The Business Of Death, Death Works Trilogy

by Trent Jamieson

  I shift there, and glance around; I’m in the right cafe in Springwood, standing right next to my target. My appearance startles a guy pushing a shopping trolley. I wink at him, he frowns, moves on, because no one appears out of thin air—not even in the southern suburbs.

  “Well, you’ve moved out into the sticks haven’t you?”

  Alex looks up from his chai latte, sliding his hand over a card. “Christ, Steve, you surprised me. And what’s with the hair?”

  “Has to be a first for everything, I suppose. And I don’t want to talk about it.” My jaw drops. “Are you wearing a skivvy?”

  “It’s cold.”

  “But come on. A skivvy…you look like a Wiggle.”

  I pull the chair out from beside him.

  “What you got there?” I ask, trying to get a view of the card he’s obscuring not particularly well. Alex and sleight of hand don’t really gel.

  “Season pass to the Lions’ games.” He shakes his head. “I forgot, I got these when Dad was…It’s stupid. I haven’t been to a game all year.”

  “I’ll come with you,” I offer.

  Alex squints at me. “Didn’t know you followed AFL.”

  “Nah, I’m Bronco’s boy,” I say, “but I can tolerate Aussie Rules.”

  “Tolerate?” He slides the card back into his wallet.

  I grin at him. “Just saying, that’s all. Putting the offer out there.”

  Alex nods. “Appreciated. Might be fun.”

  “Yeah. When this is all done with, it would be good to, well, to think of something other than bloody Stirrers.”

  “You think it’s that close?”

  “Tomorrow, maybe today. Brisbane, as far as we can tell.”

  “That what this is all about?” He looks from me to the comet.

  I nod. “I need to know what we can expect from your lot if everything goes down as badly as I suspect it will.”

  “Doug Anderson’s the one you need to talk to.” Alex sighs. “Steve, you know all this shit. He’s been your liaison since Tim left the department.”

  “Can you talk to him for me? Tee up a meeting. He’s not been taking my calls, and I’ve got Tim off chasing other things.”

  Alex shakes his head. “Hardly in his good books at the moment.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t think he likes my association with you. Undermines his authority somewhat.”

  “Christ, after the stuff we’ve been through! You’re my unofficial liaison, but I need my official one now.”

  “Yeah. Office politics, though, you know how it is.”

  It was office politics that started all this. “Of course, I do. But I still need to know where we stand; things are coming to a head. And, you’re a cop, you don’t even work in his office.”

  Alex sips his latte. “We Black Sheep really like to put that stuff behind us. Him, on the other hand, I’ve never seen anyone work as hard. He resents what I gave up.”

  “So when did you decide that you didn’t want to be a Pomp?”

  “Very early on. It never felt right to me, for me. Dad pushed it for a while, but I know he was proud of the choice I made.”

  I nod. “Saved my life.”

  Alex smirks. “On numerous occasions.” He sips his coffee. “What about you? Why did you decide to become a Pomp?”

  “I couldn’t think of anything else.”

  Alex laughs. “Well, you’ve done all right for yourself.”

  “Yeah, I’m a star.”

  “Fucking glass-half-empty de Selby, eh,” he says dismissively, pulling out his mobile.

  I order myself a takeaway coffee, leaving Alex to deal with Doug by himself—he hates an audience. By the time the coffee’s ready Alex is hanging up, there’s a thin line of tension between his eyes that I don’t think he had before.

  “Doug didn’t sound happy,” he says, letting the phone skitter across the table.

  “Right now he has reason not to be.”

  “He said to meet him in the usual place in twenty minutes. I impressed upon him the urgency of the matter. What’s the usual place?”

  “It’s a secret.”

  “You be careful.”

  “It’s all I ever am.” I give him a little salute and shift out of there.

  Tim’s still busy when I get back, so I grab Lissa.

  “I think I’m going to need your negotiating skills,” I say.

  “Who have you pissed off?”

  “No one, not yet. I’ve a meeting in about fifteen minutes with Doug.”

  “Aw, Dougie. What a lovely guy. How can you piss off Doug? The usual place?”

  “How do you know about that?” I thought my meeting place with Doug was secret. Sure we’ve met a half-dozen times there, usually had a beer afterwards, when the talk became less formal. But as far as I know no one had ever seen us there.

  “I have my ways,” Lissa says.

  I raise an eyebrow.

  “Well, you follow me with those Avians of yours. Sometimes I just follow you.”

  “He’s late,” I say, needlessly and for about the fifth time.

  “It’s too bloody cloak and dagger for me,” Lissa says lifting her voice above the whale song. I admire her profile, and she catches me looking. Her lip curls, the slightest movement, but I see it, and she knows I do. Her green eyes widen—there’s mockery and love in there, and something deeper, and darker. A shared hurt, a history more convoluted than our six months together deserves. For a moment, all I want to do is kiss her.

  I’m glad she’s with me. Since my little underwater expedition I really don’t like being all that far from her.

  I’m holding her hand, which makes it less cloak and dagger more pseudo date in odd location, with a dash of peril; about all we have time for these days.

  We’re standing in the long, dark hallway that runs outside the Queensland Museum and works a little like a wind tunnel, three life-size model humpback whales floating above us. A little down the way, an ultralight plane is suspended from the ceiling, but it’s the humpbacks that are making all the noise, well, the speakers bolted into the walls beneath them.

  Lissa groans. “If I hear any more bloody clicking.”

  Whale song is haunting and powerful, but half an hour of it can be a bit much, I guess. And, a lot of it sounds like someone letting air out of a balloon. HD is raging. It can’t stand the singing, and it’s keeping me on edge. That and the memories it evokes. Just this morning I was a prisoner of the Death of the Water

  I grind my teeth, squeeze Lissa’s hand a little tighter, and drive HD down. It’ll rise back up, it always does, I don’t have much space within me to push it into: something that alarms me every time I wake up in the morning and see HD staring back at me out of the mirror. Its madness and horror, the source of all my strength.

  The stone blades are mumbling too, in sympathy with HD.

  Lissa frowns. “It’s troubling you again?”

  “It’s always troubling me,” I say.

  Footsteps echo down the hallway. Lissa and I glance at each other. “Just me,” Doug says. “Sorry I’m late.”

  “Couldn’t we have met at a cafe?” Lissa says.

  Doug shakes his head and gestures at a nearby bench. Lissa and I sit down, Doug paces in front of us. “No, I know the CCTV doesn’t work here. There’s no one to see us meet, and no way that anyone can sneak up on us.” His voice is low, I recognize the mildly panicked expression on his face.

  Doug’s sympathetic, but he’s hardly influential. Not after the events of the last few months. Mortmax has grown increasingly threatening in the government’s eyes. Not only State or Federal. Every government agency in the world that has something to do with us has been keeping a very close eye on me and my Pomps’ activities. They need us, but they’re not sure how much they can trust us, or what happens if we fail.

  Frightened governments aren’t a good thing. They never function well. Even if they have a reason to be frightened. But he’s all I hav
e.

  The wind skitters paper down the long hall. Doug jumps.

  “What’s up?” I say. “This isn’t like you at all.”

  “Alex’s call reminded me of something you need to know,” Doug says then slashes out at me with a knife. The knife point buries itself in my chest.

  Can’t say I expected that.

  But HD is always ready. I catch Doug’s wrist, pull his hand back, and with it the blade. It slides free from my lung with a wet sound. HD rises inside me. It wants to kill again. Not now. Doug struggles but I don’t let him go.

  “Stop this!” I can’t feel a pulse. I look into Doug’s eyes, there’s no one home. At least no one known as Doug.

  A Stirrer exists in there now. Doug’s been dead for some time: the Stirrer’s working his body too smoothly for it to be just a day or so. Bleak eyes stare out at me, even as the lips curl into a smile.

  “It is coming. And your world will end, starting with her.” The Stirrer snaps its free hand up and jabs a finger at Lissa.

  “Bullshit, what bullshit,” Lissa says, already sliding her knife down her palm.

  Lissa strikes Doug’s head with her bloody palm, grimacing as the Stirrer’s soul slides through her and back to the Deepest Dark where it belongs.

  Doug’s a dead-weight in my arms. I let him drop, poor bastard.

  I check his hand, and there it is below his thumb. The mask tattooed in the finest detail. I lower his arm gently onto his chest, something feels wrong. Doug’s face is calm, but for where Lissa’s blood has marked him. You’d think it was a peaceful death. I peer under his shirt. There’s a hole in his chest about the size of my fist.

  Nothing peaceful about it.

  Lissa’s already on the phone, calling through a pick-up for the corpse. An ambulance will arrive shortly. The body will be taken away and burnt. Once burial would have been enough, but now we’re not taking any chances.

  “The one guy in the government sympathetic to us and he’s dead,” I say once she’s off the phone.

  “When the hell did this happen?”

  “A while back, obviously, the way he was walking and talking. No one pomped Doug’s soul. Or, at the very least, I didn’t sense it.”

  I let that hang between us. An ambulance is drawing near. Sirens competing with the whale song.

  “Disturbing,” Lissa says, she’s already looking away from the body. A body’s a body, it’s not the interesting part for Pomps, and it’s certainly the least interesting part today. Mr. D was right, the Stirrer god’s presence is causing major disruptions. Things I’m only beginning to understand.

  Death not aware of a death: disturbing is an understatement.

  Tim sits down and shakes his head. “I can’t believe it. Doug…poor, poor bastard.”

  “I liked him,” I say.

  “Any idea how long he’s been dead?”

  “At least a week.”

  “A week!” Tim pales, and reaches for his cigarettes. “I had drinks with him three days ago, they were starting to panic about your disappearance.”

  Tim had quite a bit to drink if he hadn’t noticed. I must be giving him a bit of a look because he puffs up his chest.

  “Used to be I had drinks with you, mate,” he says with a hint of bitterness. “Then you started drinking alone.”

  I shake my head at that. I want to tell him I haven’t had a drop since Lissa summoned me, no matter how much I’ve needed it, but I can’t. A day’s not long enough. Trumpeting about a day without alcohol makes it sound like I have more of a problem than I’m willing to admit.

  “So, we’re without allies again,” Tim says. “The government itself has been compromised. Even the bit that should have known better than to get into such trouble.”

  “Well, there was always a chance it would happen,” I say. “I mean, Stirrers had already started infiltrating the suburbs, and dogs, bureaucrats had to be next.”

  Tim gives me such a nasty look.

  “I’ve spoken to Alex,” I say, “and we’ve shipped extra brace paint to his District, and he’s even passed some of it on to State Intelligence and Security Operations. And, no one in a ministerial position seems to be affected.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I can sense their heartbeats.” Tim looks impressed. “I’m not just a pretty face you know,” I say.

  “Yeah, you’ve got great hearing. Talking of which,” he lifts a sheath of papers from his lap, “I’ve got a speech written up for you, for this afternoon. The Ankous are going to need something impressive.”

  “You saying I can’t come up with the goods?”

  “One day out from the end of world, and we’re chasing our tails. Do I need to say more?”

  “I don’t like speeches,” I say, rubbing my head. It’s itching, I can’t stand this not having hair, maybe I need to rub oil in it or something.

  “Exactly and not a problem,” Tim says. “I’ve Steveified it, it’s more a series of dot points.”

  “I know what I’m going to say.”

  “Yes, and it’s written down here—in convenient dot-point form. These are Ankous you’re talking to, you need to be pretty slick.”

  I take the notes from him. Glance through them. Yeah, it’s pretty much what I was going to say, only better. Tim’s been writing speeches for nearly a decade, he’s got it down to a fine art. I get to the bottom and there’s a little squiggle and the letters SSR.

  “What’s SSR?” I ask. “Oh, Something Stirring Required.”

  “You know I’m going to get to that bit and laugh. I’m not Winston Churchill.”

  “No, he never had to fight against a god. You’re going to need something stirring, really stirring.”

  I hand it back to him. “How about you have a go, eh?”

  Tim tears up a little. My offer’s really touched him. “I suppose I could.”

  I lean back in my throne, lifting the front legs an inch from the ground, and reconsider Cerbo’s suggestion. The sheer audacity and bravery of it is shocking. It’s the sort of thing that the Stirrers wouldn’t expect. Our job is based on sacrifice and blood, but never to that extent. Whose is?

  Maybe Cerbo’s right. But the sacrifices I’m prepared to make are personal. I demand that my staff fight, but I could never demand that they die. I can only expect that of me.

  “You ever think it might just be their time?” I ask Tim.

  “Their?”

  “Stirrers.”

  “If it is, well they’re going to have to earn it. This was once their world, but they lost it, those days passed over a billion years ago. You don’t get that back, we’re here now.”

  “I like my evil black and white.”

  “You’re Death, you’re already morally ambiguous.”

  “Yeah, but what isn’t?”

  “All I know is that if they win that’s it for all life, from bacteria up. All of it’s gone, and it might as well have never happened.”

  “But everything ends, maybe our time’s up.”

  Tim nods his head. “Yeah, everything ends and it’s our job to know when time’s up. It ain’t up.” He hands me back the notes. “Put that in your speech.”

  Thirteen Ankous sit around my desk. Hell and earth behind us. The different light of each zone provides a peculiar and varied illumination. Some faces are partly shadowed, others clearly lit, but all possess a look of expectation, dread and utter weariness. And not a few of them keep glancing at my bald scalp.

  I wait for the coffees to be brought in.

  “Is there a reason for this meeting?” asks Ari Jacobstein, not even looking at her coffee. She’s been running the UK since Anna died, and I know that she has been watching everything that Cerbo has been doing closely. These Ankous know more about the business than I do. Having me as their boss may have provided them with some much needed humility, but I can’t help feeling it would be better if I could just upgrade them all to Regional Managers. The Hungry Death inside me doesn’t agree at all. It wouldn�
�t.

  I lean forward in my throne and nod. “There’s a reason, Ms. Jacobstein,” I say. “Everything suggests that whatever is going to happen will happen tomorrow, and that it will most likely occur here. Don’t tell me you can’t feel it. You all look like you’ve aged years in the past few days. You need to be ready to mobilize.”

  There’s an intake of breath.

  “The rumors are true then?” David, South Africa’s Ankou, says.

  “Yes. I never meant to keep this hidden, but then I never meant to be snatched away by the Death of the Water. And neither Cerbo nor Tim are big on sharing information. The Stirrer god is almost here.”

  Ari’s lips tighten. “So we can’t stop it?”

  “No, I wanted to take the fight to it, but Cerbo has been unable to find a way to do that which didn’t involve considerable casualties,” I grimace. “And by considerable I mean a hundred per cent. Killing every Pomp to defeat this threat is not an option.”

  “You contemplated this?” asks David. He glances at Ari and rolls his eyes, she grins at him, and I don’t know whether he thinks I should or I shouldn’t have.

  “I considered every suggestion brought to me,” I say. What I don’t say is how Cerbo had pushed for it. “Do you have any that you would like to offer, David?”

  “I—”

  “Very well, then. Now, while Cerbo’s idea is not an option, mobilizing every single Pomp we can spare and getting them here, that can be done. I know you lot haven’t been as busy as the Australian branch, and that Stirrer numbers have fallen away to almost nothing in your regions. I want you to be ready to use the various corridors of your respective Number Fours to feed Pomps into Brisbane. We’re going to have to bulk up our numbers, a lot.”

  “We will consider your suggestion,” David says. I almost reach over the desk grab him by his lapels and shake. Damn it, I almost drag out my knives and cut his throat. The intention must be pretty plain because he leans back slightly.

  “You’ll consider nothing,” I say. “Other than the quickest way to get your Pomps here when we call. This isn’t a suggestion.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “It’s a fucking command. I’ve sat around, conferred, chatted, and talked things through. I’ve been everything that’s expected of me. But truth is, I’m growing impatient.”