Draw the Brisbane Line

by P. A. Fenton

  ‘Oh, you’re fucken dead, bitch.’ She smashed the half-full bottle of rum on the ground. Dave thought she might have just done that to underline her point, but then she bent down and picked up the neck of it, still attached to the bottle’s jagged shoulders.

  ‘Come on then,’ Banksia said. She set her legs in a half-crouch, tense, but her upper-body appeared loose enough to be considered relaxed.

  The looter charged her, not with a shout or a war-cry but a frank business-like sincerity which chilled Dave far more that the jagged shard of glass she held in her hand. And Banksia? Banksia was grinning like a coke-head riding the crest of euphoria.

  As Yvette sprinted down the road, clearing the town proper and the violence erupting there, she felt like she’d caught the last wave to shore before the sharks arrived.

  She wasn’t safe yet though, not by a long-shot. Every now and then, she’d glance behind to see that skinny madman in pursuit, a grin or a grimace stretched across his face, and for him the distinction between the two was probably unimportant. A few paces behind him lumbered his burly sidekick, his henchman, and he wasn’t smiling at all. Yvette tried to inject some more pace into her stride, leaning into it and pumping her arms. She didn’t think the Louboutins clenched in her fists were slowing her down, and they were the nearest thing she had to a weapon.

  She eventually reached the end of Lawson Street and the beginning of Lighthouse Road, her lungs tightly-filled hot water balloons. At least that meant she was in the home straight, although the home straight began to climb just steeply enough to make her legs start to scream, don’t forget about us.

  She risked a glance behind. It might have been wishful thinking, but it seemed to her that Skinny and Bear were a bit further behind. Good, she had a chance. She just had to get to her house with enough of a head-start to get through her home’s security.

  Epoch sounded like he was going to die. Biff was well out of puff from the sudden sprint, but he wasn’t about to tip over. He was pretty sure his second wind would kick in soon, but he didn’t think Epoch had a second wind.

  ‘Gunna kill her,’ he wheezed. ‘Fucken bitch.’

  Biff wanted to say, why is she a bitch? Because she wanted to avoid a mugging, a beating, or whatever it was Epoch had in mind for her? Instead, he said, ‘Should we stop? Plenty of other big houses in town.’

  Epoch looked across at him, his head wobbling so erratically it was either part of his running technique or he was in the middle of a stroke. He fixed Biff with a mad glare and wheezed, ‘No. Fucken. Way.’

  Yvette sprinted the final fifty metres to the driveway of her home and sidestepped into it. Her two pursuers were out of sight around the bend, and she hoped that if they didn’t know which house was hers, the chase would be over.

  She let out small cries of pain between chest-splitting inhalations. She was slowing, but she forced herself to resume a jog along the paved drive. She was worried that if she stopped moving for too long she wouldn’t be able to start again.

  The noise of the rioting carried all the way to her secluded drive. Loud crashes and booms she hoped were just big things falling down.

  The outer wall of the house appeared out of the trees like an oasis. A well-fortified, exclusive oasis. She scraped her feet up to the main gate and planted her hands on the wall. All she had to do was straighten up, bring her eye to the retinal scanner built into the wall. It was the same technology used in the IRIS passport programme. She first saw it at Schipol airport and decided then, this, this is what I need. No need for keys, just her peepers. Positive recognition of her identity would trigger the half-dozen four-inch-thick steel rods to retract from walls into the housings in the doors, and pneumatic arms would swing the gate — an eight-foot-high steel-reinforced slab of oak — in a wide arc, letting her in. A similar system was in place on the house’s front door.

  She pushed up off the wall and straightened her back, and then immediately arched over in hot agony as both sets of hamstrings simultaneously cramped.

  Oh God, they’re tearing, they’re tearing.

  It felt that way, it really did. Yvette had never given birth, but she thought in that moment the pain those other women speak of, that’s what it must be like: a hamstring tear in the guts.

  She wanted to lie on her back and stretch her legs up on the wall until the pain went away, but she knew she couldn’t afford the time. She had to assume her pursuers knew where she lived, that she only had thirty seconds to a minute’s head-start on them. So she forced herself to her feet, fighting past the searing tight agony in the backs of her legs, trying to keep them as straight as possible, and she managed to get herself into a stiff-legged stance with her hands planted against the wall for support. She was leaning back into the cramp, heels digging into the hard drive, when her right quadriceps seized. Almost immediately after, the left ones tried to wrench themselves into a complex knot. Then both sets of hamstrings resumed their assault, and she went straight back to the ground, unable to stifle the screams which now bolted up and out of her throat.

  Chapter 57

  Jenny blinked her eyes open on a clear blue morning sky, coughing through a throat which felt like it had been lined with glue.

  ‘There she is,’ a woman said from somewhere to her right. ‘Welcome back.’

  Jenny turned her head and saw a woman dressed in jeans and black polo shirt. She held a dangerously sleek rifle — almost futuristic with its contoured matte black body and aerodynamic lines — not at-arms or aimed safely at the ground, but pointed very deliberately at something before her. Jenny turned her head to see what it was, and the first thing she saw was Jim’s dead body beside her, flies already collecting around his ruined head.

  She turned the other way fast. Whether it was the sudden movement or the gruesome image of Jim’s corpse, she retched an acid-sharp stream of orange bile into the grass. Beyond Jim, four men were sitting down on the grass, white plastic ties binding their wrists and their ankles. Thugly was one of them, the pilot was another. Behind her, she knew, there were other men who were not restrained with plastic ties, because they didn’t need to be. She turned back to the woman with the gun and said, ‘I know you.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You don’t.’

  ‘Yeah, I do. I saw you on the TV. On the news.’

  ‘Oh right. Yeah. And you’re Mrs Sportacus.’

  Ignoring the bilious movements in her body, Jenny sat upright. Sportacus. That was Tom’s snarky nickname for Dave, but he only ever used it in private. ‘We’re not married, yet,’ Jenny said. ‘I’m the future Mrs Sportacus. Maybe.’

  ‘Don’t you fucken maybe me. I’ll drag you to the church myself.’

  ‘You must be GI Jane,’ Jenny slurred.

  ‘Something like that.’

  Thinking about Dave, she suddenly felt very much awake when she realised this woman would know where he was, how he was. ‘Where’s Dave?’ she said.

  ‘He’s safe.’

  ‘Yeah? And where’s that? Last I heard he was with you, and that doesn’t seem so safe.’

  The woman, the soldier — the shooter — gave her a half smile and chewed at some loose skin at the corner of her lower lip. ‘I’m still OK, ain’t I?’

  ‘So what is this exactly?’ Thugly interrupted. ‘We under arrest or somethin?’

  The soldier girl in plain clothes looked towards the house, and Jenny followed her gaze. The large commando guy was marching towards them. He nodded to GI Jane.

  ‘Somethin,’ she said to Thugly. ‘Right, which one of you is the pilot?’

  The pilot croaked ‘I am,’ and the commando whipped out Satan’s own fishing knife and stepped up to him. The poor guy, he screwed up his face in a this is the end and I don’t want to see it kind of look, and the knife slipped neatly between the plastic bonds around his wrists and ankles. He grabbed him by the upper arm and lifted him to his feet like a small child.

  ‘Chopper,’ the commando said to him. ‘Now.’

  G
I Jane stepped up to Jenny and held out a hand to her. ‘Miss Lucas? Let’s get you out of here.’

  Jenny took her hand and felt the strength of the woman lift her to her feet. Her head swam for a few seconds, but she stabilised, found her balance.

  ‘So you’re just gunna leave us here tied up like this?’ Thugly said. ‘For the cops?’

  GI Jane smiled. ‘How fast you think you can hop?’

  The helicopter lifted off the ground, and Jenny looked out the window at the cluster of bound and dead men near the house. Pia’s hand squeezed her shoulder — they’d made their introductions before take-off, she was Pia and he was a brick, or something — and she shouted over the spinning rotors, ‘You need to take your seat.’

  Jenny nodded and strapped herself in, tight.

  While the pilot was going through all his pre-flight preparations, Jenny asked Pia, ‘What’s in the house? What were we going to be carrying out of there? Was it drugs?’

  Pia smiled and shook her head. ‘Do we look like we work vice? No, it was arms.’

  ‘What, like guns?’

  ‘Guns,’ the brick said. ‘Grenades, mines, RPGs, C4, Semtex …’

  ‘C4?’ Jenny said. ‘Like plastic explosive?’

  The brick nodded. ‘Also some Hellfires,’ he said.

  ‘Holy fuck,’ Pia said. ‘How many?’

  ‘Dozen, maybe more.’

  ‘And you’ve already called it in?’

  The brick nodded.

  ‘We need to get this fucken chopper off the ground,’ she said. ‘Right now.’

  The Battle of Banksia was a brutal and furious thing, fists and elbows and knees and faces and ribs and feet and foreheads all crunching together in meaty thumps of impact. Banksia took care of the charging girl-thing with a hugely impressive roundhouse kick to the head. Everyone who saw it uttered whoa in unison. Most people there had probably never seen such a strike outside of the cinema, Dave included. It seemed as though every person up and down the street, be they rioter or defender, took a minute to take in the brief confrontation. When their awe broke, however, so did their restraint, and three men charged out from the restaurant at Banksia.

  Banksia met them with fists and knees, and despite absorbing several of their blows, they were left on the ground unconscious or writhing in dazed pain, while Banksia stood over them breathing hard through a bloodied grin.

  Whatever thin barrier had been holding back the other looters, it snapped, and they charged at the lone brave woman. And a half-thought later, the defenders charged in to help, shopkeepers and chefs and QTA soldiers; and Dave, by virtue of being close to where Banksia was standing, found himself at the centre of it all.

  Biff thought he might have to carry Epoch the rest of the way, judging by the smaller man’s laboured breathing. Biff was actually enjoying the run, the burn in his quads and his calves. He didn’t feel as though he was running to or from anything right then, he was just … running. Epoch found his second or third or fourth wind, but before they could settle into a steady rhythm, Epoch reached out and grabbed Biff by the sleeve, pulling him up.

  ‘Down here,’ he said. ‘Her house is down here.’

  Biff would have run straight past it if Epoch hadn’t stopped him. The trees seemed to sway across the entrance, conspiring to conceal it. They started jogging along the curved driveway, and Biff welcomed the gentle decline it provided, taking some of the effort away from his overworked legs. They heard the screams before they were too far down the path, cries of pain.

  Biff was momentarily confused. Was someone else already there? Was she being hurt? If she was, should he … should he help?

  ‘Come on,’ Epoch said, and actually began to run ahead of Biff, lifting the pace.

  Biff started pumping his legs again and quickly caught up to the bouncing backpack on twigs. Somewhere up ahead a low mechanical whir started up.

  Imagine this is childbirth, Yvette told herself. She often imagined what it would be like to have a child, a small life to look after, but seldom had she bothered to imagine the journey of pregnancy and labour. But now, this pain … other women always described labour and childbirth as one of the most viscerally agonising experiences any human could endure. This was the hottest agony Yvette had ever endured, so it must be in the same ballpark. So, she was to give birth, to deliver her own life. She just had to stand up. She ignored her hamstrings as they said no you don’t and tried to curl up into a wet fleshy ball. She ignored her quadriceps as they said, what the hamstrings said. She was screaming now without restraint, but that retinal scanner was right there, just a little bit further. Her lower back entered the fray, joining forces with her hamstrings to bring her to her knees. But she fought it, through pain and tears and her hammering heart, and she threw her eye against that scanner hard enough to bruise it.

  She imagined herself having to explain the black eye in the coming days to sceptical sticky-beaks. I walked into a retinal scanner. A rough laugh tumbled out of her throat as the big gate started to swing inward, and she fell through the widening gap.

  Before the pain in her body could reclaim her, she swung her fist around and connected with the big red button on the wall which reversed the gate’s action. It slowed, paused, and began to close again. She fell to the cement driveway, somewhere between barely there and nowhere.

  They were only half a dozen strides from the entrance when the big driveway door clicked shut. Epoch let out a shout of frustration and threw his shoulder into it. He had as much of an impact on the barrier as a bug has on a windscreen. He fell to his arse and sat there, panting hard.

  Biff turned his attention to the gate and the wall. It was easily eight or nine feet high. He might be able to boost Epoch up there if he stood on his shoulders, but Biff could make out the tell-tale glint of wire along the top of both gate and fence. Probably electrified. He passed on his observations to Epoch.

  ‘Well, fuck,’ Epoch eventually said, and a sick grin split his face. ‘Only one thing for it then, eh?’

  He pushed himself to his feet, panting hard, and approached the gate. He shrugged the backpack from his shoulders. Biff understood what he meant to do when he began unzipping the pack.

  ‘I don’t think you can just blow the lock on this thing,’ Biff said. ‘Don’t even know where the lock is.’

  ‘Nah, fuck the lock, yeah? We’ll pack this fuckin slab with everything we have left. Take the whole fuckin thing down.’

  Chapter 58

  Banksia wasn’t fighting solo for long. The first guy to stand by her side was the militia man. Dave recognised him from the television, from the interviews, but he couldn’t quite remember his name. Something starting with an A, like Alfonso. Dave just started thinking of him as Al. He stalked up behind a disenfranchised muscular kid dressed in a Versace chenille barocco loopback hoodie, and clubbed him with the edge of his hand at the base of his neck. He went down with a surprised cry.

  On television, Al always came across as stern and serious, yet calm. Controlled. He used political-speak phrases like there is no instant solution, and our message is very clear and very simple. Now he kicked the guy in the hoodie somewhere below the ribs with a mad grin chiselled into his face.

  Banksia and Al started fighting back-to-back like a couple of comic book superheroes. They were joined by others, an eclectic blend of residents and itinerants, from the very wealthy to those completely untroubled by wealth. A blonde surfer boy looked like he was trying to keep the attackers away from Banksia, and he was making a pretty good show of it, relying on inelegant though effective punches and kicks. What he lacked in technique he made up for with raw enthusiasm. Dave saw Tino running across to the group from a smaller fray further up the street, a baton gripped in his hand like a sword and his handgun still in its holster.

  Dave was surprised to realise that, with the exception of the occasional warning shot fired in the air, he was possibly one of the very few people to have used a firearm during the melee.

  Bank
sia swivelled her hip and swung her leg up and around in a perfectly executed high kick, connecting with the head of an overweight blonde girl in a high-vis shirt wearing a pair of pink diamond drop earrings, somewhere between a carat and a carat-and-a-half each. One of the prized baubles sailed through the air and skipped along the road amongst the pebbles and blood.

  Some of the blood was Banksia’s. A lot of it, probably. She was dripping the wet stuff from several places on her head and her hands. Blood soaked into her once-blonde hair from two or three scalp wounds, and she spat a stream of it onto the road. Rumour had it she once received a deep gash in her femoral artery while filming a pair of fighting timberwolves in Alaska, completely on her own with a Go-Pro strapped to her head, and nearly bled out before the medivac helicopter arrived. The injuries she suffered now would be barely noticeable by comparison.

  I can’t just stand here, Dave thought. I can barely move, but I can’t just stand here while Banksia fights, while the town residents and the workers and the tourists and the police fight. I have to join in, I have to do what I can.

  What he could do consisted of taking two laboured steps forward before a charging looter in a pair of tan Hermes loafers shoulder-charged him squarely in the middle of the back, then hurdled his suddenly pain-contorted body. Mercifully, he wasn’t trampled. The restraint exhibited by the police, by the militia, it seemed to have extended in a fashion to the looters. They ran around him, jumped over him, but didn’t treat him like a rug.

  He still wanted to get up, to help Banksia and join the fight. His body seemed to have vetoed that idea though. All he could do, he found, if he craned his neck as far as it would go and rolled his eyes to a point where they were half in the bag of his eyelids, was watch.

  Epoch didn’t worry about a countdown or following any kind of safety procedure. He just ran like fuck after lighting the fuse, no word of warning, and Biff sprinted after him. He’d packed the remaining stock of the explosives into the small corner where the heavy gate abutted the unscalable wall, inserted the longest piece of fuse wire he could find — and none of them seemed long enough, not with a charge that size, and he was all out of remote detonators — and lit it. They ran back up the drive towards the road and darted sideways into the scrub a moment before the charge detonated. Biff felt the shock-wave hit him in the back, and he reflexively put his hands over his ears. An empty gesture, his ears were already ringing like a tuning fork after the blast.