The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2010 (volume 1)

by Paul Haines

  The final charge is read, and Colin pauses to lick his lips, the break in speech tripping my attention. All the charges are the same, for all our prisoners. A mass sentencing and execution would be more efficient, I’d joked.

  But, no. It is the rights of the individual that DREOC has not respected. Thus it is the individual we must honour, and condemn.

  No one talks about Australia anymore. I stopped counting the number of times I’ve had to reload after the sixth clip.

  “We are prepared to waive these charges,” Colin says. “If you can put aside your prejudices and judgements and let go of the collective mentality you’ve so blindly followed, if you can do this, you may join us. You can help us change Australia. You have a choice: to change.

  “Together,” Colin says. “We are building a better future.”

  He can’t say the DREOC motto without emphasising it. He still thinks it’s clever.

  Blood seeps over the lip of the stage to the patterned paving below. The slope has funnelled it down through the cracks towards St Kilda Road, and the crowd has given way before its advance. On the edge, by that creeping tide, an Indian woman and red-bearded man stand behind a girl, hands on her shoulders. Her face is dirty, thin, and the features ambiguous in origin. She covers her nose and mouth and hasn’t looked up from the blood in a long time.

  This enemy, this guy, this frightened man, he is kneeling in the blood of those tried before him. It’s soaked his pants and the stain is climbing the fabric. It isn’t much of a choice. He nods. He has no loyalty to DREOC. It was just a job.

  Colin looks at Yvonne, and with a small shake of her head, she removes her hand.

  She is so quick to judge.

  Colin doesn’t skip a beat. “You do not possess the qualities necessary to make the world and our future what it must be. You have no place here.” I can’t tell if Colin enjoys this or not. I don’t know if I can even hear him over the memory of all the previous judgements and the growing howl in my heart.

  “This is Tessa. You can’t classify her just by looking at her face, and her background confuses you because she cannot be so easily defined as ‘Asian’ or ‘Caucasian’. For that, you treated her as less than human.”

  And you won’t let me be only human, merely human, just human.

  “You locked her up because she was inconvenient.”

  And you’re the one who carried that out.

  “She is the face of the future, the Face of the Revolution, and the revolution has won!”

  There are no cheers. This is no triumph.

  In this breath, in this moment no different from all the others preceding it, I touch my finger to the trigger. The hush in the square is outlined by the complacent murmur of seagulls, gathering by the trucks to the side of the stage, the tray beds heaped high with all the people I have executed, no, murdered today. To the other side, the beer garden converted to a cattle pen, are all the prisoners yet to be tried, heads down, some crying.

  No please no please no please no his lips move. This frightened man, this enemy, his voice has fled. Yvonne took it from him, negated any choice he might have made with a shake of her head.

  My wrist aches, hand gloved in gore, cordite and blood on my tongue, ears ringing, the gun too hot in my hand but I can’t put it down. There are more to come, we have to read them, we have to decide what they are, we have to-

  Colin steps back, clear of any spatter, and I say, “No.”

  The word cuts through all the other words hanging in the air, soft and undeniable and waking the crowd from their acceptance.

  “These blokes, they thought I was some old Chinese fuddy-duddy, they started telling me what I should be saying, and I thought, uh oh, here we go, I’ll show them. Nobody tells me what to be.”

  “You know I’m just going to throw those words back at you when you tell me what I should be, right, Dad?”

  I tilt my chin, just enough of a negative to assure the guards below.

  “You were this man. Just doing your job. Not malicious. You worked for DREOC and did all that he did. You changed.”

  “And he won’t change,” Colin counters. “Yvonne has seen him. She knows. None of us can lie to her.”

  “No,” I repeat. “Seeing is not understanding.” A ripple runs through the crowd. These people have lost as much as I have, if not more. They fought beside me. They died doing what I commanded. They did terrible things because I ordered it. They believed.

  “His death won’t solve anything. None of these deaths will. This isn’t what we wanted.”

  “This is what we need.” Colin turns to the audience, prisoners and comrades, and points at the enemy, the guy, the victim. “He will not change! He will look at you and see a chink, a wog, a skinny, a boong, a curry, a towelhead. It is ingrained. It cannot be undone.”

  The audience shivers like wind passing over water. Here and there I see a nod, or a frown of doubt. Even the guards, friends who’ve been with us since that first camp, lean towards each other and whisper uncertainly, eyes darting between us. They all believed, because we never gave them a reason not to.

  Colin has become a fluent orator in his time, but I am the Face of the Revolution, and there is blood, bone and brain spattered on my trousers, shirt, face and hair.

  The girl in the crowd isn’t listening to Colin. She doesn’t need to be told of all the wrongs DREOC perpetuated in the name of a better future. She doesn’t need fine speeches to mollify her conscience.

  “. . . It will only happen again unless we erase it. We must remove the minds that pollute the collective with narrow and out-dated thoughts . . .”

  All she can see is the blood at her feet.

  “. . . We can only take what we have learned, and start anew. A society that recognises the individual as equally as the group.”

  Out of my line of sight, Yvonne is silent, still, almost nonexistent. Knowingly or not, she has become the tool DREOC created her to be. I am fortunate for the helmet, and that—here, now—she cannot see what I am thinking.

  Colin turns to me, and it’s just him, me, and the disappointment in his voice.

  “It was you who taught me this simple truth.”

  “Then why don’t you understand?” I whisper.

  The crowd stills. I have never grown used to being the focus of so much attention.

  This time, I can’t give them what they want.

  “Don’t you see what we’re doing? You put me in that camp because someone read my mind and I dreamed of zombies, and that was incompatible with your checklist. Now we’re standing here, passing out judgement on these people because we’ve read their minds and what we find is incompatible with our checklist. This new world order we’re building, now we have our own psychic; we’re telling people what they are, and what they are allowed to be—” I swallow. I can’t look at Yvonne. “We’ve become them.”

  “This is different, Tessa.” He couldn’t fake this frightening calm. “You’re losing sight of the bigger picture.”

  “This is not different.”

  The frown in Colin’s brow deepens. He doesn’t want to hear this, doesn’t want me to be this, doesn’t have time for this. “Everything has changed. We’re giving this man a chance, which is more than you were given. You know this. You’ve known this your whole life. This is the change you brought about.”

  The rift is complete. This is what we have become. In the empty space between us is the memory of Kim. This is why he ended up in Kim’s bed; he had not put her on a pedestal. She was like him, just some person.

  I bow my head, and nod.

  He says, “Then you know what must be done.”

  He says, lower, “It is too late to change your mind.”

  I don’t trust myself to speak.

  For a moment, I think he’s going to reach out a hand to me, or I to him, but the moment passes, and with a final nod, he turns away from me.

  “Doubt is in all of us!” He addresses the crowd again as I step up. “Even sh
e, the spark and inspiration that brought us so far, even she doubts! We have endured so much to reach this point, we have suffered and we have lost so much, and there’s still a lot of work to be done.” The stillness in the audience remains, but the flavour of the air has changed, the welling expectation heavy like a distant storm. “The path forward is still one we must fight for, every step of the way. We all doubt. We will continue to doubt, but we shall never, never let doubt win!”

  They cheer. They no longer doubt.

  Yvonne puts her hand on the back of my neck. I feel a tremble run through her fingers, but she does not pull away.

  This enemy, this victim, this guy at my feet, he won’t look at me. I don’t doubt Yvonne. She sees people clearly, all they have ever been. I judge him, and harshly.

  She cannot see what people will become.

  In another time, in another place, to another person, my mother said she would be proud of me, no matter who I was, and even though he hassled me for not becoming an astronaut, my father agreed.

  Finally, I meet Yvonne’s eyes.

  She’s smiling, a broad, relieved smile, and with that smile the world changes, no, the world never changed, and my doubts leave me.

  And I put a bullet through her heart.

  Brave Face

  Pete Kempshall

  They made me watch.

  It took about a minute. Doesn’t sound long, does it? But a minute . . .

  Count it. Go on, count it out. One one-thousand. Two one-thousand. Three one-thousand. And while you’re getting up to sixty, think about watching. Not on the net like everyone else, but right there in the room, close enough to look into his eyes. Unable to turn it off, unable to look away.

  Then tell me a minute’s not long.

  Afterwards, they tied on the blindfold again, trapping me inside my head with the sight, and with the knowledge that sooner or later they’d come for me. That’s how this will end. Not with negotiations, not with exchanges or concessions, or release, but on my knees, under lights.

  I concentrate on other things.

  I’m with Beth, squeezing her tight in Departures. She tells me to be careful, I tell her not to worry. I’m a civilian. I’m going there to help, not to fight. It’ll be fine. Promise.

  I kiss her and she touches my face. Her hands smell of baby wipes.

  The memory aches, but the ache gives me strength. If I hold on to it like I held onto her, they can’t touch me, not where it matters most.

  Jerry begged. God, how he begged. They had to shout their demands into the camera just to be heard. And then the screaming, as they set to work with the knife, slicing first, then sawing, holding him up by the hair as the rest of him fell away.

  That’s why they made me watch. That’s why they took away the cloth, held my head still and my eyelids open. They wanted me to know what’s coming. Because when you know what’s coming, when you’ve seen it happen . . . you’re going to beg. That’s what they want, for me to beg, to bargain, to plead.

  But I won’t. Behind my eyes I see them doing to me what they did to Jerry and I want to scream. I want to howl and thrash and kick and bite and cling to my life with every last particle of my strength. But I won’t.

  I picture her watching when they drag me in front of the lens, picture how she’ll see me every time she closes her eyes. Every time she thinks of me—for every day after, despite everything we’ve shared—her first thought will be of this. And I imagine how one day, when he’s old enough, she’ll have to explain it to our boy.

  I can’t stop this. Not by begging. Not by pleading. All I can do is make it easier for the people I love. So I pray, for a brave face and a sharper knife.

  It’ll be fine.

  Promise.

  Home

  Martin Livings

  Jack sits, dead, in the passenger seat of a white sedan driven by a familiar stranger. It’s hot in the car, hot like an open oven, hot like a burning lake of oil; rivulets of sweat trickle down his brow and back, along his arms. His wrist itches and aches where his watch strap digs into it, but he doesn’t dare look at it, doesn’t want to know the time. Half past death, a quarter to hell.

  “How are you holding up, soldier?” the man asks him, without taking his eyes from the road ahead, straight and featureless as the barrel of a rifle. On either side of the road, misty buildings stream past them, their walls transparent. Nebulous tree spirits line the street, barely there at all. And, beyond and beneath and behind them all, the desert, always the desert, dry, flat, dead. Dead like Jack.

  Jack looks down from the road ahead, at his once-pristine army dress uniform, rumpled by heat and sweat. There, in the middle of his chest, the shirt is torn and burnt, hanging away in ragged flaps. Beneath that, the gaping hole in his chest. His fingers flutter unconsciously to the wound, feeling the jagged edges of his shattered ribs.

  “Jack?”

  Jack looks up at the driver, a well-dressed man in his middle years with dark, thin hair greying and flat against his scalp. Small, delicate glasses sit on the bridge of his thin nose. He wears a stylish dark blue suit and seems blissfully untouched by the heat that torments Jack, who feels like he should know him. The man keeps watching the road.

  “Jack, I asked you how you were holding up.” There is a searching quality in the man’s voice, a piercing lighthouse beam of concern that makes Jack shrivel in his seat.

  Jack doesn’t say anything, can’t find the air in his ruined chest. He wants to ask where he is, who the driver is, where they’re going, but there’s dust in his throat, sand in his lungs. He shrugs instead.

  “Not too far to go now,” the man says. “Nearly there.” He glances across at Jack.

  Jack flinches away from the driver. The man’s eyes are carnival mirrors, each one holding a twisted, misshapen reflection of Jack, throwing it back at him like a foul curse. He turns, looks out his window instead, anything to escape those mirrored eyes. Outside, the ghost houses pass them by, their fences swirling with pale luminescent smoke. They stand above the arid sands on foundations long dead, faded memories of brick and wood and concrete. Only the desert is real now. The desert, and the road, and the heat.

  The car slows, pulls over. Jack feels the bump as it stops, and the buildings around them emerge from the smoke, become more real, more solid. It looks like a service station, a low-slung building with huge glass windows and doors plastered with garish advertisements for a thousand things a dead man no longer needs. The driver turns to Jack, he sees it in his peripheral vision, but he doesn’t return the look, doesn’t dare meet those eyes again. “I’m sorry,” the man says, “but we need to get some petrol. Can I get you anything? Some water?”

  Water. Jack’s dry mouth and throat cry out for it, but he controls them. He can’t trust anything, not from this man, this thing that looks like a man. He shakes his head.

  “Suit yourself,” says the man, and climbs out of the car. He walks around and pumps some petrol into the tank, stands casually in the mist, the buildings languidly fading in and out of existence around them. The harsh clunk-clunk-clunk of the bowser makes his head hurt. Then it stops, and the driver puts the nozzle back and walks into the smoke, towards the hazy shop. In a second or two, he’s gone. Jack holds his breath, waits for the man to reappear, but he doesn’t. Then Jack reaches for the door handle, expecting it to be locked. It clicks and opens beneath his hand.

  Outside, the air is even hotter than within, drier, dustier. He coughs as he steps out of the car, wobbles on his feet as if he’s never walked a step in his life. He leans against the vehicle for a moment, then pushes himself off. He walks away, away from the car, away from the phantom petrol station. Away from it and towards the only thing that’s real. The road and the desert beyond.

  He stands at the edge of the road, swaying a little. His head spins. The sweat is under his watch band again, making his wrist hurt. Even outside the car, he can smell the stink of his corpse, the flesh rotten, blood congealed and tacky. He looks down
at his chest, sees flies buzzing around the open wound. He feels sick at the sight of them.

  He looks up, up at the road, and glances to his left. There’s a car approaching, a dirty black car, dented and rusted, travelling fast down the straight, barren highway. Then a noise to his right distracts him, a sharp rhythmic drum roll. He recognises the sound immediately, looks in its direction. There is a jeep approaching, an army jeep painted pale yellow and brown, desert camouflage colours. The muzzle-flash of its rear-mounted heavy machine gun flickers like a faulty light bulb. He hears the triple-bangs of the bullets, the gunfire, the sonic booms, the impact explosions. He looks down and sees the road at his feet splinter, shattered pieces of rough bitumen dancing like startled crickets. He turns back to his left as the bullets finally find their target. The dark car shudders and shivers beneath the assault, metal torn, glass shattered. It veers off to the side of the road.

  His side of the road.

  It’s coming right at him, collision course, but he feels no fear, just a curious detachment. It slides sideways in the soft sand at the road’s shoulder, engulfed in a plume of dust. The cloud reaches Jack, slaps him in the face, and he closes his eyes, flinches away from the stinging sands. When he opens his eyes again, the car has come to a halt.

  Jack hears footsteps to his right. He turns and sees that the jeep has stopped, maybe ten metres away, and a man in army fatigues is jogging towards him, sidearm drawn and at the ready. His pale helmet is low on his face, shading his eyes. The soldier runs straight past Jack, close enough to reach out and touch if he wanted, and approaches the ruined black car. He looks through the shattered windscreen, at the dead man slumped behind the wheel. The driver doesn’t look much older than Jack, maybe in his thirties, with olive skin and dark hair. He’s dressed in civilian clothes, his white button-down shirt soaked with blood. Sunglasses cover his eyes, a small mercy. The soldier carefully walks around to the side of the car, to the rear door. He reaches out and opens it.