The Business Of Death, Death Works Trilogy

by Trent Jamieson

  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.

  “Jesus, Don, put the bloody thing down.” Sam jabs her pistol in his face. This could all go bad very quickly. “There are enough people trying to kill us without you helping them.”

  “You put yours down first,” Don says sullenly. I open my mouth to say something, then glance back at Lissa who shakes her head at me. She’s still outside, and out of sight of Don and Sam. There’s no need to complicate this stand-off any further. I close my mouth again, partly to stop my heart from falling out of it. It seems I’m getting more familiar than I’ve ever wanted with the actuality of guns—and it’s not getting any more pleasant.

  “On the count of three,” Sam says.

  Don lowers his rifle immediately. He’s not much of a conformist. “You’re right,” he says.

  “I know, Sam. It just got under my skin a bit… the whole damn situation.” “I have a tendency to get under people’s skins,” I say.

  “So do ticks,” Lissa whispers, but I’m the only one who hears her, and I don’t even bother flashing her a scowl.

  Don chuckles. “That’s what I’ve always liked about you.” He reaches a hand out to me, and pulls me into a sweaty bear hug. At the human contact I struggle to hold back tears. “Sorry, Stevo. Christ, I’ve just had a bad kind of day.”

  “We all have,” I say as he pulls away.

  Sam runs over to me and her hug is even more crushing. She smells a lot nicer though, mainly lavender and a hint, just a hint, mind, of some good quality weed.

  “I’m so glad you’re all right,” she says.

  If you can call this all right, then you’re way more optimistic than me, I think. Still, I hug her tight, and this time I can’t quite hold back the tears.

  “It’s all right,” she says. The bloody Pomp mantra: It’s all right.

  Does she think Morrigan’s responsible? Surely not.

  “You want a cup of tea?” Don asks, looking a little embarrassed. He nods toward a Thermos in the corner of the room sitting somewhat incongruously next to a sledgehammer, a new one, its handle coated in plastic.

  “Tea?” I say, wondering at the hammer.

  Don smiles ruefully. “I’d get you a beer but, well, I haven’t had time to run to the bottle shop.”

  Too busy worrying about Morrigan, I think.

  “Tea would be great,” I say.

  “I’ll have one, too,” Sam says, then blinks, staring out the open door. “Lissa? Oh, I’m sorry.”

  Does everybody know this girl? So I wasn’t a member of the Pomp Social Club, but Jesus, how did I never meet her?

  “Don’t worry, Miss Edwards,” Lissa says. “It was quick. I’ve had time to adjust.”

  “Miss Edwards?” I’d always known her as Sam, and this throws me.

  “Some people are more polite than others. In your case, most people,” Sam says to me. “You were lucky she found you.”

  I nod my head. “Lissa’s the reason I’m still alive.”

  “No surprises there,” Don says. “You couldn’t piss your way out of a urinal.”

  Well, isn’t this the Steve de Selby support group. I’m about to say something narky but I notice that Don’s hands are shaking, enough that I think he may soon spill the tea. I take the cup gently from his grip.

  “No arguments from me,” I say, even if I’m grinding my teeth slightly. “How did you two make it?”

  “They got a little over-enthusiastic,” Don says. “I was finishing at a wake—no stir, oddly enough—when some bastard just starts shooting. They missed, and I could see something wasn’t quite right. Turns out he was a damn Stirrer. That in itself was peculiar, because I should have felt him. Then I realized he was a Pomp… well, used to be. I recognized him, but didn’t know his name, though I’ve since seen a few I do. I blooded up and touched him, too quick to get some answers, and then all I had was a still body and a rifle. Then I got the hell out of there, once I’d made sure.” His fingers brush at his blood-smeared shirt.

  It has to be touch, and it has to be blood to stop them. Death is intimate, and bound in life. And blood and death are entwined. Think about all those ancient tales that mix them up, like vampire myths. Stirrers don’t feed on blood, but life, and a Pomp’s lifeblood is the only way to shut the gate.

  Death is up close and personal and we’re all staring into its face. Which is why pomping can hurt, though death is less traumatic than life. If every pomp was as painful as childbirth, the world would be crowded with dead people desperate to cross over to the Underworld. And they’d damn well want to be paying us more.

  “I got lucky, too,” Sam says. “I saw the Stirrer before it saw me, stalled it, took its pistol and got in touch with Don.”

  “We were both lucky,” Don says.

  Sam wraps an arm around his waist. I look at Lissa, she smiles at me. I didn’t know that these two were a couple: one of the many things on the list of stuff that I don’t know about my friends, family and colleagues. Don bends down and gives Sam a kiss.

  “I’m sorry about your parents, Steve,” Don says. “But there was nothing you could have done.”

  I don’t know how to respond to that. Was there something I could have done? I run the options through in my mind. I was just as much in the dark as anyone.

  Don changes the subject fast. “So you said that Morrigan’s alive?” He looks over at Sam as though to say, I told you so.

  “Doesn’t prove anything,” Sam says. Aha! So Sam doesn’t agree with Don!

  “Last time I saw him, via the Hill, he was in Number Four, and he was wounded,” I say. “Then an hour or so ago, a sparrow got a note through to me. I suppose he had a fair idea where I might be. Sparrows are good hunters.”

  “A sparrow. One of those inklings of his?”

  I nod. “Yeah.”

  Don and Sam exchange looks. “He sent you here?” Don asked.

  “Not here, exactly, just the general direction.” I don’t know where he’s going with this, but I’m starting to not like it.

  “We haven’t spoken to Morrigan.”

  “Do either of you have your mobiles on?” Lissa asked.

  Sam pales. She pulls her phone out of her handbag, it’s a hot-pink number. She flips it open. “Shit.”

  “Turn it off,” I say.

  It starts ringing, and Sam jumps. We al
l do. She hurls it at the ground and stomps on it with her purple Doc Martens until it stops ringing and is nothing but bits of plastic and circuitry. But still it looks sinister somehow, and puissant, because we know it’s too late.

  Other than Morrigan, we’re probably the last three Pomps in Brisbane, the lucky ones, and now we’re clumped together. If Morrigan is behind all this… “We have to get out of here, right now.”

  And then a dead guy appears in the middle of the room. We’re standing in a rough circle. He’s tugged this way and that by our individual presences.

  He blinks at us. “Um, where am I?”

  We all look at each other.

  “Queensland,” I offer.

  He shakes his head, and looks about the squalid room. “Shit, eh? Queensland. What’s this? Am I…?”

  “Yes,” we all say.

  “Well, what does it all mean?” He scans the three of us, as though looking for a point of egress. He’s about to make a break for it. But I’m not anxious to pomp him, my insides are feeling tender enough. Don gestures furiously at me to do it, but I’m pretending I don’t notice him.

  “I don’t know what it means. But it’s all right,” Don says. He winces and then gently touches the dead guy on the back. The fellow’s gone.

  “We’re all playing our A game today,” he says, looking from me to Sam and back again. When we say nothing, he shrugs. “I’ll check the back.”

  I feel like an absolute shit, but I’m so glad I didn’t have to make that pomp.

  Don’s at the back door, peering out, his rifle held clumsily in one hand. He stiffens, closes the door softly and backs away down the long hallway to the living room. “There’s someone out there.” Don’s pale as a sheet. “Couldn’t see them, but I could feel them.”

  Now that he’s said it, I can too. It’s similar to the darkness that I had felt around the Wesley Hospital. The air is slick with an unpleasant psychic miasma. It’s catching in the back of my throat like smoke. Don is looking worse and I’m not surprised: he took that last pomp.

  “Time to use the exit plan, I think,” he says, glancing over at Sam. She nods and lifts up the sledgehammer from the corner of the room. She looks like some weird combination of Viking god—blonde plaits hanging from beneath her beret—and hippy grandma.

  Sam passes it to me and I grunt, the thing’s heavy. Its plastic grip crinkles in my hands. I look at her, confused. How is this part of the exit plan?

  “Steve, would you mind smashing a hole in the floor?”

  “Not at all.”

  She points to the middle of the room. “About there would be good.” Then she runs to the window, peers out and fires her pistol into the dark.

  It’s surprisingly easy to make a hole in the wooden floorboards—they’re rotten—though every time I strike the floor, the whole house shakes and I wonder if I’m going to bring it down around our heads. Once the hole is big enough, even for Don, I step aside for the others.

  Don drops down first, grunting as he hits the ground. Sam motions for me to go. I hesitate and she grimaces.

  “Steve, I’ve got the gun. You go, and now.”

  I’m down and running at a crouch. Someone fires, and I’m not sure if it’s them or us. I look back and watch Sam drop neatly through the hole. Her pistol flashes. Lissa’s with me, and I don’t think she could look more worried than she does. She darts away into the dark and is back in a heartbeat.

  “There’s three of them. Stirrers.”

  The moment she says it, their presence floods me. A foulness stings the back of my throat. “At least three,” I whisper.

  The house is musty and muddy underneath, and I’m getting mouthfuls of spider web. No spiders yet. I follow Don through a scrubby little garden and onto the road.

  We don’t stop running for three blocks, until we reach Don’s brown transit van. Don’s bent over, and having a spew. It’s the perfunctory vomit of a heavy drinker. I wonder if I’m heading that way, too, since I’ve been hitting the drink pretty hard of late. Well, that’s the least of my worries. Don straightens, wipes his mouth, and jabs his rifle butt at the van.

  “In the back,” he says to me, as Sam catches up to us.

  I slide open the side door and scramble onto the hard bench seat inside. Sam’s behind the wheel, Don beside her, and we’re off with a squeal of tires. Sam takes the first corner so tightly that I’m thrown out of my seat and hit the corrugated metal floor with a grunt.

  “Put your seatbelt on,” Sam says. I clamber back into my seat and pull the seatbelt across my waist.

  A car horn honks at us as we shoot past, and Sam gives it the finger.

  “Keep out of the fast lane, ya dickhead!” Don yells.

  Lissa’s laughing.

  “Old people these days.” “You watch who you’re calling old,” Don says, “or I’ll come back there.”

  Sam concentrates on the road.

  “I hate driving in the dark.” Don reaches over and flicks on the headlights.

  “Don’t you say a word,” Sam growls.

  We take another corner like we’re a bunch of drunken hoons on a Friday night, and even with the seatbelt on I nearly slide off the bench again. Sam knows how to drive fast, but this van is hardly handling like it’s on rails.

  “So you really think Morrigan’s involved in this?” I ask Don, as much to distract myself from Sam’s driving as for my pressing need to know. The Morrigan argument seems absurd—I saw him wounded and I’ve known him for as long as I can remember. He talked me out of the nightmare of my break-up with Robyn, he’s sat at the table for Christmas dinner. He’s walked Molly—possibly more often than I did.

  “He’s about the only one who could pull it off. The man knows everything, runs everything. And we let him,” Don says. “It’s probably not a good idea to trust anyone at the moment.”

  Yeah, which is exactly the right thing to say to someone stuck in the back of a van while the two people up front both have guns. Then again, if they had wanted me dead I suspect that I’d be a corpse by now.

  “One thing is certain,” Don says, “we need to split up. Morrigan— or whoever’s hunting us—wants us to stick together.”

  “Here?” Sam says.

  Don nods. “Yeah, here will do.” He smiles back at me.

  “Milton, not a bad suburb to dump you in. At least it’s near the brewery.”

  Sam swings us off the road, and slams to a halt. Another car beeps its horn as it flies past, but Sam ignores it. “Sorry, Steve. I know you don’t want to hear this, but Don’s right. Together we’re a bigger target.”

  Of course she was going to side with Don. They’re lovers. “Are you two going to split up as well?” I ask, a little petulantly.

  Sam nods her head, and I’ve never seen her look so sad. “That was the plan all along. We just wanted to see each other, before—”

  “Before we sort this thing out,” Don breaks in, “and make the bastards, whoever the fuck they are, pay.” Don’s out of the van and is sliding the door open. “Keep breathing. I’m going to try and get in touch with Mr. D. I don’t think he knows about this.”

  “If he does,” I say, “then none of it matters, we’re all dead.”

  Don nods. “That we’re still breathing makes me believe he doesn’t. Mr. D has much more elegant tools at his disposal than guns.”

  Which is absolutely true. Death stops hearts, and stills brains with a breath. He could have killed every single Pomp with a thought. After all, he is disease, he is misadventure, and he is just stupid bad luck, almost all of which I’ve encountered in the last thirty-six hours.

  “Speaking of which…” He digs around under the front passenger seat. “Aha!” Don passes something to me. A pistol. “Be careful with that, it’s loaded.”

  I look at it like it’s a scorpion. Sam rattles off some details about the weapon, which bounce just as rapidly off my skull. All I know is that it’s a gun. You point it and squeeze the trigger.

  “…
You got that?” Sam asks.

  “Yeah, um, yeah. Of course.”

  “We have to go.” Don shakes my hand roughly and I wince. There might still be a piece of glass in there. Then he pats me on the shoulder. “You’ll be fine.”

  “Good luck,” I say, and wave at Sam. The faux smile she gives me is matched for false cheerfulness by the one I’m wearing. We’re chimps surrounded by lions, grinning madly and pretending that the big cats are not circling ever closer, and that it’s not all going to end in slashing claws and marrow sucked from broken bones.

  “We’ll be all right,” Sam says. “You take care, and keep that Lissa with you.” She glances over at Lissa. “And, you, look after this guy. He’s one of the good ones.”

  “I will,” we both say.

  Don’s already back in the van. I step out and slide the door shut.

  Sam’s off, crunching the gears and over-revving the engine, leaving me coughing on the edge of the road in a pall of black smoke.

  15

  Think she needs to get that gearbox seen to,” Lissa says. When I don’t reply she looks at me more closely. “Are you OK?”

  “I think so.” Twin bars of tension run up my neck. I roll my head to the right and the crack’s loud enough to make me jolt. I’m edgy all right. If this keeps up I’ll be jumping at my own shadow, which might be sensible.

  “Just you and me again, kiddo,” Lissa says.

  “There’s worse company.” My voice cracks a little. “Much worse. You’ve—I don’t know what I’d—”

  “Don’t,” she says, taking a step away from me, and I know what she means. There’s no future for us. There can’t be. That’s not how this works. No matter what else has happened, she’s dead, and I’m alive. The divide is definite.

  But it’s bullshit isn’t it, because she’s still with me. I’m not keeping her here. In fact my presence should be doing the reverse. She’s a dead girl, and she shouldn’t be here, but she is. That has to count for something.

  “I hope they make it,” I say, all the while wishing that Lissa had made it too. Though if she had, I’d probably be dead.

  It’s hardly a comforting thought, but there aren’t any of those that I can find anyway.