50.
Bohemian
Bob Tells His Version of the Wastes (5)
War brings all kinds, Nicky.
Scurrilous sorts, mostly. People keen to pick at the corpses and the wreckage.
Profiteers seeing a cheap buck to be made. And the gold hunters were already
scattered through the east, waiting to dig at the remains of Walker and Taylor
to see what clues they could uncover about buried hordes of gold. They all have
interests in keeping that kinda turmoil kicking. In that, they’re a bit like a
shitty footy player tagging a gun. All they want is to ramp the tension, milk
the indecision, make it all dirty, drag it to their level. A truce is bad for
business. An agreement that things got too messy.
Chauncey
– what’d you say he was calling himself again, Helmut?
Chance.
Yeah,
that fella. He’s one of them dirt types. Keen to stick a fist in the ribs when
you ain’t looking and duck off the other way while you check for some official
to call foul. Sneak a goal out the back kinda cunt, ya know?
Power
hungry fucker. And when Aayden ran back to his uncle Roy and got the Taylors
all fired up and marching off to brawl, Chauncey – Chance, whatever, he ratted
out the whole situation to the Walkers. He conned his way into the funeral
preparations with a few tough lads and he gets to telling them who killed old
Sharmayne’s mum and that Roy was bout to break the armistice on Carers. But,
worry not, he said to the Walkers. Pointed at the guys with him. I’ve got a few
of me own Carers willing to work for gold.
There
was no moment of thought or doubt as far as Sharmayne was concerned. She hired
a few of them right from Chance and put em to work Caring up some knives and
forks for weapons.
They
didn’t – I didn’t know, he’d already sold off a few equally less
worthwhile Carers already to Aayden, Roy, and the Taylors. Chance, he put
himself in the middle of it as the fucking arm’s dealer.
I
thought we were on the same side for a bit. Realised pretty quick his only
interest is himself, but. No Ministry about the man. Detested Ministry,
actually. Yet, it didn’t stop him basically helping in its dirty work. And when
it all went pear shaped, he came begging to me to keep him out of it. Didn’t
want to be tarnished as a war crim, right. I told him I’d see what I could do.
Man frightened me, to be honest. When I excised him and Rudiger from the
stories, a couple of years later the motoboys started keeping watch of me.
Wasn’t sure if it was to keep me quiet. Or payback. Probably both. Chance
hedged his bets.
And
speaking of Rudiger, he watched his heart get torn, as his missus fell in with
the conflict. He disappeared for a while there. Somewhere out east. When he
came back, it wasn’t pretty.
The
conflict kicked hard from the get-go. Armed to the gills, Taylors and Walkers
systematically demolished each other’s Collection Stations, manor houses,
compounds, and union halls, killing any number of family and disappearing
tracts of the east to the looser powers of the Cared weapons they recklessly
carried. For though Roy was an accomplished Carer, the hitmen Chance hired out
were little more than journeyman scrubs whose Cared tools were as likely to
backfire as they were to properly function. The other Carers who were hidin out
there tried to keep out of it, but fearing that they’d choose the wrong side
and twist the war, Taylor and Walker hunted em down. And them gold diggers,
too, took a dislike to em, firstly, when they refused to Care for their pick
axes, and secondly, when they thought they might step in and end shit and ruin
their chance to pick at the remains of whatever gold mines were hidden across
the east. The Carers were hunted, mutilated, and cut down. The order was
getting well trimmed.
The
war continued to rage and flame. Senseless in the way that things can get when
revenge and greed are the fuel. It was a series of raids, surprise attacks,
drive bys, and duels. As I said, the Cared implements were destructive, digging
out swathes of land into voids that far as I know still swell and vibrate out
there. Butter knives used to sever people from existence itself. Pots and pans
which gathered the air and burned it molten, that was then hurled at the
opposition. Most of it that wasn’t Cared by Roy or his men was a hair trigger
prospect, likely as not to disappear the wielder as serve it actual function.
Like I heard about a whisk Cared to scramble a man’s molecules, which backfired
and twisted the arms of the man who had into red liquorice. He lived. Uncomfortably.
Released of
her affair and swelled with a new infatuation, Sharmayne led with unbridled
violence. She torched Taylor lands right to the edges of the Valley. Savage
aboard her Holden, leaning out the window screaming and shooting. Sharmayne hunted
for Aayden. Suburb to suburb. Aayden fled from her, salting the land as he
went, causing his own kind of twisted carnage.
Eventually,
Sharmayne believed she had him trapped. With her brother Hunter, they cornered
him at a Toll Booth deep in Taylor lands. They stormed right into a trap.
Gunfire opened on the siblings and Hunter fell in a tangled, riddled mess.
Sharmayne who had been blinded by the idea of achieving her satisfaction fell
with a bullet in the knee. From the Booth stepped Aayden, bearing a knife
especially Cared by his Uncle Roy. It was a chef’s knife, Nicky, a bit like
yours. He came up to Sharmayne and people said he shed tears for the woman he
loved who didn’t love him back. I’ve always believed that was bullshit, but.
Man didn’t have tears. He only saw something that he couldn’t possibly have, and,
cos of that, it wasn’t worth keeping round. She wouldn’t submit to him. Not
ever. Cut down and waiting for the inevitable, she only stared at Aayden as he
came and a string of sweet curses dripped from her lips. He placed the knife to
her throat and slit.
It was not
the first time that knife had done its business. People knew what it did.
Nothing quite so otherworldly as slicing through time and space. Nah. What it
was Cared to do was separate a being from its body. It cut the souls right
outta ya physical sack. Dribbled out their wounds. Then as it floated free, the
knife could rend the body of the soul, flay it, slice it, mince it into
nothing. Aayden took that knife to Sharmayne’s body and spiritual existence and
cut both into paste, then nothingness as the air carried it away. She was diced
out of this world.
For a moment,
it seemed as though hostilities would cease. Brutality had been thought to
reach its crescendo. And though it was more violent and terrible than anything
I had anticipated, the job was all but done. The Ministry would clean up the
east. Block off the black holes. Take back the land and have the control it
sought.
Rudiger heard
about Sharmayne, but. Any idea of peace was quashed as he exacted his terrible
revenge.
Not just on
the Taylor’s neither. He became adept at hunting Carers – Helmut there may tell
you one day. He blamed them for creating the kind of monstrous weapons that
could so thoroughly vanquish his love. And in his rage, the cool calculations
of the man remerged: he saw it as his mission to clear the way for Ministry and
turned on the Walkers and their Carers, too, whom had started as his loudest
cheerleaders, then came to tremble at his name.
No one knew
where he was hiding out. But they knew the dull thump of his cricket bat. The
deep voice of a man committed to his task, who had talked himself into it,
informing the victim of their crimes, the rationale of their impending
battering.
Eventually he
came for Aayden, Roy, and the knife. I was there. Under duress. Found by the
Taylors at a Walker compound. Rudiger came in one evening as they interrogated
me about what I knew. The coward Aayden he fled. Roy tried to stand his ground
with the knife, but Rudiger slipped past him and took out his legs with the
cricket bat. He took the knife to him then. Claiming this was how justice is
best served. The Ministry Good requires balance, he said as he took apart the
bits of Roy’s soul like a chef at a chicken carcass.
It was
horrific. I still think about it. Too much.
He left with
the knife to hunt down what was left of Roy’s Carers in the compound.
That was
enough for me. I fled.
Of course,
what happened after is well known. Aayden’s last stand at the Costco. The
faulty spatula he tried to use which ultimately scrapped away a large swathe of
Ringwood, before he was gunned down by gold diggers. The whole east lost to
insanity. The Walker and Taylor families split. Tracts of land empty and burnt
and swirling into vortexes. Things, molecules, the stuff of reality displaced
and fractured. Distorted. There was nothing left for the Ministry. I suspect
that Rudiger made it certain: there was nothing Good there anymore, no room for
it to fit.
And,
still, he came out a hero. The man who tried to save the east. I fixed the
story. Omitted his role from the love story become tale of revenge. I made it a
tragedy. In a sense, it really was.
51.
Paul was dreaming of stars and
cults and finding the best in people.
The
grates near the train line rattled. Churned against rust. Limply, Paul woke up
and looked straight into the flames of a lamp. Above it a beard floated against
the dark.
‘Paul,’
the beard said and split in two. ‘Time to go.’
The
light came to Paul then and he smiled a little, but didn’t know why.
