by Greg McLean
He can’t wait. Either he catches Cutter in the act, or he flushes him out. But he has to move now.
And if the bloke’s innocent, then he’s innocent and it’s more blood on his hands. That he’ll think about when he gets to it.
Willing his legs to move, heart beating overtime, he runs at a crouch up to the back run of the shed. He pauses at the gap, pipe in hand, and sees a shadow cross the wooden slats at the far end of the building. He takes the opportunity of distance to slip inside at floor level.
It’s pitch-black and dank inside the shed. Shearing season is still months away and in the winter the shed goes into hibernation. Dust covers the boards and stirs up into his lungs. Fetid wool and dung hangs heavy in the stale air. He holds his breath, fighting a cough, and tries to use what little moonlight there is to search the gloom. From where he crouches he has a good view past the hulking wool bins to the holding pens beyond. If Cutter crosses the room Mick’ll see him. His legs begin to shake but he dares not move.
A noise sounds just ahead in the holding pens and Mick hesitates a moment then moves forward. Bastard could be in there even now, no awareness, as Mick comes up behind him. He readies the pipe and there’s another louder sound – definitely someone in there. Mick rises.
He can see a shape now in the gloom of the pens, low to the ground, and he raises the pipe above his head and comes in silent as death.
The sheep blinks up at him, its slit eyes somehow blank and fearful at the same time. Its hooves skitter on the wood as it retreats a step.
And before Mick can move, steel presses into his back. Fetid breath in his ear.
‘Got you now, boy.’
7
Mick had been listening for footsteps, his senses tripped to maximum. Yet Cutter comes out of the dark like a ghost, slipping behind him whisper-quiet and digging the knife against his kidneys. In a sliver of moonlight Mick can see their shadows on the rotted wood of the wall next to them, the knife angling out of his back like it’s stuck in him already.
His knife, most likely.
‘Yer breath stinks, Cutter. You been eating out that sheep?’
The man chuckles hot against his neck. Rips the pipe from him and sends it spinning through the open door. ‘You’re one cool cucumber, boy. I could kull you right here – disappear you, like you dud Jock and his dog. No one’d ever know. Be evening up the ledger, hey? Bit o’ karma.’
Mick clenches his empty, useless hands at the threat. But he can’t even move. ‘So fucken do it. Want me to beg, ya got the wrong bloke.’ His eyes probe the darkness for a weapon, anything.
Cutter grips his shoulder tight, sensing resistance. He pierces the skin beside Mick’s spine with the tip of the knife. ‘Ya dumb fuck. If I wanted to kull ya I woulda gutted you first night you were here.’
Mick glances back at that, sees the yellow gleam of the shooter’s teeth in the darkness.
‘Something different about you, isn’t there Micky? Just had to be patient.’
‘What?’
‘Your first, that mighta bin an accident. Argument gone wrong, you get the upper hand. Then you’ve crossed over. So next time, you don’t even thunk. You go straight to kulling.’
‘No —’
‘Seen you with the salesman. Same way you are with stock. Knew I was right to suss you out. Then with Jock – maybe you dudn’t intend kulling him, but you dudn’t walk away neither.’ He leans in closer. ‘Something dark in you, boy.’
Mick says nothing. The sheep bleats softly in the holding pen but he barely hears it.
‘You’re good at hiding it. Maybe even from yourself. But I know. The only difference between us is, you’ve never faced what you are.’
Mick can’t help glancing back again.
‘Yeah, us.’ Cutter grins. ‘That’s why I bin pushing you. Only one choice in life for us. It’s just how long it takes you to accept it. I can tell you’re scared. But not of anyone. Of yourself. Of what you’re capable of.’
‘Nothing like you, dog.’
Cutter chuckles at his spat anger. ‘I thunk we both know the truth of that.’ Mick seethes. ‘Ya don’t know how lucky you are. Man can have a lot of fun out here. People go missing all the time. It’s a bug motherfucken country. Lotsa opportunities for accidents – people getting lost, missing turnoffs, running outta water. A mullion square miles to hide a body.’ Mick can feel the fucker’s smile in the darkness behind him. ‘Why do ya thunk a good Kiwi boy like meself’s here? But, Jesus boy, ya gotta work out who knows where they are, what record there is of ’em. Then you’re free to do what you like. That salesman’s attracting attention. And Jock? Don’t thunk that’s a bit too close to home?’ He laughs quietly, pulls Mick towards him. ‘Be a shame if they found the knife you done him in with. Your fungerprints all over it, matching his wounds. Still with traces of his blood and our friend Jock now.’
Mick stares at their shadows. Wonders how he can get the knife out of Cutter’s hand.
‘If you thunk I’d be stupid enough to bring your knife here, you’re mistaken, sunshine.’
Shit. ‘Why’re you telling me this?’
‘’Cause what you don’t realise, ya fucken amateur, is there’s others like us.’
Mick freezes.
‘Thought you’d like that. When I first arrived, I start hearing about folks going mussing that I hadn’t done, so I begin watching people. One or two of us out here, we could survive nicely. But there’s at least three others already working this place.’
Mick blinks. ‘What’s that got to do with me?’
‘Getting crowded.’ Cutter leaves the observation hanging there until his meaning soaks in.
‘You . . . want me to kill them?’ Mick tries to turn and Cutter sticks him deeper with the knife. He winces in pain. ‘I told you, mine were both accidents.’
‘Bullshit. You’re a kuller, son. Pure and simple. You should be thanking me. Thunk of it as training.’
‘You’re crazy.’
‘Got nothin’ to do with crazy, boy. It’s just survival.’
‘Then why haven’t you taken them out yourself?’
‘I already got some fucken nasty wounds trying. Went after this fat pedophile pruck. Kids going mussing’s too much publicity. Thought if I could get him outta the way there’d be less interest up here again. Fucker booby-trapped his camp and I got stuck by one of his spikes. No . . . I’ll send you to clean up the outback instead, with your little knife hangin’ over you as insurance. Then we go our separate ways. You can go on further north, back home to Queensland, maybe.’
‘What if I like it here?’
Cutter laughs, then grips him by the back of the neck. ‘I’m givin you a chance, boy. I cun still turn you in if you fuck with me.’
Mick stares at the rotted wood next to him, at Cutter’s shadow so close behind he can’t even see the knife anymore. Then he snorts angrily. ‘You expect me to go looking for some sick killers, no clue what I’m doing, what to look for?’
Cutter grins. ‘Good boy. That child-fucker’s got a mine site he goes to, about a hundred miles from here. He drunks at the Black Shanty in Wills —’
‘Child-fucker?’
‘Pedophile. That’s what it means. Didn’t you know?’
Mick frowns. ‘So you’re just gonna hand over the knife when I’m done?’
‘That’s the deal.’
‘Problem with that is, I reckon I go out and do your little errands, kill these other blokes – then you kill me.’
‘Why the fuck would I do that?’
Mick looks back. ‘Because that’s what I’d do.’
Cutter snorts. ‘These psychos get wund of you they’ll come for you anyway. Our friend Jerry the Fiddler – that’s what I call him – collects little boys’ twugs and berries. Saw the jars meself. Wonder if he’d add a strapping young lad to his collection?’
Mick gives him nothing.
‘Go do your job, boy. You ever try to take me out, your luttle knife’ll resurfa
ce with all the gory details. You’ll have every cop in the country looking for you till the end of your days. That’s uf you cun even get close to me.’
‘Yeah, but see, you’ve already fucked up.’
It’s Cutter’s turn to pause. ‘What?’ he growls.
‘You had to get close to tell me all this,’ Mick says.
And steps back onto the blade.
He’s able to angle to the left so the knife misses his spine, even his kidneys and liver, as it sinks in. At the same time he smashes his fist against the rotted wall and grabs a sharp, jutting length of the decayed wood as it splinters. He spins and slashes Cutter’s throat in one movement. The Kiwi fuck’s surprised hand’s still on the knife hilt against Mick’s back and he pulls down on it as he falls. Mick grunts with the pain and hopes it hasn’t done more damage. He staggers backwards but doesn’t lose his footing as Cutter crumples to the boards.
The shooter holds a useless hand to the gore flooding through his fingers and gapes up at him. His mouth works like a fish.
Mick eyes him cold. ‘What’s that, old man?’
He watches as the man coughs blood, tries to speak. ‘You . . . bustard.’
‘It’s about survival, right?’ Mick crouches, and points Cutter’s own weapon at him. ‘Now, where’s me fucken knife?’
Cutter coughs blood in a speckled arc up into his face. Mick wipes it away, and realises the man’s laughing at him. ‘You fucked up. I already plunted it . . . with one of the others, in case . . . you screwed me. And to give you a timeline, keep you hungry. In a drum they’ll check soon – a month . . . maybe sooner. When they find it they’ll come for you. Just a matter . . . of who gets you first. The cops. Or one’a them cleaning you up.’
Mick squints. ‘Who are they?’
Cutter grins bloody teeth. ‘You’ll know . . . when they find you, Scared’ac—’
He slumps, dies. Mick grabs the wall for support and kicks the shit out of the body until the dead shooter’s a mess and his own blood’s flowing freely down his legs.
He props himself, panting, and looks at his handiwork, holding the blazing wound in his back. Then he hobbles to the door and opens it to the outside air.
He stands staring out at the night sky, the fear inside filling him like a black tide.
8
He’d been hunted before. He wouldn’t let it happen again.
Mick had walked for endless days as his father relentlessly tracked him as he would a dog. The boy didn’t know if his mother was still alive, if he himself would make it through this. He tried to sweep his footprints clear and cover up after his camp in the evening, taking meandering paths, sometimes doubling back on himself. But his father’s tracking skills seemed as if magic. Even broken blades of grass or scratches in the dirt were enough to signal where he was. His father was like a terrifying shadow always on his heels.
Mick travelled throughout the night beneath the spread of stars, then found shelter during the heat of the day, sweltering in his swag amongst the undergrowth as he listened for closing footsteps, getting little rest. Once, his father got so close Mick barely had time to duck behind a clump of needle-sharp grey Mitchell grass and watch the familiar silhouette pass against the blinding sun on the rise overhead. Even when it had passed, Mick waited, knowing his father’s hunting technique of continuing some distance from his target then suddenly dropping flat to the earth. The prey would crouch frozen until it seemed safe, then unwittingly emerge – sometimes an hour later – only for his father to rise from his resting spot and put a bullet in the animal’s brain. Or in this case: his.
It was only his shaky memory of his old man’s hunting techniques that allowed him to keep a step ahead, and eventually a day came when he was so far lost out to bush that he no longer sensed the looming presence behind and he felt free of his father’s grasp.
By then it didn’t matter. After days with no water his mouth was bone dry and his head pounded as he lay in the shade of the afternoon.
A fever overtook him, and by the time he staggered over the hill and saw the abandoned shack out in the middle of the plain he thought he was dreaming and he expected the building to disappear any moment as he walked towards it. Yet when he finally reached the front door the wood was solid beneath his touch and he pushed inside and the house’s cooling embrace drew him in and he collapsed right there on the floor.
How long he lay on the dirty floorboards he didn’t know. He kept waking from delirium to stare up at the spider webs in the corner of the room, wishing he could stand so he could grab the fat black thing hunched in its centre and shovel it in his mouth. The spider seemed to watch him, as if knowing his thoughts. A spreading weakness gutted his insides and the fever pulsed through him like diarrhoea.
He heard skittering. He arched his head back at the sound of tiny claws on wood – even that much effort making him dizzy – and saw the little shadow in the kitchen. The mangy rat shuffled out of its nice spot in the cupboards and scurried beneath the battered table with no mind to him being there. He watched it circle closer, its twitching nose sensing his heat but not scared in the slightest. He could barely raise his head as it sniffed his shoe then nipped the leather. Then it scurried up alongside him, sniffing all the way until it was close to his splayed fingers. Its little teeth bared at the smell of skin.
Before it could bite him, he whip-grabbed its head and slammed the little bundle of fur into his mouth and crunched down. The rat’s bones cracked like twigs. He cried as he ate.
Later, with enough strength finally to rise, he checked the taps for water in vain, and then the rain tank outside. Though the house had obviously been dormant for some years the tank was half full from the past season’s rains and he drank from the rusted tap until he vomited. Then drank again.
With food and water in his belly, he hauled back inside and lay down in the middle of the floor and let the fever rage through him as the winds howled outside like demons fighting to get in, and for a moment he imagined with terror his father standing like some dark power, watching the house, waiting for him, before the fever took him again and he sank down into numbing darkness.
He woke two days later. Every part of him ached like hell. But he’d survived.
He always survived.
He’ll sure as shit survive this too.
That’s all that matters in life: outlasting anything thrown at him. Everything else is horseshit. Cutter had been right about that much, at least.
Mick had survived being hunted by his father, survived the hellhole of the camp, the deaths of his sister and the salesman and Jock. So now this.
The first thing he does – after cleaning the shed and bagging the shooter’s body – is disinfect then bandage the wound on his back. Then he tows Cutter’s HR away under cover of darkness and dumps it as far out in the scrub as he can, off one of the survey roads. He burns a handful of the shooter’s clothes and other possessions nearby – keeping the shooter’s knife, but getting rid of his guns as they’d be too hard to keep hidden – and empties the ashes down a well. Cutter’s body he scatters for the wild dogs and waits until he sees them come for it, as all the while the stuff the shooter’d said about him – about what he is – rattles around inside his brain like a hollow-point bullet. But he can think on that shit later.
No one was too surprised at Cutter clearing out in the middle of the night, especially after Jock’d left only days before. Stockmen and station hands often left places without telling anyone: going on benders and turning up months later on the other side of the country, or downing tools and wandering mad into the heat of the outback.
But the bastard must’ve tipped off the salesman’s body as it’s found in the rubbish dump soon after. Funnily enough, suspicion falls right back on the high-tailing shooter. Mick doesn’t even have to start the rumours – Simpson and Mercer are already talking about it when he steps into the mess hall the next morning.
‘Ya think it’s true, Mick?’ Opey asks him when they’
re out alone in the back paddocks.
‘That Cutter eloped with a sheep? Most likely.’
‘Screw you,’ Opey pouts and trots away.
When they get back late that afternoon the two cops, Roberts and Kravic, are checking out Cutter’s shack. They’re deep in conversation with Blackall, the manager, who’s shrugging about something. ‘No, sir. I don’t know which sheep,’ Mick offers, throwing his voice. ‘Could be the cute one with the little black nose. If you find her, tell her I love her.’
‘Fuck’s sake, Mick. This is serious,’ Opey says. ‘No telling what that cunt was doing.’
Mick looks at him, studies his reaction. ‘Yeah, I know.’
When it’s his turn to be questioned he sits at the kitchen table of the farmstead and acts appropriately surprised. The pain of his back helps.
‘Knew Cutter was a psycho bastard – but who’da guessed this?’ he exclaims, looking with wide eyes from Roberts to Kravic. Roberts nods, seems to share his concern, or is too sick to care, but Kravic just looks at him, frowning. He’ll have to focus on the older cop, then.
‘All we wanna know is if you have any idea where he is now,’ Roberts says. His eyes are yellowed and watery. It’s like staring at death.
‘You think he did that salesman?’
‘There is no link at this stage between Reginald Cutter and Brian Seacombe. We just wanna determine where he is for a few questions.’
Mick almost chuckles. That could be tough. He attempts to cover it with a cough.
‘Something funny, boy?’ Kravic asks.
Yeah, ‘Reginald’ for one thing. ‘No, I’m just . . .’ He wipes his brow as if struggling with all this. ‘How could he do that? How could anyone?’ He hopes he hasn’t laid it on too thick.
Kravic stares at him a moment more. Then looks back at his paperwork.
‘For all we know,’ Roberts sighs, ‘Seacombe wandered off from the pub and stumbled into the tip, skewered himself on some rusted pipe. His body bore . . . animal damage. We’d just like to track Mr Cutter down and clear him. The other shooter from here, Jock, too.’