“What are all these?” she asked.
Robert had a quick look and dismissed them.
“What do they look like? Fucken leaves. Anyway, we can’t be more than five kay from dad’s,” he replied with false bravado. “I reckon we just keep going and get this shit-heap looked at in the morning. As soon as we get over the next rise, from memory it’s virtually all downhill.”
He closed his door, but the interior light stayed on. Hmmm…mustn’t have shut it hard enough. He slammed the door again, with gusto this time. The recalcitrant light still shone. He glanced at the instrument panel. The red tail gate icon was on.
“Did you open the fucking boot you stupid bitch?” he asked Fiona, in a gruff tone that implied why did you.
“N-no. No way.” she answered, defensively. “As if I’d get out of the car in this weather with the place crawling with giant snakes!”
“Only one snake and it’s an ex-snake,” he reassured her, hurrying around to the back of the car and slamming the tailgate. He jumped back into the driver’s seat. The tail gate icon was off, but now the air bag icon was flashing red. As was the oil light. And the ‘Service Due’ light, even though it had just been serviced. What the hell is going on here?
He put the car in drive and they limped up the final hill, the engine still stuttering badly. At one stage, metres from the top, it felt like it was about to conk out entirely. C’mon. C’mon, asshole you can do it…
“Ohh, can you turn the air con down please, Rob, it’s freezing in here.”
The hair on the back of Robert’s neck was standing to attention too, but it had nothing to do with the air-conditioning. It wasn’t even on, despite it being the middle of a hot Queensland summer.
Robert opened his window, despite the drizzle, to let in some warm air and drove on, ears attuned to every sound, trying to ignore the ever-growing feeling that they were not alone.
Suddenly, the headlights began to flicker as ALL the dashboard lights lit up like the proverbial Christmas tree. Oh no, is this a joke…what else is going to go wrong?
Nothing it seemed because at last they crested the hill and commenced their descent, the Land Cruiser finally picking up speed. Robert breathed a sigh of relief, as he broke into a broad smile.
“Well, it doesn’t matter what happens now,” he exclaimed, “we’ve made it! I can just taste Dad’s shit-full home brew now!”
The smile quickly vanished. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he’d seen a sinister shape gliding slowly across the back seat. In the semi-darkness, other mysterious things had taken place back there: a headrest had popped up, one of the seats had sprang into the upright position, a seat belt had retracted, the centre console had lowered. Fiona had obviously seen or heard all this activity too, the way she squealed and spun around.
Robert turned the interior light on. Or tried to. Despite it working less than a minute ago, now it was kaput. What the absolute fuck? No matter how hard he flicked the switch on and off and tapped, then thumped the light itself, the car remained in total darkness. Now even the dashboard lights had gone out.
“Fuck!” he said as he wrenched the steering wheel hard right; he’d been so distracted by the faulty dome light and everything else that was going wrong, the Cruiser’s front wheel had almost gone over the edge. That was close!
“Rob, stop the car NOW and let’s get out,” she whispered, not wanting their hitchhiker to hear her. “I think the snake…”
“Alright I will, I will. But don’t panic. Remember what I said…Carpet Snakes aren’t venomous. It’s probably more scared of us than we are of it.”
Or maybe not. Robert felt movement on his right shoulder and his left hand shot up to push it off. His army-trained reflexes were very sharp, but not sharp enough. In a fraction of a second, the snake had lunged from the back seat, wrapping itself around the contoured driver’s seat, and around him. His primal scream filled the car.
He remembered having a photo taken years ago as a kid at Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary with a friendly carpet python lethargically draped around his neck. This was nothing like that.
This snake was heavier, harder and far from lethargic. In a flash, it had pinned his broad shoulders and muscular upper arms to the seat. It coiled itself around and around him. Squeezing tighter and tighter. Targeting his neck. He tried to get his left hand up between the snake and his windpipe. No way. The snake was all muscle and one step ahead of his every move. The harder he tried to force his hand into the gap, the tighter the giant snake squeezed. He had to steer with his knees.
He still had a bit of movement in his lower right arm though, so he reached his hand into his jeans. Grabbed his trusty Swiss Army pocket knife. Flicked it open. Started stabbing and stabbing at his attacker. But it did little more than flinch as the blade pierced its scaly flesh. If anything, it just made the snake angrier. Robert’s mouth and his nose were soon covered by yet another writhing coil, blocking off all air before he’d had the chance to take a decent breath. He tried to bite into it, but couldn’t penetrate the snake’s thick hard skin.
His eyes implored Fiona. “Get. The. Fucking. Thing. Off.” But there was little she could do but scream hysterically, tears running down her face, as she slunk as far away from the horror as she could, pressed right up hard against the door handle. In a final twist, the snake wrapped one last loop around Robert’s bulging eyes, so he couldn’t see the upcoming corner.
Or the careering Land Cruiser shooting off into the abyss.
Chapter 2 .
Room service.
Stomann was sleeping like a baby.
Or so it would have seemed to anyone standing by his bedside.
However if you were to linger a little longer, look a little closer, you’d have begun to notice things. The twitching eyes. The tight lips. The furrowed brow. And the soft whimper. Only from Stomann’s side of the pillow, it wasn’t a whimper.
Deep within his subconscious, he was screaming his lungs out!
The blood-splattered thing had him! It had cornered him. Thrust a jagged, raw bone in his face…a bone it had wrenched from its own leg! He’d run for his life but it had managed, somehow, hobbled as it was, to run him down. It had just seized Stomann’s flabby red neck in an ice-cold, vicelike grip and had begun to drag him up out of the bed, closer and closer towards its two curved, needle-sharp fangs when Stomann woke up screaming and gasping for breath. It was a good two seconds – five or six ker-thumping heartbeats – before it dawned on him that it was only a fucking nightmare.
The reality wasn’t much better.
Having put a massive dent in the mini-bar the night before, and the Hotel bar prior to that, 39 year old Theo Stomann had one bitch of a hangover. In fact as he lay there wide eyed, sweating and swearing, puffing and panting, waiting for his heart to either slow down or pack it in entirely, he didn’t even know where the hell he was.
He didn’t recognise the clock radio (chained to the bedside table) that blinked 7.45am. Or the cheap mock-ogany bedside-table itself. Nor was the slightly saggy black leather lounge chair familiar. Or the coffee table strewn with chocolate bar wrappers and miniature empty booze bottles. Especially not the aboriginal art on the wall to his right. What the fuck’s that all about? It wasn’t until he farted himself out of bed, staggered over to the thick orange curtains and hauled them apart did the penny drop.
There, 20 klicks due East and savagely backlit by the already-blazing dessert sun, was Ayers Rock. Uluru as the abos called it. Huh! Think they damn well own it. Well, where’s their fucking receipt then? Squinting and closing the curtains almost as fast as he’d opened them, Stomann flopped back down on the crumpled bed while the events of the past two days crept painfully back to him, bit by bit. Just like that frustratingly slow computer dial-up when he was downloading porn as a fat spotty teen in the good old days.
After a long, boring bus ride from Alice Springs, he’d arrived – hot and bothered and very thirsty – at the Desert Gardens Hotel around
lunchtime on Thursday and headed straight to the bar. Over the course of the afternoon, he’d been joined by nine of his mates, each of them arriving independently. They were all staying in separate rooms, despite the hotel being fully booked thanks to the True Australia Party executive conference. Not that Theo had even been to his room yet. Not while there was cold beer to drink, and Scotch to chase it down.
Their generous Benefactor had paid for everything, flights, accommodation, meals, drinks (way too many drinks) and a host of extracurricular activities. These included a very windy and bumpy helicopter flight over the rock, or as close to the rock’s airspace as the bloody locals would allow. Screw those boongs… it’s as much mine as it is theirs…and these days we’re not even allowed to climb the fucker!
Plus as part of a bonding session (Caldwell’s stupid idea) they’d gone on an even more bumpy one-kilometre camel train expedition. Dickinson, the group’s token pommy bastard, had joked that the 120-kilogram Stomann was “the flippin’ straw that broke his camel’s bleedin’ back!” Arsehole!
And finally, of course, that fateful minibus trip out to watch the sun set over that cursed red rock…
Just then the telephone rang, loudly. Bad dreams. Bright lights. Loud noises. Fucken Murphy’s law when you’ve got a hangover! He snapped the receiver up before it could pierce his ears again and heard the familiar, yet strangely raspy voice of the guy the Benefactor had appointed commanding officer. He who must be obeyed.
“Stomann? Caldwell here. Pleased you’re up. I wanna see you and the boys straight after breakfast. I’ll have room service bring something up.”
And he was gone before Stomann could ask what he wanted to see him about, find out why his voice sounded so hoarse, or tell him that the last thing he wanted was effen food. Never eat on an empty stomach, mate.
The way he felt right now, room service wouldn’t be the only ones bringing his breakfast up.
Perhaps a hot shower would make him feel half-human again. It usually did, especially at times like now when he stunk like a half-drunk skunk. With a grunt and a groan, he hoisted his fat arse off the bed again and, once the room had stopped spinning, started manoeuvring across the so-called deluxe suite towards the bathroom. He’d only taken a few wobbly steps in that direction when there came a faint knocking on his door. Quickly slipping an XXXL dressing gown over his billowing shorts, he waddled over and opened it.
There stood an aboriginal hotel employee in his late teens/early twenties holding a salver-covered tray. That was quick! Neither spoke a word as Stomann roughly snatched the tray out of his hands and slammed the door in the young man’s face without even thinking about a tip. Stuff him. Black bastards get enough bloody handouts already.
He sent the empty bottles on the coffee table crashing to the floor, knowing that the cleaners would sort that lot out later, and put the useless tray down. Now, where was I? That’s right, on my way to the shower. After belching loudly and giving his balls a good scratch, once more he set a course for the bathroom, glancing around in search of an errant towel, preferably a reasonably dry one. One that hadn’t been spewed into at 2am.
He jumped, then froze. Shit! That breakfast tray just moved! He could swear he’d seen the silver salver swirling slightly out of the corner of his bloodshot brown eyes. Maybe even heard something too. Christ, no… impossible. Must have still been wobbling from when he put it down. Or it could just have been his own reflection moving across the super-shiny surface as he walked past. Or he was hallucinating. Yeah, that’s it, I’m still half pissed and I’m hallucinating. The dreaded DT’s. Yet despite all his rationalisations, still the goose bumps stood to attention on the back of his sunburnt neck, and his puffy hands shook as he lifted a fresh-ish towel from the back of a chair.
Stomann walked backwards to the bathroom, warily watching the tray, daring it to move again and scared shitless that it might. When he got there he closed the door behind him, waited a few seconds, then opened it again with a Yosemite Sam-like flourish and peered back out. Nothing. Feeling foolish, yet slightly more reassured, he stripped off his dressing gown and shorts, draped the towel over the shower screen and flicked on the taps. Before long the room filled with steam. He was just about to step on in when the telephone rang again. Oh, for fuck’s sake!
For a split second he thought about ignoring it, but he knew he never could. He’d be wondering who it was all day if he did. Maybe the missus, although I’ve told that bitch not to call me unless it was life-or-death urgent. Leaving the water running, he walked naked back out to the phone, giving the coffee table a very wide berth, and answered it.
“Hello?”
“Stomann. You’re up? Good. I’ll meet you and the boys in the White Gums Bistro for breakfast in…let’s say half an hour. Before we do The Olgas. There’s some stuff I want to go through with you all, about that unavoidable minor incident that happened yesterday. Make sure we’re all on the same page. Just in case.”
“Caldwell!? But you had breakfast sent up just a minute ago. And hey… what happened to the croaky voice?” By now, Stomann’s voice was a little on the hoarse side too.
There was a long pause before Caldwell spoke again. “Listen Theo. Maybe it’s time to back off the booze a bit. Croaky voice? Breakfast sent up? You’re losing it mate. And the last thing I need right now – especially with Robert pissing off back to Brisbane – is for any more of us to lose it. Got that? Right then, see you at eight-thirty.”
Stomann wasn’t about to let it go.
“But you called before…a few minutes ago…said you’d get room service to…”
“Stomann. Read my lips, I never called you before. Must be someone having a lend of you, sport.”
“But the breakfast…?”
“Yeah. Breakfast at eight-thirty sharp. White Gums Bistro. Be there.”
And for the second time in as many minutes, Stomann was left standing with a mute handset in his sweaty mitt. But if that wasn’t Caldwell before, then who the hell was it? Must be someone having a lend of you his boss had said. Yeah, that’d be right. Probably Dickinson or Muir, or maybe both of them in cahoots. They were the group’s comedians, the ones who’d dubbed him “The Michelin Mann”. It would be just like them to ring him up, bung on Caldwell’s voice (badly, the more he thought about it) then pay a porter, a black prick at that, to bring some ‘breakfast’ up to him. Some roadkill most likely. Ugh!
Hey! They could easily have tied a gossamer-thin thread of fishing line to the salver and jiggled it around too, from outside the door, just to give him the heebie jeebies. It had damn well worked too, spooked the bejesus out of him. But when he got to the tray, there was clearly no fishing line attached to the cover, nor had there been. Whichever way they’d done it (remote control?), it was a neat trick. Stomann stared at the lid for a few seconds wondering what gastronomic delight the boys had cooked up for him.
Oh no, there wasn’t something alive under the lid was there? That would’ve explained the movement.
Cautiously he shuffled his feet back till he was a full metre away from the table. Suspecting the worse, he slowly reached out with his right hand and took a firm grasp of the lid’s handle. Taking a deep breath, he counted to three then quickly yanked off the cover using it as a shield as he brought it away, screaming his lungs out as he did so. There on the plate was just a single little red leaf. That’s strange.
Stomann picked it up and crushed it between his thumb and forefinger. Dumbfounded, he stared at the empty plate for a moment, before a realization hit him…
OH SHIT! IT’S INSIDE THE LID!
Stomann dropped the salver like a hot potato, convinced that something was clinging to its undercarriage, lying in wait, ready to pounce. But as the silverware clanked and clattered and rattled across the tiles, and then silently rolled base up onto the carpet, he could plainly see that it was empty. Ha. Ha. Very funny, boys. A real scream.
By now the steam wafting out of the bathroom was like a low-lying cloud, mis
ting up the room and fogging up the cane-framed mirror above the TV set. His shower beckoned, so putting all thoughts of pranks and impractical jokes, breakfasts and bogeymen to the back of his befuddled brain, he hit the bathroom once more. Almost as an after-thought, he turned around and closed the bathroom door behind him, telling himself it was just so the bloody telephone wouldn’t disturb him. Oh yeah, then why did I slide the bolt across? He stepped over the side of the bathtub and under the stinging spray. He pulled the sliding shower door shut and let the water cascade down his rolls of fat. Ahhh! That feels good.
Stomann was so engrossed in lathering himself up, he didn’t see or hear the latch slowly slide back, or the bathroom door creak open a crack, then click shut a few seconds later. However not long after that, as he was rinsing off the suds, he got the strangest feeling he was being watched. With the hair on his arms bristling, he squeakily wiped the condensation off the shower screen and peered out through the fog.
WHO…WHO’S THERE?
Two beady eyes peered back at him! It gave him a helluva start before he realised it was just his own distorted reflection in the misty mirror above the vanity basin. He was being watched alright; but at least the bastard doing the watching was bloody good looking.
Overkill : Pure Venom Page 2