The little bird regards me with bright eyes, its head tilted, then hops closer. It coughs once, strikes its beak against the ledge and coughs again. I put out my hand, flinching slightly as the sparrow jumps quickly onto my finger. Its squiggly chest expands and shrinks in time with its breathing, and all the while its eyes are trained on me, unreadable and intelligent.
There is a tiny roll of paper clipped to its leg. I reach for it, and the sparrow pecks down hard on my arm, drawing blood. An inky tongue darts out.
“Shit.” I’d forgotten about that, mobile phones are a sight easier than this stuff. The sparrow needs to know that it has the right person, and there’s also a price. Blood’s the easiest way. Satisfied that I am the correct recipient, the tiny roll of paper falls from its leg into my open palm.
The sparrow looks at Lissa and starts chirping angrily, fiercely enough that it’s almost a bark, surprisingly loud from such a small creature. Lissa glares at it and the sparrow gives one final growl of a chirp, launches itself into the air, and is gone into the night.
“I don’t think it was too happy to see me,” Lissa says. “In fact, I know it wasn’t.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve outstayed my welcome, I shouldn’t be here. The world wants me to go.”
“I don’t want you to go.”
Lissa crosses her arms. “Steven, you haven’t been acting like it.”
“I—”
“Just look at the note, would you?”
I unfold the paper. Morrigan’s handwriting is distinctive: all flourishes and yet completely legible, even when it’s covered with bloody fingerprints.
Still alive, Steven. You’re not the only one. Don’s in Albion, Sam is too. Get there if you’re able. Your best chance is together.
Be careful.
M
I read it aloud. Lissa frowns as she looks from the note to me. She shakes her head. “Steven, this doesn’t feel right. It could be a trap.”
“Everything feels like a trap, though, doesn’t it? Every street’s a potential ambush. If we keep this up, whoever our opponent is will have won.” I heft up my backpack. “Morrigan’s alive. I have to cling to some sort of hope.”
Lissa’s lips tighten, she’s not happy at all. “But there’s hope and then there’s insanity, Steve.”
I look her squarely in the eyes. “I’ve got a bit of both, I reckon. And anyway, besides you and the contents of this pack, it’s all I’ve got.”
I’m also much happier following Morrigan than trying to get Mr. D’s attention. Lissa has explained the ritual, and why the craft knife is necessary. Anything else has to be worth trying first. Lissa knows that. It’s hanging there in front of us, this secondary truth. Drawing Death the old way scares the shit out of me, and I can understand why most Pomps would be unfamiliar with the process. There’s too much pain. It’s one thing to have people wanting you dead, another entirely to take yourself to that place.
Now all I’ve got to do is get to Albion. It’s a northern suburb, about twenty minutes away. Once I’m there I’m sure I can find Sam and Don. Pomps can sense each other—it’s an innate thing, hard to describe, but you know when they’re near and, if you know them well enough, you can tell just who is about. I haven’t sensed any Pomps since the Hill and I’m a little hungry for it. There’s a loneliness within me that is completely unfamiliar.
I realize that all my life there have been Pomps around and now there seems to be nothing but the polluting presence of Stirrers. I need my own kind with a desperation that is almost painful.
And I’m terrified that they’ll be dead or gone by the time I get there.
13
I can’t believe I’m asking this, but, are you going to steal another car?” Lissa asks.
I have to laugh. The thought had crossed my mind. “I might be mad but I’m not stupid.” Besides, actually finding an unlocked car with its keys in the ignition in this part of the city looks like it would be impossible. I’d like to think I could hot-wire a car after breaking into it, but I can’t.
I run up the steep stone staircase, two steps at a time, that leads from the river onto the jacaranda-lined traffic of Coronation Drive, and jog to the nearest bus stop, Lissa pacing me all the way. Behind me, a CityCat glides down the river toward the Regatta pier. I stare after the big blue catamaran’s flashing lights as a bus comes to a halt. I clamber aboard, and show my pass like I’m just going to Albion for a curry or a pizza. How I wish I was, and with Lissa, too. But the truth is I’m probably going to Albion to die.
“Got a clear run at last,” the bus driver says. “Some idiot messed up a bus, then stole a car.” I doubt he’d be so friendly if he knew I was the one responsible, which then makes me distinctly uncomfortable with the idea of traveling in a bus. Bad memories surface. Perhaps I should have stuck it out and found a car.
“Yeah, some people, right?” I say.
I sit in the middle of the bus nearest the exit. The driver’s already put the bus into gear and is nudging into the traffic on Coronation Drive. From this angle I have a view of the west and I can see a thin trail of smoke darker than the night coming from the direction of the garage. All that’s left of my car is blowing in the wind.
The bus rumbles toward the city then takes the Hale Street exit, peeling away from the skyscrapers to the right of us, heading toward the inner-city bypass and Albion. It’s also how you get to Royal Brisbane Hospital, and the airport. I’m familiar with the hospital, most particularly the morgue, but it’s been a long time since I’ve been to the airport, and that was only to pick up friends and family. There was a time I’d dreamed of traveling, just never got around to it. Wish I had. I catch myself at that thought—I’ve indulged in more than enough self-pity. I look at Lissa.
“What?” she asks.
“So tell me about Lissa Jones,” I whisper. No one seems to notice that I’m talking to thin air.
Lissa rolls her eyes. “Gorgeous, single, thirty-something.”
“Something being?”
“Thirty, and only just. It was my birthday yesterday.”
“You could have told me earlier.”
She snorts. “What, so you could buy me a cake?”
“Well, happy birthday, Miss Jones.” I dig the bottle of water out of my backpack and take what I reckon is a suitably celebratory swig.
“Never wanted to be a Pomp,” Lissa says.
“Really? I know you said it, but I thought you were joking.”
Lissa raises an eyebrow. “Joking, eh? Because the last day has been such a barrel of laughs.”
“Sorry.” There’s a bit of silence, and it’s only going to deepen unless I dive in. “For me it was always something I was going to be.” And it was. My parents had never said anything outright banning me from considering anything else, but they’d never really encouraged me to explore my options, either.
Lissa chuckles. “I studied event management,” she says, and her smile widens. “I certainly learned a lot about staging a good funeral.”
“Your parents used to take you to them?”
“Didn’t yours?”
I laugh. “I actually used to think that wakes were just something that people attended every day. I had a black suit from about the age of four.”
“Bet you looked cute.”
“Yeah, and none of that past tense, thank you.” I smile, though there’s part of me still demanding that I stop flirting with a dead girl. I know I’m being unprofessional, and she knows I know but, then again, after what has happened to my profession, it hardly seems to matter anymore. “I remember Dad stopping a stir in Annerley. The body was actually twitching, and Dad went up to the coffin and slapped the corpse on the face. Stalled it then and there. People were looking at him as though he was mad, and I was just grinning, proud as punch.
“Dad did most of the hospital gigs, the staff knew him. Doctors and nurses, particularly the nurses, they see all the weird stuff. They understand why our job is so impo
rtant. So they were always polite around him, respectful. I liked that.”
Lissa smiles. “Dad’s boy, eh? I didn’t want the job. I didn’t want to spend my life going to funerals and morgues. But the job picks you, and it sticks in the blood. Anyway, in my family it does, whether you want it or not.”
I’m not sure if she’s making fun of my family’s rather high Black Sheep to Pomp ratio—Aunt Teagan, my late Uncle Mike, Tim—so I just nod, and go along with it. “It makes sense, though, could you imagine pomping cold? Shit, that would really screw you up.”
It was different in the old days, there was something of a cultural scaffold. If you started to see weird shit, everyone knew what it was. Well, it’s not like that anymore. Without family guidance those first few pomps would be nightmarish. I wonder how things are going to work now, who’s going to pass on all this information to the next generation. Surely not me.
“I was stubborn, though,” Lissa says. “Finished my degree.”
“Good on you,” I say.
Lissa glares at me. “Anyone ever told you you’re a patronizing shit?”
“Yeah, but I’m serious. I only got through the first year of my BA—if you can count four fails and four passes as getting through.”
Lissa shakes her head.
“Neither do I.”
“You can always go back.” I love her for saying that, talking as though there might be some sort of long-term future.
“Nah, I’m scarred for life.” The sun’s been down a while now and the city’s luminous, a brooding yet brilliant presence to our right. “Which isn’t going to be too much longer, anyway.”
“Don’t say that,” Lissa says. “You can’t think that way. You mustn’t.”
“Well, it’s true. You spend your life around death like we do, pomping and stalling Stirrers, and it tends to make you numb. Hell, it numbs you a lot. You know it does. I have plenty of free time, and what do I do with it? I accumulate things. Not ideas, just things, as though they’re ideas. Shit, half the reason I gave up at uni was that I decided it was easier not to think.
“And when you decide it’s easier not thinking then you’re only a short step away from deciding it’s easier feeling nothing. I can’t remember the last time I cried before today.”
“I remember my last tears,” Lissa says. “Like I said, I never wanted to do this job. I cried whenever I thought about that too much.”
“See, I envy you your pain,” I say.
“Don’t.” Her eyes hold mine in that electric gaze of hers.
“But at least you strived for something, even if you failed at it. That’s incredibly heroic, as far as I’m concerned,” I say.
I tried my hand at non-Pomp work, the regular trades as we call them. I gave up the mobile and the pay packet, and it just didn’t fit. Honestly, though, I really didn’t try that hard. What I did learn was that I wasn’t really a people person—I’m too much of a smart arse for one thing. Anyway, you get hooked on the pomping, the odd hours, the danger. It’s certainly more exciting than working in retail: it didn’t matter if your clientele weren’t always cheery as there was no follow-up, you didn’t have dead people coming to see if their order had arrived, there weren’t any secret shoppers, and you never had to clean up the mess (a blessed relief in some cases).
For me, pomping was the perfect job. There was no real responsibility, and it was good money. I had few friends, other than family, and a few people whose blogs I read. There I was, walking and talking through life, not having much impact, not taking too many hits either.
The problem with that is that it doesn’t work. The universe is always going to kick you, and time’s waiting to take things away. If my job hadn’t made that obvious, well, I’d deserved what had happened to me.
In my case it had taken everything at once. And put in front of me the sort of woman I might have found if I’d actually been in there, living.
I realize that I’ve been staring into her eyes.
“Don’t fall in love with me,” Lissa says.
Too late. It’s far too late for that.
“You’ve got tickets on yourself,” I say softly. “Fall in love with you? As if!”
I look up. The bus driver’s staring at me. Half the people in the bus are. I didn’t realize I’d been talking so loudly. Talking to myself, as far as they can tell.
“I’m serious.” Lissa turns her head, stares out of the window.
“Too serious,” I say, not sure that she is even listening. We sit in silence for the next few minutes until we’re a stop away from the heart of Albion. I jab the red stop signal like it’s some sort of eject button. The bus pulls in, the doors open and I’m out on the street, in a different world. Restaurants are packed to the rafters with diners. The place is bustling.
That’s not where Don and Sam are, though.
“Aha,” I point west. “I can already feel them.”
We wander down the street, a steep curve, the traffic rushing by, desperate for whatever the night has on offer.
There are some nice parts of Albion. On the whole it’s a ritzy part of Brisbane, but no one’s told this bit of the suburb. The restaurants are behind us now, and we’re descending from the urbane part of suburbia to the sub. It’s no war zone but there’s a burnt wreck of a bikie club a few blocks down, and a couple of brothels nearby. You can smell petrol fumes and dust. The city’s skyline is in front of us, high-rises and skyscrapers bunched together, lighting the sky. You can’t see Mount Coot-tha from here but I can feel One Tree Hill, just like I can feel Don and Sam. They must be able to do the same.
They’re holed up in an old Queenslander which would have been nice, once, with its broad, covered verandah all the way around, big windows and double doors open invitingly to catch afternoon breezes. Not anymore, though. You could describe it as some sort of renovator’s delight—if they had a wrecking ball.
“Absolutely delightful place,” Lissa says. We both have a little chuckle at that.
The corrugated roof dips in one corner of the front verandah like a perpetually drooping eye, as though the house had once suffered some sort of seizure. Some of the wooden stumps the building’s sitting on have collapsed. It’s a dinosaur sinking into itself.
“Still looking at about half a million for it I reckon.”
“Real estate, everything’s about bloody real estate,” Lissa says. “That’s the problem with the world today.”
“Well, it’s a prime location.”
Lissa grimaces. “If you want easy access to pimps and car washes.”
“The train station is just up the road, don’t forget that.”
“And what a delightful walk that is.”
I make my way gingerly up the front steps. One in every three is missing. The front porch has seen better days, too, and that’s being generous. The wood’s so rotten that even the termites have moved on to richer pastures, and whatever paint remains on the boards is peeling and gray, and smells a little fungal.
As I reach for the door, something pomps through me, another death from God knows where. Not again. There’s more of that far too frequent pain, and I’m bent over as the door opens a crack. I’m too sore to run, so I push it and find myself staring down the barrel of a rifle. I know the face at the other end of the gun, and there’s not much welcome in it.
“Hey,” I say. “Am I glad to see you.”
“Stay right there,” Don growls.
“Don’t be stupid, Don,” Sam says from the corner of the room. I can just see her there. She’s holding a pistol and not looking happy. “It’s Steve.”
“How’d you find us?” Don demands.
“Morrigan,” I say. “He’s alive.”
“Of course he is,” Don says, his face hardening. “He’s the bastard who betrayed us all.”
14
Don has old-school Labor Party blood running through his veins. Broad shouldered, with a big jaw that the gravity of overindulgence has weakened somewhat, he looks lik
e he should be cutting deals with a schooner of VB in one hand and a bikini-clad babe in the other. He has the dirtiest sounding laugh I’ve ever heard. The truth is he’s a gentleman, and utterly charming, but two failed marriages might suggest otherwise. After a couple of beers, he slips into moments of increasing and somewhat embarrassing frankness. “They were bitches, absolute bitches.”
And after another couple, “Nah, I was a right bugger.” And then, “Don’t you ever get married, Steven. And if you do, you love her, if that’s the way you butter your bread. You do like women, don’t you? Not that it matters. It’s all just heat in the dark, eh? Eh?”
Yeah, charming when he wants to be. Which isn’t now. To suggest Morrigan is behind all this is ridiculous. Even I’m not that paranoid.
Don looks ludicrous with a rifle, even when the bloody thing is pointed at my head. Maybe it’s the crumpled suit or the beer gut and his ruddy face. But he’s serious, and he hasn’t lowered the gun yet. No matter how silly he looks, he can kill me with the twitch of a finger.
He stinks of stale sweat and there’s a bloody smear down his white shirt. There’s a hard edge to his face, and I recognize it because I’m sure I look that way, too. It’s part bewilderment, part terror and a lot of exhaustion. We three have probably been doing most of Australia’s pomping between us for the last twelve hours.
Sam, on the other hand—even in her cords and skivvy, with a hand-knitted scarf wrapped around her neck, and a beret that only a certain type of person can pull off—looks like she was born to hold a pistol. Sam is what Mom would call Young Old, which really meant she didn’t like her. I couldn’t say what her age is, maybe late fifties or early sixties. Her pale skin is smooth, except her hands—you can tell she has never shied away from hard work. She grips her pistol with absolute assurance.
Interestingly, it’s aimed at Don.
We’ve gone all Reservoir Dogs in Albion, and I almost ask if I can have a gun, too, just to even things up a bit. I’m also wondering if I can trust anyone. Don certainly doesn’t trust me.
Death Most Definite (Death Works #1) Page 10