by Jack Dann
He was turning back to the boy when he sensed something behind, a shadow running at him from the hall, and he turned, already raising his hands in protested innocence, expecting one of the child’s parents.
I didn’t — he started to say and then the figure filled his vision and his tongue jammed to the roof of his mouth at the impossible shock, the recognition, and then a whoosh of air sliced towards him, a sudden wallop impacting his temple and sending him sprawling back towards the window, throbbing disembodied pain seeping through him as if vicarious, delayed. And as he stumbled against the window-ledge trying to yell: Wait! he clumsily pushed with his free hand, palm butting a chest. But it only allowed the other to find him again in the near-dark and the next punch slammed into his nose and snapped his head back against the curtain-muffled window, sparkling his vision and sinking cold up past his eyes. He fell then, toppling to the side with one flailing arm, sight gone, and he somehow grabbed hold of the curtain on the way down and it held for a moment then noisily ripped and came down on top of him. He swatted at the sudden caul, terrified, waiting for the blows to rain down, kicking out like a child, feeling a thump as he connected with something that nearly twisted his ankle. But it felt good, substantial, and he kicked again, sensing his foot crunch something this time: a leg, giving him time to struggle out from the curtain and see the room in sudden relief with the last of the outside light coming through the naked window.
To see his attacker — his brother Stephen — hunched before him, cradling his smashed knee and glaring, face twisted.
St-Stephen? He managed but his brother just stared at him. Stephen? What are you —
And then his brother snarled and came again and all he could do was scrabble backwards, feet skittering on the floor, arm still tucked uselessly into his shirt, and then his brother collapsed as his leg gave out but kept coming at him on his stomach now like the boy.
He backed across the floor, knowing that this was impossible, that it couldn’t be his brother attacking him, that he must be delusional, still in the crashed car perhaps, dreaming deliriously because of his injuries or something. And then his brother reared up with one arm and brought it down on his shin, piledriving the shear of bone with a crack, and he screamed at the explosive reality of the pain and kicked out instinctively with his other leg, catching Stephen beneath the eye and whipping his head. His brother just grinned, teeth white in the near-dark, a faint rip opening across his cheekbone. Blood welled like tears.
He banged up against something cold and harsh, his hand scraping fireplace-stone, and as he frantically searched for something, anything, to defend himself, he tried to yell: Stop! What are you doing? his voice raspy with fear, but it only seemed to spur his brother on, unstoppable now, coming at him across the floor in a nightmare whirl of limbs.
His hand finally closed around something heavy and metallic and he swung it in a wild arc that ended with jarring impact.
His brother abruptly stopped, expression frozen, crazed eyes unfocusing and glazing over.
He let go of the black length of fire-poker. It remained suspended from Stephen’s head, its thorn dug deep into the side of the skull as the familiar blue eyes rolled up and blood ran in a thin line down and around his neck. Then Stephen keeled over and the poker clattered to the floor.
He stared down at the crumpled body of his younger brother, shaking, face crawling with horror. No, no, no … he kept saying. But Stephen didn’t move. He had killed someone now. His own brother. He’d killed his own brother. He slumped backwards. Kept mumbling to himself: No, no … spacing out, eyes blurring and tilling with tears. It was too much to take. What was his brother doing here?
And then he remembered the boy. Tore his eyes away from his brother’s body and in a daze looked back into the corner.
The child was gone.
He looked to the open doorway, distantly wondering if the child ran out while they were fighting, but his mind no longer worked. Couldn’t answer the questions. He got to his feet, gasping at the pain in his tortured leg, and edged around Stephen’s body to the corridor.
The lights he had turned on were now off. He stared down the length of darkness to the still-open front door at the end.
A shadow crossed the doorway.
Then: footsteps, crunching gravel, more shadows arcing down the hallway. He stood awestruck staring at the gap of light as the sounds increased like hailstones, a steady rain of impacts.
And then the first figure appeared. A silhouette only but its shoulders were hunched in anger, the body squat and arrowlike, searching and then focusing on him. Another figure behind it and another and then darkness eclipsed the hall as figures filled the doorway and spilled into the house towards him, the noise on the floorboards now coiled thunder.
He instinctively twisted and fled up the staircase, knowing only that he had to run, the sound of countless feet scrabbling down the corridor pushing him on in terror. He rounded the top of the stairs and flailed in the darkness — a dim skylight the only illumination on the landing — and banged into the first door he could find.
He jammed his body against the door and stood panting. A bedside lamp softly lit the room and his eyes took it in as if it was some rationality, some comfort against the insanity on the other side of the door. Then he saw the glow off the sweating pale bodies on the bed: at first only a congealed mass of rippled, sheening flesh dotted with hair and freckles; then the woman moved beneath, opening her legs wider and groaning, and the mound coalesced into distinction. The guy kept pummelling away in fury on top — love-handles sagging down over shapeless white buttocks, shoulders straining with the missionary position. And then suddenly swung his head around, grinning through thick beard at him.
He almost tore open the door to escape back into the hallway.
The guy kept thrusting, staring at him with wild eyes and that rictus-grin, and then the woman beneath — greying hair spread over the pillow like road kill — looked at him standing there. Her glazed eyes washed over him then refocused and she smiled, the white slug of her tongue darting out to wet her lips:
Come here.
Her voice was soft, seductive, and he tried to push backwards through the wood of the door as his mother raised her hand to him, beckoning to join them. Outside, silence fell on the landing.
His mother frowned. I said come here.
Graeme stopped thrusting and stared at him, grin disappearing. The old anger surfaced beneath pig-eyes as the fat bastard withdrew with a clench of his puckered ass and a sound like a knife sliding out of a wound. Rolled off the bed and stood, bloated hairy stomach taut with a lifetime of beer, slickened alien-head penis a fresh jutting limb.
Then his stepfather was across the space between them in a flash, grabbing him by the throat and staring up, hands slick with salty sweat. Behind, his mother ran a hand down her body and snarled at him.
He couldn’t do anything, could only stare down.
And then he realised he was now taller than his dead, impossible stepfather. And as Graeme was bringing his face down to his and reaching for his groin with the other hand an anger rose from somewhere deep inside, hidden all these years but finally given full expression and he roared and punched back at the older man, feeling the jellied softness of nose beneath his fist; punching again, harder this time to the jaw with a satisfying crack of crumbling bone, and Graeme was stumbling backwards now, hands raised blindly against the assault, and he limped after him and slammed down onto the fucker’s chin and his stepfather crumpled, erection wilting and mollusc-drawing up into itself. He jumped on the older man and was barely able to keep his broken hand into himself, to stop using that too to beat and beat, and he kept punching until there was only blood, until the red mist hung in the air and covered his face.
A screech and a whump as something smacked into him, hot skin pressed against his, and then slices of pain near his eyes as his mother clawed from behind, legs wrapped around his waist, and he could feel her against his lower b
ack, and he cried out and rolled onto her, slamming his head back with crunching force against her face and swinging around to hit and hit and hit.
When it was over he vomited until his stomach spasmed with nothingness. He tried to close his eyes to the scene around but kept seeing himself punching again and again, kept seeing their slackened faces dissolving beneath him, and he wearily opened his eyes and looked to the door, waiting for it to burst inwards.
A muffled giggle came from the corner of the room. He looked up at the dresser to the boy sitting on its top swinging broken, multi-jointed legs and staring with fascination at the bodies sprawled on the floor. A soft awful clicking of bone like chittering teeth. When he realised he was being watched, the boy looked at him and fell quiet, but the smile lingered. He seemed to be waiting.
He was about to ask something useless of the boy, something redundant and irrelevant about what was happening. But it didn’t matter any more.
The boy nodded at his acceptance, and then the glittering eyes swivelled towards the doorway and the smile widened.
He understood then, understood everything, and he crouched and waited for the first to come through; these people from his past, the dead and the living: aunties, uncles, friends from primary school, old girlfriends, grandparents, work colleagues, perhaps people he’d only passed in the street, brushed past in pubs, sat next to on the train. He could hear them now pressing at the door, lining the stairs, crowding the hallway with clenched hands, filling the driveway in anticipation, could imagine them stretching away down the road, an eternity of faces and fists and blood. He flexed his hands like a prizefighter and hunched closer to the floor, grinning with the insanity of it all.
He hoped his father was next. He was looking forward to seeing him again.
AFTERWORD
Hell is other people, as Sartre said.
‘The Rest is Silence’ (Hamlet’s last words, and obviously an ironic title in that the story ends with anything but silence) is what I’d call an existentialist ghost story. We are all haunted by the past, but we learn to repress the pain and regret and guilt and move on with our lives. It’s often only years later that the true damage surfaces and threatens to overwhelm us.
Some it will destroy.
— Aaron Sterns
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SMOKING, WAITING FOR THE DAWN
JASON NAHRUNG
JASON NAHRUNG is a Brisbane writer who grew up on a cattle property in Queensland but now works as a journalist for a major metropolitan newspaper. His coverage of Australian speculative fiction has earned him a William Atheling Jr Award for review and criticism. His short fiction is invariably darkly themed, perhaps reflecting his love of classic B-grade horror films and 1980s Goth rock music. His debut novel, The Darkness Within, is based on a novella-length story written with Mil Clayton.
Nahrung is a writer ‘with the juice’, another writer to watch. Here he writes about mateship, otherness, and what’s worth dying for in the mummified dryness of the Australian outback…
George stood by the bleached skeleton of the Wyandra stockyards, breathing in dust and sun-baked silence. The rustred roofs of the township shimmered in the heat haze, and from what he could see, his old stomping ground hadn’t fared much better than he had in the past twenty years: tired, forlorn, running out of time.
He leaned against the uncomfortably warm bonnet of the Commission-issue van and rolled a smoke, making the most of the inconsequential shade offered by a drooping mallee tree. The first hit of nicotine settled in his lungs and he coughed wetly before breathing out a blue cloud of resignation.
He eyed the sagging loading ramp and the warped rails. The decrepit yards didn’t look like they could hold so much as a steer now, but once, he and Tommy Daniels had herded a baker’s dozen of Undead through those gates and shipped them back to the holding camp down the road at Cunnamulla. They’d got a citation for that.
Familiar bile rose in his throat and he spat it out to sizzle on the tarmac. They’d been quite a team, him and Tommy, raising all manner of hell out here, mates all through school and then for the best part of ten years with the Commission.
A Fourex sign, the red faded to the colour of dried blood and the white to that of bone, beckoned from the roof of the Railway Hotel from across the railway line. That had been their office, once. Back before the enclaves had been established and the Undead had been semi-legalised; back when a collared zombie or vampire was worth a damn sight more than a ute-full of kangaroo carcasses and dingo scalps. Back before the big Toowoomba breakout had rolled over his friendship with Tommy like a road train. All that was left now was road kill, twenty years old and still stinking fit to make him spit.
George flicked his cigarette butt to the ground and toed it out. Sweat pooled under his shoulder holster and the heavy utility belt at his hips. He reflexively caressed the polished weaponry, drawing comfort from the long, thin tube of the HeartStopper, the half-moon curve of the nested guillotine, the black mass of his side-arm.
The sun beat down on him like a solid iron fry-pan, making him squint behind his sunglasses, sweat stinging his eyes. He didn’t need to check his watch to know the time; he could tell by the angle of the shadows that it wasn’t yet noon. Plenty of time. He eyed the hotel that was, like him, a memento living on dust and memories. Time to go to work, he thought, but first, he’d drop into his former office and see if his old mate had left him a postcard.
George leaned against the bar and closed his eyes. The Railway Hotel smelled as he remembered it: stale beer and cigarettes, dirt and antiseptic. He forced his eyes open as the publican plonked a glass of beer beside him, condensation making his mouth water with anticipation. The bubbles rose towards the thin layer of white foam sealing the glass, promising relief as the yeasty aroma wafted free. The publican, crow-footed eyes narrowed to a slit, picked through George’s change, took what he needed and ran it through the register. He hadn’t looked George in the eyes since George had walked in.
George grabbed the cold glass and took a sip. The beer still tasted the same. It always did. He sighed and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand before rolling a smoke. ‘You know Tommy Daniels at all?’ he asked.
The barman glanced at the phone, then dumped an empty in the sink with a harsh bang and rinsed it off. Sweat beaded on the man’s bald spot.
George hid a knowing smile behind the rim of his glass. ‘I thought you might, given this is the only drinking hole in town.’
The barman concentrated on drying the glass. ‘Don’t know no one by that name.’
‘Tommy Daniels. He was a Hunter, once.’ George took another drag on his cigarette. He felt the vaguest movement of the air from the fan bolted to one wall, its muted whirr the only sound.
‘A Hunter, eh?’ The barman looked up, his eyes glancing off the pistol slung under George’s arm. ‘You won’t need the gat. Hasn’t been any renegades out here for years. They’re all locked up in the enclaves, eh.’
‘You would’ve heard of Tommy. Here.’ George took an old snapshot from his pocket and placed it on the bar runner, careful to dodge the wet coaster.
The barman eyed the photograph, two young men in sleeveless shirts and bullet-proof vests carrying rifles, standing in front of a four-wheel-drive. They could’ve been shooters, except for the Commission logos on their vests.
‘That’s an old photo. Before my time, I’d reckon.’
‘He was a bit of a local legend, Tommy. I’m guessing he wouldn’t look much different now.’
‘There was a chap, called himself Dan, looked a bit like that.’ The barman ran a hand over his bald spot. ‘He’s dead, but.’
‘Really?’
‘Passed on a week or so ago. That you, standing next to him?’
George tipped his glass in acknowledgement.
‘You here for the big roundup, back in 72?’
George nodded, remembering the hunt that followed when the Undead had broken en masse out of the Toowoomba camp. The
clever ones had headed to the coast, trying to hide in the population there. But others went west, and why had always been a mystery to George. The zombies he could maybe understand — they could handle the sun — but the vampires: where was the food, the shelter? Hunting them was hardly a challenge. Shouldn’t have been a challenge, he amended.
Memories of the shearing shed surfaced unbidden, the sunlight lancing through the gaps in the timber slab walls, the holes in the iron roof, the smell of wool and grease and sheep shit heavy in the dusty air. He and Tommy, driving stakes into the Undead and dragging them out to the van for transport. And then the screaming, the fire … And seeing her, the Greek, and feeling the earth lurch under his feet.
The barman rested a hand on the tap. ‘Another?’
George looked at his glass, mysteriously emptied between nicotine breaths, and nodded. ‘How did he go?’
‘Found him myself, dead on his kitchen floor. Heart attack, maybe kidneys or liver. I never heard for sure. Didn’t have a cent to his name, the poor bastard. Folks round here chipped in to buy him a headstone at Charleville.’
George looked out the open casement that offered a view of the town. The other pub was a sagging timber structure that looked ripe to collapse, its windows boarded and paint faded to non-existence. The community hall didn’t look any better, and only two rusty bowsers marked the former site of the petrol station cum general store. Whole streets of houses had vanished since his time.
‘Wasn’t a fancy headstone,’ the barman said, putting a dish of peanuts on the bar.
‘They never are,’ George said. No one retired rich from the Commission. No one retired from the Commission, full stop. He skolled his beer and reached for a handful of nuts. ‘So you buried old Tommy, eh?’
‘If that was his name. It was what Dan wanted.’
‘Strange.’
