Origin

by Greg McLean

  ‘My stomach. Add to them.’

  He holds the knife as if to thrust into her, gut her like a sheep. ‘But —’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she says softly. ‘I cover myself with a corset. No one will know.’ She closes her eyes.

  He stands before her as the light beats down on them and if anyone was walking past outside they’d see him there with the knife poised at her belly. He presses the knife against her skin and it dimples and he can feel the want straining at his elbow, willing him to push it home. To see the flesh part easily as if it was him entering her.

  But she doesn’t suddenly shy back from his touch and instead presses against him, and it’s she that draws first blood. As though she takes away his chance to stab her deep, and instead he angles the knife flat against her skin and draws a red line. She groans at the kiss of steel.

  ‘The other side,’ she says and he cuts from her bellybutton to the left. Blood drips from the shallow cuts down her thighs and into her pubic hair. A few drops hit the floor.

  He watches the drips. It’d be so easy to make it a stream, a river of blood, a deluge pouring down her legs and feet.

  But he can’t move and her eyes snap open with desire and she tells him to fuck her there, still standing. He drops the knife, and unbuttons his pants and she eases up onto him, both of them slick with blood. It becomes sticky and difficult but she won’t let him stop and he keeps going until she cums, and then he does, onto the floor. The white ropes join the blood on the boards, swirl in a mucky pattern.

  After he’s let her down they lie naked on her bed while his freshly washed clothes – cleaned of her blood – dry on the sill. She rests across his chest and plays with the hair running up his stomach, his own scars down his side.

  ‘It’s all about control,’ is all she says, as if that explains everything they’ve just done.

  All he feels is a confusion of emotions. A desire for her, but also a sense of being used. Like he’d been a spectator.

  He takes a drag of his cigarette, stares up at the smoke drifting to the roof as the soft weight of her falls asleep against him. Can’t bring himself to do the same.

  Jock leaves the next day.

  Mick overhears him saying to Cunningham he doesn’t want to kill anything anymore, not after Bullet. He’s gonna head north and maybe grab some work on a freighter. Had enough of the land.

  As the rabbiter’s walking out of the mess hall with Pete and Rodge, Cutter blows him a kiss and waves goodbye. The rabbiter glares and sees Mick looking at him too. But Mick can’t be bothered with any of his shit anymore and turns back to dishing up his lunch. Good riddance to the fucker. That’s one less to worry about.

  Footsteps pound behind him. He swivels and it’s Jock come for him, not Cutter.

  He reaches out to fend off any incoming punches, but Jock goes for the big pot of hot stew to the left. He hauls it up with those scrawny arms and tips it at Mick. The vomit-like mass of gravy and chunks of meat splatters against Mick’s chest and up into his face like the bloody spit of the salesman, and for a moment he forgets where he is and panics – all these people around, watching him, the evidence of gore all over him.

  ‘Psycho piece of shit!’ Jock’s screaming at him. ‘You fucken eat this! Go on, eat me dog! You sick fuck. Fucken big man. You’ll always be a Scareda’cunt!’ He rounds on Cutter: ‘And you . . . you sheepfucker. You . . . freak.’

  Cutter chuckles, but Mick is red-faced as everyone laughs – at him, at Jock’s outburst, he doesn’t know. Doesn’t care. He feels the shame regardless. He bares his teeth and says softly, more to himself than Jock, ‘You’re gonna regret that, cunt.’ Then Jock’s cronies are pulling away the rabid ex-rabbiter and Mick’s left covered in dinner.

  Simpson brushes past the mob on his way in. He raises an eyebrow when he sees Mick standing at the serving table with everyone’s lunch running down his front. ‘Think ya missed ya mouth, Micky,’ he says and Mick storms past to get changed. He doesn’t look at the gloating Cutter.

  Jock hitches a ride to Nildon on the afternoon’s cattle truck and Mick sits astride his horse watching him go, then turns back to his herding, his anger building. When it’s dark enough that night he heads off to bed early, but instead steals Simmo’s ute and leaves the station.

  The rabbiter’s a dark figure staggering out of the pub after drinking his fill. He props against the wall for a piss, then heads for his room around the back. The desert air’s freezing and he shivers as he walks, laughing at something someone’s said inside, then he squints ahead, looking for his door in the near-dark and barrels towards it.

  Mick clobbers him two feet from it. Drops him like a sack of shit. The rabbiter leaves just a set of heel marks as Mick drags him around the corner.

  He squats and smiles down at him.

  ‘Heya, Jocky. Thought I’d say goodbye proper, like.’

  The man stares at him, brain fuzzled with booze, then tries to bolt. Mick kicks him back onto the dirt.

  ‘What the fuck, Mick?’

  Mick can still smell the clotting remnants of stew on himself, the pull of blistering skin on his chest from its heat. He’s gonna enjoy this. ‘Real stupid move of yours today, mate. We coulda just left it. You were beaten. I won. You run away. Everyone’s happy.’

  ‘You’re a psycho,’ Jock slurs. ‘You killed me fucken dog.’

  ‘You deserved it. But I never put it in the stew. So now I gotta get you back for what you did.’

  Jock blinks at him. ‘You reckon this is a game?’

  ‘No, Jocky. Just what’s right.’ Then he drags the dirt-covered bag behind him out into view and cracks open its ties. The smell of rotting flesh escapes and Jock gags. Prepared, Mick merely turns away and wrinkles his nose. ‘Phewy. She’s ripe. Don’t think age has done old Bullet too kindly.’

  Jock stares into the maw of the bag and tries to skitter away. From the street there’s the sound of voices, a car starting up, and Jock draws in breath to yell. Mick boots him in the chest.

  ‘This is between the two of us. Man to man.’ He waits for the car to pull away, the pub’s lights to turn off inside as the publican calls it for the night.

  Jock looks up with bugging eyes. ‘What are you —?’

  Mick empties the bag into his lap, slips in behind and grabs the back of his neck as Jock stares down in horror. ‘Ya already accused me of it. So y’might as well do it now. And then you’ll always know.’

  The grinning half-decayed skull of the greyhound rests against Jock’s crotch, looking up at its owner. The rabbiter tries to scream but is too terrified. Mick holds him tight and takes out his knife, reaches around and cuts off a sliver of green flesh from its muzzle.

  Jock struggles, but he’s too drunk to shrug off Mick’s weight, and Mick’s able to pull his head back, shove in the hunk of rancid meat and clamp his hand over the rabbiter’s mouth. The man snorts a stream of snot over his fingers, but with his mouth locked tight the poor bugger has no choice but to swallow or turn blue. The piece is too big and he starts gagging.

  ‘So eat,’ Mick says in his ear, and finally Jock shuts his eyes and breaks the bit down and there’s a loud swallow and then silence. ‘See, that wasn’t so hard. But I reckon we need a bit more so you remember it.’

  He starts to cut another sliver from the corpse and Jock shudders and thrashes in his grasp. ‘No, no, no,’ he’s moaning, and then he leans to one side and vomits a steaming gutful of frothing beer.

  Mick shoves him away and wipes at his pants. ‘Fuck’s sake. That’s the second pair of me clothes you’ve ruined today.’

  ‘You’re not . . .’ Jock’s blubbering. ‘You’re out of your mind . . .’ He vomits again, on Bullet’s skeletal paw and Mick shakes his head in disappointment.

  ‘Show the girl a bit more respect, hey, Jocky.’ He toes Bullet’s remains back into the bag and ties it. ‘Now, you remember this next time you think of me. ’Cause I see you again, I’ll make you eat the whole bloody thing. I’ll k
eep it safe just in case.’

  Jock sits in the dirt: a filthy, vomit-stained mess. Head slumped, hands hanging between his legs. Beaten.

  Mick chuckles and turns for his car and Jock looks up with eyes blazing with hate. He’s been pushed further than any man should be. ‘You piece-a—’ he screams and launches.

  Mick goes down hard under the force of the surprise attack. The air whumps out of him and Jock straddles him, goes straight for the knife. He gets both hands on the handle, trying to wrench it out of Mick’s grasp, eyes bulging white in the darkness, hair wild around his face.

  Mick tries to throw him off but the man’s crazed with strength and manages to turn the blade towards Mick’s stomach. He watches it inch downward, closing the gap, the man putting all his weight behind it – and before it can get any further he kicks one leg loose and knees upwards between the man’s spread legs.

  Jock’s eyes go blank with gut-pain, and he crumples around his smashed balls and Mick twists and shoves him to one side. Rides him over and stabs his knife into his throat as he does, pressing hard into it.

  Jock stares up, bubbling blood. Mick watches the defiance go out of his eyes, something milky across them – that last sigh of the soul – and then he dies.

  Mick tugs out the knife and rolls off, lies beside Jock’s stilled body waiting for his breathing to return to normal. They sit like that in the cool desert air as he watches an ant nip at the man’s bare ankle and then he’s able to get to his feet and his buggered legs are like jelly – like he’s a ten-year-old cripple again. He stares at the dead man, wipes his face of sweat and surprise. ‘Stupid shit,’ he breathes at him. ‘Didn’t have to come to that.’

  He glances around. Realises he’s done this again. And in the open, goddammit.

  Fuck, fuck. Have to clean it up again, Jesus, get moving.

  He grabs the rabbiter’s still-warm corpse beneath the armpits and drags it to the ute, and only just remembers to go back for the bag of dog. He scuffs over the blood and drag marks as best he can, then searches Jock’s pants for the key to his room and empties it of his meagre belongings.

  Once the site’s clean he heads up the highway. About ten miles from town he takes a track out into the desert and keeps driving until he’s in a series of small mountain ridges. He continues driving until he gets bored, then pulls over and digs as deep a hole as he can and drops Jock and Bullet in it. He covers it back up so good there’s no chance of them ever being found again. Then he pisses on the grave. ‘Now you made me put down two dumb animals, Jocky, old boy,’ he says as he aims.

  Heading back to Nildon, he thinks to check the hotel lot one last time to make sure he hasn’t left anything. He parks out of town and walks in, enjoying the calming effect of the stroll. His senses still pulse with adrenaline and his eyes dart over the buildings searching for witnesses or the sudden arrival of police cars, but the town looks as dead as Jock.

  As he heads for the rooms around the back of pub ahead, he stops mid-step.

  There’s someone there.

  He stares at the distant figure, stunned. A vehicle is parked outside the pub, lights off, and in the dull light he can see the person squatting next to the building as if checking something.

  Mick runs up low and fast, crouched below the grass by the side of the road, but he’s not the quickest and he’s still too far out by the time the figure heads back to their vehicle. The headlights flare in the night and the car pulls away. He’ll never be able to get back to the ute in time to follow.

  His temple’s pulsing with pain as he reaches the rooms, but searching the whole back area behind the building, he finds he covered it up pretty well. There’s no blood or even obvious footprints.

  Maybe it was someone from the pub who’d heard the commotion earlier and come out to check. Seen nothing and left. Has to be it. It’s just lucky they hadn’t come out earlier, when he and Jock were mid-fight.

  He’s reading too much into it, panicking for no reason. No one’d seen what he did. And no one would know. Jock’s room will just be empty in the morning and everyone will assume he’s left on some freighter, or whatever it was he said he was going to do, and that’ll be it.

  By the time he reaches the station most of his panic’s drained away with the voice of reason. He sits in the car a moment in the darkness and lets his stress fade. ‘Close one, Micky,’ he says quietly to himself. ‘Gotta be better than that, ya silly shit.’ He shakes his head at his temper, his lack of forward thinking – well, what the bloody hell did he think was going to happen, going after Jock like that? – and gets out.

  It’s only as he places a foot on the ground and swings out that he feels something amiss. He reaches around to the small of his back.

  And discovers his knife isn’t there.

  6

  Cold fear takes him. For a long minute he can’t move. He’ll have to go all the way back, search the back lot again. But what if he’d dropped it burying Jock’s body?

  For fuck’s sake. Stupid, Mick, stupid!

  He can picture his knife with his initials carved into the hilt, human blood along the blade, his fingerprints neatly imprinted down the handle. He may as well turn himself in now.

  Frozen, he glances over at Cutter’s quarters. He thinks of the lean figure next to the pub. The person bending as if searching for something. There’d been no cars outside the bar when he’d first left. So it can’t have been a patron. It was someone else who’d come in afterwards.

  The bloke in the other car knew.

  He crabs his way down the slope, ready at any moment for a figure to step from the trees in front of him. Cutter’s dusty HR always sat in the carport alongside his room. Mick had rarely seen him use it, but it was still in good nick and word was it could outrun any car on the property. The car roaring away from the pub had been fast, and under the cover of darkness he steals up to the shack and peers around into the carport.

  The car’s not there.

  Mick spins, expecting the shooter to suddenly be behind him, weapon in hand. To trap him just like a bitch dingo by his old man.

  But he’s alone. Heart pounding, he melts into the darkness as noiselessly as he can, edges away from the shack. He needs a chance to think and rests against the big mess hall wall, able to see anyone approach from the horizon above.

  The silhouette could have been Cutter. Might’ve been following him this whole time. Then, from the darkness, watched him kill Jock, maybe even been there the time before with the salesman.

  And now the cunt could have his bloodstained knife.

  Stupid!

  Sweat bathes his brow and his balls crawl. Dammit, he’d tried to make a fresh start – get a job and find some purpose on the station, avoid whatever darkness he seemed destined for.

  And it hadn’t worked.

  He could leave the station, and Opey and all the others, and go on the run again. But this time he wouldn’t have the camp to hide him, Old Tommo and Ma Tikalee trying to help him out. This time he’d have every cop in the country hunting him. He’d be in the papers and on wanted signs in every pub and post office.

  He can’t run. Not this time. He has to find that knife.

  He could return to the pub that night and search again, but that’d be a waste of time. It has to have been Cutter in the other car. He’s sure of it.

  Just the sort of thing that meddling fucker’d do.

  He has to trust his gut on this one.

  Lay low until he returns, then jump the prick. If he’s wrong, he’s wrong.

  But Cutter doesn’t return that long, sleepless night, and Mick stresses all day out in the paddocks. The more he thinks about it, the less certain he becomes. Maybe he’s giving the shooter too much credit to think he’d be able to follow him. And then to get the knife? A bloke’d have to’ve been seriously unlucky.

  But he’s always been unlucky. Why would now be any different?

  He’s so distracted he nearly mixes the wethers with the first-year ewes and
cops an earful from Cunningham. He seethes over his dinner that night and steals out as soon as he can to check Cutter’s quarters again.

  The car’s still not back. And although he slips inside and quickly checks through the neat bastard’s belongings, there’s no sign of the knife.

  So what does he do? Either he takes the ute back to Nildon, just in case, to have another bloody look around. Or he goes searching the back roads for Cutter himself. But the bloke could be anywhere. What’s the chances of bumping into him?

  It’s only because he’s standing by Simmo’s ute some time later, weighing up what to do, that he sees the other car coasting, engine off, down the slope above, like a huge black beetle in the night.

  Mick crouches and grabs a length of rusted pipe as a makeshift weapon. It feels heavy, nicely weighted in his hand.

  Cutter’s HR angles around the back of the buildings and disappears behind the shearing shed off by itself and Mick hesitates only a moment. Then he cuts down towards the grazing paddock so he can come up from the south.

  Hopefully, the shooter would be expecting him to approach from the ridgeline and the line of other buildings, not from the spreading crop beneath the hill. Mick moves cautiously but steadily, eyes wide and animal, taking in everything above him. The gentle sounds of the sheep conceal the noise of his movement through the grass and he’s able to get to the scatter of trees near to the shed and crouch, breath held.

  Cutter’s HR sits squat and cooling ten feet away, unseen from the homestead and other buildings. He would never have realised it was here if he hadn’t seen it coast in himself. Crafty bugger.

  He watches the surrounding area like a hawk, scanning for movement.

  Then there’s a creaking protest of wood deep in the shed.

  It could be a trap. Bastard could be waiting for Mick to sneak in to jump him. Or he could be hiding the knife as Mick sits outside giving him all the time in the world.