Doomsday's Child

by Pete Aldin

  Red Head blushed but kept silent. His sneakers had become objects of fascination to him.

  Meg's expression hardened a little, but she showed no similar embarrassment. “You're one of us, despite the accent. Americans have always been our allies. We can trust you. But we can't trust them.”

  “Bloody oath,” said Bill, turning to face the crowd. “Bastards destroyed a beautiful country.”

  More murmurs of approval and support. This time he got lots of eye contact.

  Lewis shifted, about to say something, but Elliot put a hand on his arm. Then he raised his voice and pitched it past Meg and her red-haired lapdog. “So it was this guy who unleashed an undead plague upon Australia. Geez, Lewis, that was more than a little thoughtless.”

  Lewis rewarded him with a smirk.

  “Not what he means and you know it,” Meg snapped, an eye on her restless disciples. She nodded at Lewis, but said to Elliot, “You're not the poor prick who had to stop the refugee boats and saw how messed up those people are.”

  No, but I saw how messed up the region they came from was. And how we did a lot of that messing up.

  Lewis bristled. “My dad wasn't a boat person! He came here as a uni student, then got a job.”

  “An Australian job!” snarled Bill.

  “Shut the kid up,” called someone else.

  Red Head looked at Lewis with more than a little pity and made a hand motion to keep quiet.

  Meg told Elliot, “Time's up. Choose. With us or against us?”

  And that's what it boils down to these days. At least life's simple.

  “I guess it'll have to be against.”

  Meg looked over her shoulder. “Tony, you recognized that boat? Said they stole it?”

  “Bloody oath. Reg Davies' boat.”

  “Then search it. You too,” she added to the man beside her. He squirmed, discomfort growing. “You'll stand right there,” she told Elliot and Lewis, “and your friend back there will give them room. They find anything indicating you harmed this Reg Davies person and our conversation will change tack dramatically.”

  19

  They took the trip back in silence with the wind and the sun in their faces. The small marina was as they'd left it, the birds worrying at the carnage on the pier. Their SUV and trailer sat at the far end of the lot near the ramp; no one had been by to steal it. They pulled the boat up far along the dock to bypass as much of the human detritus as possible, moored, climbed up and tiptoed through the mess with birds flapping and complaining. In no mood to love animals, Elliot swung a fist at one that flapped too close, almost connected. If they hadn't been picking at the unholy undead, he'd have considered bagging a couple for dinner. He had to do something to take his mind off this. And luckily, Lewis had coolly evaded any discovery of the pistol in the waistband of his jeans. Lewis had the SIG out now, studying it like he couldn't believe he still had it. Elliot couldn't either. He was certain the red-haired guy had noticed, but he hadn't said anything. The .303 and the pocket knife they'd kept, but perhaps in the interest of good sportsmanship they'd handed back the bat and tire iron.

  Assholes.

  But really what had he expected?

  Thought you'd find an impregnable island fortress where happy people would welcome Lewis with open arms and let you ride off into the sunset with a clear conscience.

  Idiot.

  Turning left, Elliot dragged his feet onto the asphalt lot with the others flanking him. Their misery was palpable, a cloud at his back. After unhooking the trailer, it would be a fifteen minute trip back to the boat-owner's house to break the bad news to the other Cambodians. Their best choice short term would be to fortify that place—or more painfully, consider returning to Jock's. Beyond that, Elliot needed a good night's sleep before plotting options.

  They were halfway across the parking lot when a male voice called from the door of the tackle store.

  “Stop there and I won't shoot you.”

  Instinct kicking in, Elliot dropped to the ground, putting one of the parked cars between him and the store. He craned his neck to see Lewis and Heng still upright, hands climbing toward the sky. Heng faced the store but Lewis was turned toward their right. Elliot looked that way and gave up hope. A second man had appeared from behind another car, double-barrel shotgun covering him. A goddam ambush. He got to his feet. The man at the store walked out into the sunlight, brandishing a bolt-action rifle. Elliot's chest itched where the barrel was pointed. Light glinted on the hill above where a third man also held a rifle on them. All three wore faded work pants and long sleeve cotton shirts, their grey hair stuffed under cloth sunhats. Two wore glasses. None of them was a day under sixty.

  “Boy's got a pistol,” called the man with the shotgun. Elliot noticed a walkie-talkie on his belt. A guy on the island had been muttering into a similar handset; Elliot had thought him communicating with others on the island. Instead he'd been tipping these farmers off, his comrades searching the boat to stall for time.

  But for what purpose?

  The guy at the store told Lewis to put it on the ground and for all of them to drop whatever other weapons they had. Exchanging glances, Heng and Elliot tossed the tire iron and cricket bat.

  “Keys to the car too.”

  Elliot said. “We walked here.”

  The man pointed in turn to the cars hooked to trailers. “One of them's yours. You drove the boat here with it. So. Keys. Now.”

  Elliot dug them out and tossed them on the cricket bat.

  They were directed out into the open and ushered by the guy at the store up the road out of the parking lot, while the shotgun-bearer collected the 9-mil. The guy on the hill stayed there covering them until they'd passed then fell in beside his mate, while the guy with Elliot's SIG started up the SUV and followed them in first gear.

  “You farmers?” Elliot asked. “We can help you. We're fit, healthy–”

  “Shut it,” one said. The radio crackled at his belt.

  “Must be immigration service then,” Elliot said, nodding at the walkie-talkie. He received no answer except a gesture with the shotgun to keep him moving.

  One trio followed the other up the hill. The older men were steely-eyed and weather-worn, capillaries showing in their cheeks and joint pain in the way they walked, but they weren't stupid, keeping a reasonable distance and keeping their prisoners to the centre of the roadway.

  Around the bend and over the crest, the top of a long truck showed, dull steel or aluminum panels with long gaps between them. A livestock transport. He smelled them, then heard them. Sheep. Ten or twenty maybe, about a quarter the potential load of that trailer.

  “So you are farmers,” Elliot said.

  “I said shut up.”

  “You said shut it,” Lewis said.

  “Smart arse kid. Gonna get shot.”

  Lewis had the sense to leave it at that, but Elliot wondered—as the other two must have been—why they weren't shooting them, doing it here, getting it over with. The truck gave off an aura, as if there were worse things than a bullet in the head on a country road.

  The only times in history that people were herded into livestock cars …

  When they were a hundred feet away, they were ordered to stop. One of the farmers skirted them and opened the back gate. There were sheep in the topmost level. The middle two decks were empty. Someone moved in the gloom of the lowest deck, the trailer floor, and Elliot hoped to heaven there weren’t deaders in there.

  “Back, you,” the man at the gate told whoever was in there and Elliot's blood pressure dropped to a slightly healthier level.

  “In you go,” said the other man.

  “Figured you'd say that,” said Elliot.

  And with no option, he and the others complied.

  *

  A young couple, male and female, crouched in the middle of the forty-foot trailer, their heads ducked beneath the floor of the deck above.

  A gridwork of steel bars had been laid across the trailer's fl
oor, for no purpose Elliot could see unless it was to stop fallen animals from sliding around. The way he'd seen livestock crammed into similar trucks over the years, normally there wasn't any room for animals to slide, held in place by the press of bodies. A couple of planks the size of suburban fence palings lay against the right-hand wall of the trailer; a tuft of wool had snagged in one where the wood cracked like a hangnail. The welded framework had been there for years, judging by the chipped paint, dried feces and rust. Each bar was a little thicker than his fingers and each square was fifty by fifty inches. And the framework made it impossible to sweep out the trailer if the famers had been so inclined. “This is useful,” he murmured, inspected the detritus fallen inside it.

  “This bullshit,” Heng said, fists wrapped around the thick side panels and rattling them hard.

  “Won't get out that way,” said the young woman at the far end. “We tried.”

  “Not try everything,” Heng said.

  Elliot gathered three bolts the size of index fingers into a pile and added, “Damn straight.”

  Above them sheep shuffled, complained. It stank bad in here, the air so thick it was almost solid.

  Lewis crawled closer to the young couple. “I'm Lewis. This is Heng and Elliot.”

  The young couple closed the gap and offered him their hands in turn. They were college age, the male with heavy beard and long hair tied in a man bun, the female with her hair clipped shorter than Elliot's and eyes the color of a clear sky. They were in good shape, not an ounce of fat on them but well fed and toned, dressed in shorts and tees with hoodies tied round their waists. Stress had hollowed out their cheeks, painted dark circles beneath their eyes, while the sun had tanned their skin the red-brown of clay.

  Each sported a different ankle tattoo above their sockless sneakers.

  “Angie,” she said.

  “Dylan,” he said. “They got us on the road. Maybe half an hour's drive from here down the coast. Tricked us into coming closer.” He shook his head in rue.

  “Looked like safe people,” Angie explained. “Old people. We're so stupid.”

  Lewis made a sympathetic face. “Not many safe people around anymore.”

  Elliot noticed then that Dylan's left hand was bandaged as tightly as his own ankle. “You bit?”

  “What? No! Cut my palm on barbed wire.”

  Something warm and putrid gushed through the gaps between decks, spraying near the three young people who cursed and made space around it.

  “Do you know where they're taking us?” Angie asked from the striped sunlight in back of trailer.

  “Didn't stop to ask them,” Elliot muttered. “Too busy being herded in here with the rest of you sheep.”

  She flinched, then squinted blue death at him. Not one to tolerate disrespect. That was good.

  Heng shuffled around, squatting, one hand on the outer panels for balance. “Doesn't matter where take us. Matter what we do when we get there.” He turned Elliot's way. “You got plan?”

  Elliot started unlacing the boot from his injured foot. When he had it off, he tugged at the long woollen sock he had there damp with sweat. He shook it and slid the three bolts inside it down to the toe, tied a knot above them. He lay it beside him and got the lockblade from his cargo pocket the dumb farmers hadn't bothered searching.

  “You ever fire a rifle?” he asked Heng.

  “Yes. No problem.”

  Worrying the hangnail piece of wood on the plank with his blade, Elliot told him, “Then I got plan.”

  20

  The truck slowed around a bend in the road, grinding back through the gears, air brakes firing. Elliot pressed his face to a gap in the right side of the trailer, saw a steep drop off to narrow beaches, rocks and ocean, a skinny automated lighthouse.

  “This side,” said Angie and Elliot scooted across to the left.

  The truck slowed to a crawl as they came up on the fenced-off property. The side fence, running off at a right-angle to road, seemed to go back a half mile or so before vanishing over a rise. A farm came into view then, fortified, the ten-foot-high chain link topped with rows of barbed. Razor wire had been strung along and through the grass to prevent approach. A rustic sign near the gate read The Downs. A homestead took up the corner closest to the road with maybe seventy-five feet between it and the fence line.

  “Is that a double fence?” she asked. She smelled like sheep piss.

  “I can see why,” Dylan groaned and pointed. “Check out the local exhibits.”

  As the truck made to turn through the gates, the fence did resolve as one set inside the other with a consistent fifteen foot gap between them. And in that gap, the undead loitered. Easily thirty of them, in various states of decomposition and undress, fingers through the fence, fascinated with the turning vehicle, this giant noisemaker.

  In the deck above, the animals shifted, bleating in fear.

  “They smell them,” Heng said.

  “So do I,” Lewis added, t-shirt over his nose. “Imagine living with that near you.”

  “Nice extra layer of defense though,” Elliot told him. He kept his fingers hooked through the gaps in the panels as inertia tried to throw him to the other side of the trailer. The toes of his sockless foot scraped against the leather seam inside his boot. His ankle was sore from the angles he'd been forcing it to maintain, but it was holding, the bandage a godsend as a brace.

  The makeshift kosh now had six bolts in it, since Dylan had found him three more. Hot as it was in here, he thanked God he'd worn his hoody on the trip across the water; the sock-and-bolts were hidden inside his left sleeve. A wooden shiv he'd carved from the plank was down his left boot. Heng had another one in his back pocket and Angie had turned from the view, distracted as she tried wedging her wooden blade in the back of her shorts.

  With Jock's SUV bringing up the rear and driven by the guy from the hill, the truck eased through the double set of gates in low gear. It entered a large compound, the entrance to the farm, a broad courtyard or turning circle for trucks surrounded by buildings and corrals for animals. The corrals were empty, but there were more sheep visible in the paddocks beyond. Cattle too. A locked garage sat beyond the homestead, large enough for four tractors. The homestead on their side of the truck was big enough for a large family, about the size of Jock's ground floor. Elliot moved to the other side as the truck pulled straight in to park side-on to the house. The SUV swung in between house and truck. On the right, across a hundred-and-fifty foot gap, an open barn, four cars parked nose in to a low wire fence between barn and an empty steel-fenced pen. One of the cars was a pickup with the business name GNM Fencing emblazoned along the side. Beside the pen, piles of fencing wire, chain link and barbed wire, metal stanchions, a couple of hay bales. At the far end of the compound, a long shed and several holding pens behind a maze-like sheep run where trucks presumably loaded-unloaded the animals. No trees or garden beds apart from those fringing the house. A tank of diesel fuel and an orange tractor sat in front of the barn and parked in front of them, a lowrider Harley and a black muscle-van. Two bikers in leather vests lounged against the van in full sunlight, chatting with another farmer-looking guy, early middle-age this time, five or six years older than Elliot. And the bikers …

  His heart constricted, lurched. He'd seen both before. Riding out of the Ousefs' health retreat. And one of them again, in Harrietville. Even from here, the pandora bracelet was visible on his belt, catching the sunlight. And that van had carried away Lewis's sister.

  Lewis gasped, “No.” He lost it, trying to tear a panel from the side of the truck, screaming nonsense. Heads turned. The bikers laughed, eyebrows raised.

  Elliot grabbed him, pulled him back, held him close like he had in the tower. “Control it. Control it, Cochise. Channel it. We'll get him. Okay? We'll get them. But you have to control it. You have to bury it deep. You lose it now, and the bastards win.” Lewis went limp, catching his breath, forcing it to slow. Elliot let him go. “We'll get em.”
<
br />   “What the hell is going on?” Dylan asked.

  “Trade. That's what's going on. Human trafficking. The island has an agreement with these gumbies. 'You can have the people we don't want'. The gumbies have an agreement with the Death Druids: 'don't kill us and we'll find you slaves'.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Question of my own,” he wondered aloud; “how'd these maggots end up out here? Harrietville's a long way from here. How'd they know about Barnabas Island?”

  “Not so hard to figure,” Angie said. “We've seen a few of them around, travelling in packs. Pretty small island if you have vehicles. If you have the numbers, the guns and the sociopathy—if the deadheads have killed off a lot of society and if there's no cops—a place like this is ripe for picking.”

  “Jesus,” he breathed. That made him wonder about the actual strength of the Druids. Had he seen all of them at the Oussefs' home? Or was that merely a raiding party? He let Lewis go, the teenager retreated into the gloom, face hard, hands twitching.

  Heng wriggled a little more. “Lewis told me about those men. You killed their friends.” After a moment, he asked, “How many their friends you killed?”

  “Two. Two very bad men. Bad like Khmer Rouge.”

  “No one like Khmer Rouge.”

  “Lewis tell you they raped and murdered people? They beheaded people? And here they are looking for slaves.”

  After another pause, Heng said in a more subdued tone, “Okay, maybe like Khmer Rouge.”

  Elliot scooted from side to side, checked the terrain the best he could, started giving targets designations in his head. Farmers One and Two were climbing from the truck cab, One armed with a bolt-action .303 similar to Jock's and wandering toward the bikers, Two coming to the back of the truck, double-barrels resting against his left shoulder and with a lump under his shirt Elliot hoped was the SIG. The fools had not only missed the Shrade in his pocket, but also the spare mag. Farmer Three exited the SUV, holding a .22 with a 5-round mag. He too headed for the back of the trailer. A chubby woman in her forties finished securing the inner sliding gate, leaving the outer one wide open. She carried a sawn-off double-barrel plus a machete on her belt. The two bikers and Farmer Four—who was maybe the fencing contractor; Elliot adjusted his designation to Fencer—watched with interest but came no closer. Between them, they had Waxer's sidearm revolver, Fencer's sawn-off .22 and the other biker's pump-action shottie; the latter weapon leaned unattended against one van tire. One grey-haired pot-bellied woman stood on the porch, weaponless. There may have been more people in the house, the fields, the outbuildings. If these eight were all there was, Elliot's group stood a good chance. If not—well, what choice was there?