

  “Yeah,” he says, “gorgeous. Showed up in a limo with two security guards. I thought she might be a movie star—”

  “Who’d she leave with?” Adrienne asks.

  The bouncer frowns. He’s short and solid across the shoulders, and his arms are thick all the way down to his wrists. “Some guy, skinny little runt. Surprised the hell out of me.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Could’ve sworn he was gay. Then he went home with the hottest chick in the place.”

  “Other guys tried, I guess?” Adrienne prompts.

  “Tried, failed. Honestly? She didn’t seem that interested in the guys. Don’t know how this guy did it. Indonesian guy. Very...” the bouncer searches for the right word.

  Adrienne’s scalp prickles. She has no reason to suspect, but there’s no escaping it. Plenty of Indonesians in Sydney. Doesn’t have to be Chapel.

  “Distinguished?” she sa
ys. “But with a goofy grin?”

  “That’s him,” the bouncer confirms.

  She describes Chapel in as much detail as she remembers, just to be sure. The bouncer nods emphatically the whole way through.

  “Damn,” Steve mutters.

  “She had a great look going on, this bird,” says the bouncer. “Dedicated Egyptian, you know? But not overkill.”

  “Think anyone else would know where they went?”

  The bouncer frowns, spreads his hands. “Like who?”

  ****

  The rest of the night is fruitless.

  They head into the office just after dawn. Adrienne figures that now’s the time to tell the chief everything. Someone needs to be looking after this shit, and it shouldn’t be her. They need the military. They need some way to cut off the army of dead foetuses that’s marching across the ocean floor and probably up into Sydney Harbour, looking for their goddess.

  But the chief’s office is empty, and it’s still empty three coffees later.

  “Nice shirt,” says Campbell, a young man with a brutish personality and a clean, sharp-chinned face.

  “Sell it to you,” says Adrienne.

  Campbell isn’t interested.

  She ignores whatever he says next and hits speed-dial, waiting for the chief, Douglas, to pick up.

  “Where are you, boss?” she asks.

  “Day off,” says Douglas.

  “I need to talk to you,” says Adrienne. “Face to face.”

  The chief hesitates, asks if she’s resigning.

  Adrienne sits upright in surprise. “No!”

  When she presses the point he explains he’s heading to his son’s graduation. “Bottom of the year, but at least it’s a degree in engineering.” Paternal pride in action.

  “Which university? Can I meet you there?” she asks.

  Douglas pauses. “What’s this about?”

  “It’s difficult to explain,” Adrienne stalls.

  “I don’t like difficult to explain. You know the KISS principle, right? Occam’s razor?”

  “I’m familiar.”