As he glanced around looking for his next weedy victims, the nearby garden hose burst into life, its nozzle spurting forth a forceful jet of water. It whipped around, twisting and turning around itself like a giant green snake hissing out a torrent of venom. It took him several goes before he eventually stepped on it, up near its “head”, but not before it had sprayed him good and proper. He grabbed the hose and twisted the nozzle off, wondering how on earth that had happened. He always turned the water off at the tap, like he did now. And even if he hadn’t, why had it taken until now to start pissing out. It had rained recently, so it had been over a week since he last used the hose.
He was still pondering this mystery when the first leaf floated down past his face. Then another. And another. Soon hundreds of the small, blood red leaves had fluttered down from the sky and settled on his lawn. Damn! he thought looking around, must have blown in from the park. But there were two things wrong with that. There was no tree that he knew of in the park that had red leaves like this. No red leaves at all. And secondly, there wasn’t a breath of wind to blow them here. Matter of fact it was dead still and, the more he thought about it, dead quiet. No birds sang. No cicadas screeched. Most unusual.
Better get this bleedin’ job done quick smart and back indoors he thought to himself. Too much bizarre shit going on out here. With that, he effortlessly started the Victa and commenced to mow, up and down in dead straight rows, being careful not to miss a single blade of grass or one of those mysterious red leaves. It was a reasonably warm day and yet, despite all his exertion, he was shivering. Why is it so flipping chilly all of a sudden?
He was almost there. Three-quarters of his lawn had been painstakingly mowed; he’d just emptied his second catcherful into the compost bin when he saw it. Right next to the back fence. Reddish brown with dark brown bands. It saw him too. Stopped and raised its broad triangular head and whipped the thin tapered tip of its tail back and forth.
Dickinson froze, white knuckles gripped around the handle of the purring mower. Now the snake was wriggling powerfully straight towards him, ten metres away and closing in fast. He didn’t think that they could move so damn quickly. And usually he’d be right. This breed of snake, the Australian Death Adder, rarely chased its prey, choosing instead to lay in wait. But this particular snake couldn’t wait.
Sod it, it’s not going to get me he said to himself and somehow plucked up enough courage to stand his ground. Perhaps if it had been bigger – it was only just a metre long – and if he hadn’t had the Victa to use as a weapon, he would have turned, run like a girl towards his house and bolted himself inside.
COME ON THEN, YOU BASTARD! he yelled, loud enough for the bastard to hear him, even without eardrums. The snake slithered closer and closer still till it was only two metres away. Dickinson, shaking like a leaf, sweating like a pig, waited till that distance had been halved before he screamed at the top of his lungs, cranked the motor up to full throttle and charged forward.
The machine went straight over the top of the snake; its four razor-sharp blades thumped and clunked loudly for a few seconds and then continued to rotate normally. Ha ha! Got you, you prick! he cried jubilantly and did a little happy dance before switching the Victa off and reversing it back. He stared at the grass where the mower had been. There was nothing there. He would have thought there’d be pieces of snake and blood and gizzards everywhere, but there was not the slightest trace of it.
Must have been hacked up and flung straight back into the catcher he told himself. After all, he’d heard and felt the blades hit. Nothing could have survived being struck by those scalpel-sharp blades rotating at almost 200 miles an hour. Braver than he’d ever thought he could be, he unhooked the catcher and crouched down to look inside, expecting to see the bloody remains of the mangled snake. Yet apart from a few lawn clippings and hundreds more of those bloody red leaves, it was empty.
But if it weren’t there, where the hell was it? Curiosity getting the better of him, he slowly lifted the metal flap on the back of the mower under which the catcher had sat, and peered inside. Nothing…absolutely nothing…
or so he thought. In a flash, the snake that had coiled itself around the top of the cutter shaft sprung out.
Dickinson jumped back fast, losing his hat, but the snake was infinitely faster. It targeted a large exposed vein on his forehead and sank its fangs in deep. Dickinson stumbled backwards, his head already swimming, and crawled away clutching his bleeding forehead. The snake was gone, at least as far as he could see. If he kept calm he could make it to the phone and call 000. Trouble was he couldn’t keep calm if his life depended on it. And it did.
Heart pounding, his right hand holding his punctured head, he staggered to his feet and started running, eyes frantically looking around, locked on to the mower.
THUMP!
He didn’t see the line trimmer lying across his path and stumbled over it, hitting the turf hard. He tried to get up but his legs buckled under him, so he started crawling again still looking around furtively for the snake. He was sure that it was gone, but when he looked around to see how far it was to his back door, the reptile was inches from his face, looking three times bigger now that they were eye to eye at ground level.
Mesmerised and now paralysed and in pain akin to having ones balls squeezed hard, all he could do was watch as it reared its fearsome head with its hooded eyes, bared its long slimy fangs and lunged at his unprotected neck piercing his jugular vein. The last thing he saw wasn’t his life flashing before his eyes; it was the face of a young aborigine staring at him from over the back fence, his eyes red and filled with pure unadulterated hatred.
Chapter 7
Flashback # 1. Out of fuel.
The Applause was clapped out, going nowhere fast.
Its dust-encrusted rusty bonnet jutted out from the shoulder of the road onto the tarmac. As did the thin black arm waving the faded and dented old petrol can.
“Oi! Help! Help us, matey!” Billy Guttuk shouted as he stepped out into the path of a shiny white Toyota mini-bus, the first vehicle they’d seen in over fifteen minutes and the very last ‘cast’ of the day. Perhaps tomorrow they should risk the wrath of the Northern Territory coppers and try a busier section of the park.
“POPPY, WATCH OUT!” his 17-year old granddaughter Cassie screamed as she pulled the wizened and wiry Aboriginal elder back off the bitumen. With a savage blast of the horn, the speeding van swerved hard right, fishtailed a little, but kept barrelling on, for two hundred metres or so.
Billy and Cassie watched as the brake lights of the people-mover finally flashed on and it pulled off to the side of the road in a billowing cloud of red-orange dust. Now it was reversing rapidly and erratically back towards them, engine whining.
Behind them Uluru glowed tangerine in the late afternoon sun. Soon she would be lilac, then purple, then brown, and finally as black as night itself. Seventy-seven year old Billy Guttuk and Cassie waited patiently as the mini-bus reversed back up to them. The doors burst open and its ten male occupants began surging out like angry minga, what the white fellas called ants. Billy waved the empty petrol can again and, flashing his pearly whites, began his practiced spiel.
“Thanks for stoppin’, matey,” he said, running his fingers through his tight white hair; it had the texture of steel wool. “We’s run outta juice and…”
“You crazy coon,” the man cut in. “You could’ve killed yourself, or worse still, us.”
Billy Guttuk looked at the driver out of the corner of his eye and didn’t like what he saw. With his snarling thin lips, long pock-marked nose, piercing sky-blue eyes and closely cropped head of red hair, the man – Caldwell it said on his name tag – had redneck written all over his ruddy face.
“Sorry, matey,” Billy replied with what he hoped was a winning smile. “Didn’t mean to cause youse blokes no trouble. Just that we’s fresh outta gas and gotta get home plurry quick. Cassie here’s got a young’un to look after.” This wasn’
t true. His granddaughter, as far as he knew, was a virgin. But it sounded good. Never let the facts get in the way of a good story and all that.
By now all nine passengers had spilled out of the Toyota, and Billy could see that they were plainly pissed as parrots, and worse still, pissed off. All except the driver, who was now strangely calm. A little too calm, thought Billy.
“Are you sure this heap of shit’s out of petrol?” said Caldwell walking over to the Daihatsu. “Might just be a blockage in the fuel line. Pop open the hood and we’ll have a bit of a squiz.”
Billy Guttuk quickly walked around to the heap of shit’s driver’s side door. “Er…no, matey. She’s plenty outta juice, alrighty. Look,” he said, pointing through the open window at the dusty dashboard gauges, “the needle’s…”
“I SAID OPEN THE FUCKEN BONNET!” roared Caldwell.
“But…”
“NOW!”
Billy looked at the man briefly and then with one final smile, a wry one this time, slowly stepped to the front of the car and fumbled with the catch, stalling for time until time ran out.
As the hood reluctantly rose, its rusty hinges protesting crankily, the ten white rednecks gathered around in a semi-circle and stared at the motor. Or rather, they stared at where the motor would have been if the car actually had one. In its place were a dozen or so filled jerry cans; at outback prices, the equivalent of around $600.
“See, what did I tell you blokes,” Caldwell said to the group as a whole, before his angry blue eyes met and locked onto those of a massive and muscular blond-haired ‘bovver boy’, a former South African called Eddy Van Heerden. “I told ya you can’t trust these sly black bastards, Ed. They’ve got more ways of ripping off honest, hardworking Aussies than the fucking government.”
As the men checked out the missing donk, counted the fuel cans and discussed the scam, Billy edged his way towards Cassie who was looking worried. No, scared.
“Well youse can’t blame a bloke for tryin’ eh,” Billy said, taking his long-haired granddaughter by the elbow and preparing to walk off. “Still, no plurry harm done, eh…youse fellas is just too smart for an old abo like…”
Slamming the bonnet down hard, Caldwell spun around and glared at the pair. If looks could kill…
“No harm done? You nearly kill us…you try to rip us off…and then you say there’s no fucking harm done?”
As he continued to rant and rave, Billy Guttuk saw something that no one else had noticed or, if they had, thought nothing of. Yet it was something that chilled him to the bone. A small blood-red leaf had spiralled down from above his white head of hair and had landed at his feet.
It wasn’t just that this leaf had come from a tree that was at least 10 kilometres away and there was not a breath of a breeze to blow it here. This leaf, Billy knew – as all aboriginal shaman do – was the harbinger of death.
“Tjanyarlpa kukurra!” (“Get ready to run!”) the powerful ngangkarrpa sorcerer said to Cassie with a big smile on his lean face.
“What did you just say?” the man mountain called Van Heerden asked in a guttural South African accent.
“I is just tellin’ Cassie we’s gotta be off plenty soon, Boss,” Billy replied, gazing around at his beloved Uluru. “Be plurry dark soon.”
It was getting dark. In trademark desert fashion, the sun didn’t linger once it had grabbed hold of the horizon; it was already making good its escape behind Kata Tjuta – European settlers called it The Olgas – 50 kilometres due west.
“Not so fucking fast, Blackie” Van Heerden snapped. “We haven’t finished with you yet.”
The rest of the men noticed the aborigines backing away from the Applause and moved menacingly to cut them off.
“Cool it guys,” Caldwell said to them. “Maybe the skinny old abo’s got a point. Perhaps we should admire their ingenuity in fleecing so many of our fellow motorists out of their petrol. Not a bad swindle, eh? And as he said, there’s no harm done. No one was hurt during the making of this scam.
I think we should let bygones be bygones. Better still, as a sign of goodwill, I reckon we should offer our new black buddies here a lift home, back to their tee pee or wherever the fuck they live.”
This invitation was delivered with a wide smile, yet it was as sincere as Billy Guttuk’s had been moments earlier.
By now the men had formed a circle around Billy and Cassie and were clearly intent on herding them into the van.
Billy made one last attempt at diplomacy. “Thanks, matey, but it ain’t far and we’s like to be walkin’, isn’t we Cassie? Stretch the old muscles afore tucker time.”
Cassie, lost for words, just nodded her pretty young head.
“No, we insist,” said Caldwell, his transparent smile disappearing like the setting sun, “just get in the fucking van…NOW!”
“Sure thing, boss,” Billy replied, reaching nonchalantly into the back pocket of his faded dungarees, pretending to scratch his arse. “But maybe we’s should wait for this plurry wind to die down.”
“Wind?! What fuckin’ wind..?”
His answer came two seconds later as Billy Guttuk threw a small wanigga, a threaded wooden cross packed with native gunpowder, wrapped in ’roo skin and strung with human hair, onto the ground. As soon as the throwdown hit the dry cracked earth, it exploded with a loud bang and started spinning at speed. From its smoking debris, a large whirlwind emerged and instantly grew in intensity. The circle was broken as the men shielded their eyes from, and turned their backs on, the blinding mini dust storm.
“KUKURRA!” Billy shouted, although a whisper would have sufficed.
Cassie didn’t need to be told twice. With her grandfather two paces behind her, she took off like an emu in full flight into the sparse, 2-metre high mulga, literally running for their lives.
They had four things on their side: the encroaching nightfall, local knowledge, the fact that most of the men had been drinking, and the element of surprise.
Yet Billy Guttuk knew that the willy-willy would only buy them a few moments grace before the men, angrier than ever, would be off after them in hot pursuit. They had to split up.
“Kukurra kamparnta!” (Run and hide) he told Cassie, as he veered sharply off to the left. Despite the 60-year age difference, he could still outrun his youngest son’s youngest daughter, and he knew her best chance of escape was for him to create a diversion; to act as decoy, or if worse came to worse, bait.
That’s why he slowed down slightly and began to make as much noise as he could, shaking shrubs and tossing brick-size gibbers every so often. It was working. He could hear the men about 100 metres behind him as they noisily followed the sound of twigs snapping and the thump of rocks falling. Good. By now Cassie would be at least 400 metres in the opposite direction. It was time to get moving – really moving…
Too late he saw the hand holding the rock swing out from behind a gigantic ant mound and catch him flush on the forehead. Van Heerden had split from the pack and had skirted wide, lucking onto a goat track and intercepting the absconding aborigine.
Wham! What little light was left went out for Billy Guttuk as he crumbled to the ground. Knocked out, he didn’t hear Van Heerden yell out to the boys in a hoot of triumph. Nor did he feel himself tossed ollas bollas over a broad shoulder and unceremoniously carried back to the mini-bus.
When he came to on the rear seat of the Toyota, his arms trussed up painfully behind his back, the pain in his busted head hit him all over again. Yet his first bleary thought was of Cassie. By now she would be long gone, still running for her life back home on the eastern side of Uluru.
But no. Unless his eyes were deceiving him, here she was now in the glare of the van’s headlights being frogmarched back, her dress in tatters and sheer terror written all over her young face.
Chapter 8
Weird shit.
“So to sum up…Constables Miller and Cutajar, you’re following up on those assaults at the train station…Frank and Fish, you’
re onto that suspicious house fire in Undoolya Road… Reno, you take last night’s break-ins at the bottle shop and Post Office …and Grimes and Bischa, the dynamic duo…you’re finding out where that fresh batch of ice is coming from. Right. Now is there any further business to discuss before we get out there and kick those badasses’ bad asses? No? Well, what are ya waiting for? Go get ’em!”
The morning briefing had just wound up at the Alice Springs Police Station and accompanied by the sound of wooden chairs scraping on lino as the team got up and filed out, Senior Sergeant Steve Simpson was packing up his Cases-in-Progress folders. He stopped and put down the CIPs when he saw that Senior Detective Marr across the table from him hadn’t made a move.
“What’s up, Mike? You worried about who’s passing those fake Fifties?”
“No sarge,” he replied. “They should be easy enough to find. The ink’s still bloody wet. No, it’s the Stomann case.”
Overkill : Pure Venom Page 6