He was already walking away. He walked backwards a few steps. ‘You can get a train straight from Newtown station!’
‘But what if Razz catches me?’
She only just heard his answer over the traffic noise. ‘Get off the street! Catch the train!’ Then he rounded the corner into Erskineville Road and was gone.
Macka sat on one of the new Tangara trains, eating salty chips from a cardboard bucket. She could have thumped Vinnie when he’d walked away like that, but now her anger had died down and been replaced by that strange, exposed feeling she got whenever she ventured outside her usual territory.
She sighed and sucked the salt off her fingers. Too much had happened today. What she really wanted to do was go home, make herself a humungous salad sandwich, shower, and flake out for the rest of the afternoon. She wanted all rat-kangaroos and beautiful hollow-eyed girls to be dream creatures, keeping to their own, other worlds.
Why me? Macka dolefully crumpled up the empty chip-bucket and passed it from hand to hand, crushing it tighter and tighter. What was this game about, foisting wild animals onto unsuspecting suburban girls? Why single us out?
The more she thought about it, the more peculiar it seemed. They can’t have wanted to make money with that thing, she thought, if it was true that only girls could play it. Hardly any girls actually played the games in VideoZone, although plenty hung out there just to be with the guys.
She remembered running her fingers over the controls, hunting for the coin slot and not finding it, and shook her head in bewilderment. A game that gave you something for nothing. Something you didn’t necessarily want, mind you, but something. She lifted Vinnie’s bag onto her lap and held firmly to one strap. It didn’t make sense. Not commercial sense, anyway.
A few people got out at the next stop, and Macka had more privacy in which to unzip the bag a little way and have a look inside. The rat-kangaroo was lying in the bottom of it, glowing, her four babies attached to her belly like fat pink grapes. She looked up mildly at Macka, and made no move.
Macka reached in and stroked her flank with the back of one finger, needing that pleasant tingle of contact. The rat-kangaroo turned her head and sniffed at the hand, then rested her chin on her chest and appeared to resume a snooze that Macka had interrupted. She had beautiful long eyelashes, Macka noticed, a dark fringe of fine curved hairs that made her eyes seem almost human.
She zipped the bag closed again and sat with her face to the window, not seeing the suburbs that rocked by. She felt very alone as the other passengers arrived, seated themselves and departed again at their destinations.
When she got out onto the platform at Seven Hills, the sky seemed to open up wide, and for a disorienting moment she was afraid she might float off into it. She gripped the bag handles tightly, as if the rat-kangaroo’s weight would anchor her to the ground.
Powers Road was a long street winding its way through a flat light-industrial zone. It was empty as a ghost town on a Saturday afternoon. Number 1168 was a long walk away; there were no proper footpaths and no shady trees. Macka walked up the middle of the road, the spring sun on her shoulders. She felt as if she ought to hurry, but fear of what she might find when she got there kept her steps slow and measured.
The Fun Company had no sign up to mark it, but Macka knew it was the place as soon as she saw it. It was a large box of a building squatting on a bare patch of earth, and it was entirely black. At first Macka couldn’t tell where the doors and windows might be, but as she came closer she could see a rectangular pattern of fine lines on the smooth black surface.
She approached two tall rectangles she took to be doors, uncertainly putting out a hand. There was a clunk and a crackle. A synthetic female voice said, ‘The Fun Company is closed. Please call again on Monday.’
Macka drew back, then began a slow circuit of the building, occasionally reaching out to touch it, but there were no further messages. A roadway ran from the street all around the building, widening at what looked like the entrance to a loading bay, which was closed off by great slab doors, coated in an inscrutable black gloss. Macka felt along the seams of the doors as high up as she could reach, hoping to release a catch like the one on the pod door. But nothing happened. Eventually she sat down on a patch of blasted white grass and rested her head on her arms. ‘Is this a waste of time,’ she asked Vinnie’s schoolbag wearily, ‘or is this a waste of time?’
The silence and the sunlight pressed in on her. Her eyes throbbed from the glare, her ears felt as if they were stuffed with cottonwool. Down the road, odd lumps of red and yellow machinery loomed purposelessly beyond a scraggly barbed-wire fence.
A steady, low, grinding noise, unmistakably a truck’s engine, grew out of the ringing distance. Macka stood up and edged close to the corner of the building, pressing her back against it as she watched.
The black semi-trailer slowed as it came into sight, changing down through gear after gear with great grunts and hisses. As it turned into the driveway it let loose an almost solid blare of noise from its horn.
Macka heard a thud and a hiss behind her. The slab doors had opened a chink and were sliding upward. She wanted to run inside, but the semi was just about to grind into sight, and she was afraid the driver would spot her. She ducked around the corner and waited until she thought the cab was likely to be inside.
When she looked round again, the back end of the semi was just disappearing. Already the doors were coming down. They dropped much faster than they’d risen; Macka had to fling herself down between the truck’s rear wheels and draw up her legs quick smart. She lay there clutching her banged knees and elbows and soundlessly swearing, as the truck’s engine was silenced.
She could hear the cab doors slamming. Men’s voices, distorted by echoing space, called out companionably and began to recede. They sounded tired, final; Macka guessed their day’s work was over.
She checked the rat-kangaroo. Her dash for cover hadn’t woken it. ‘Get your strength together,’ she whispered. ‘You’re going to need every bit of it.’
She began to wriggle forward under the truck. Its smells of oil, dust and hot rubber were reassuring in this place where she’d expected everything to be spooky and other-worldly. On either side she caught glimpses of huge expanses of grey concrete, and the wheels of numerous other large vehicles. ‘Oh no,’ she muttered, noticing a long line of identical black vans parked along a dock.
There seemed to be no one around. She took a chance and came out from under the semi, brushing the loose dust off her now filthy sloppy joe. She snuck along the line of vans, looking for something to distinguish them one from another.
‘Crikey, what a place.’ It was enormous, and filled with a muted grey light. The front wall was like a doll’s house—five rows of tiny offices walled with glass overlooked the loading docks. As Macka watched, the office lights were switched off, three or four at a time, until only one remained lit, at docks level. She heard the murmur of voices, male and female, floating from its doorway, a little burst of laughter, a serious voice dominating.
She reached the end of the line. A ladder led up out of the loading bay to a concrete platform at chin-level. Lined up on the platform were pods, dozens of them, exactly aligned in rows, their pointed ends raised towards the offices. They looked like the perfect place to hide, with their secretive curves, their enigmatic sheen. Macka couldn’t resist; she climbed the ladder and crept in among them.
There was just enough space for her to crawl between the pods. She worked her way over towards the lighted office and lay down in the shadows, watching.
It was clearly an after-work gathering. Four or five black-overalled men and the crimson-haired woman were standing around in the yellow light, and Macka caught the glint of a beer-can in the woman’s hand. She was laughing, relaxed—not creepy at all.
Macka was about to break clear of the pods and get close enough to hear what they were saying, when the party abruptly broke up. Two men and the woman came out and
crossed to one of the black vans. With great care, they took out the pod on its pallet, then unbolted and removed the heavy framework of its cage.
Two more men approached, carrying a large folded blanket of some soft brassy-coloured metal. All five people were needed to spread it over the pod. The woman unwound a power cord from one corner and plugged it into the office wall.
The machine groaned and was silent. The woman sprinted back to it. ‘Let me see,’ she said, and two men heaved up the blanket so that she could open the door and climb into the pod. Macka could see the yellow-ochre light of the screen reflected on her face, and hear the plasticky clicks as she pressed the buttons.
‘It’s no good,’ the woman said in disgusted tones after a while. ‘We’ve lost something.’
‘That’s why the gate wouldn’t open in the shop,’ said one man. ‘It wasn’t gate malfunction at all.’
‘Nothing so simple.’ The woman climbed out, shut the door and swore softly. ‘Though this was the gate-catch that blew in Perth, remember? So I just thought … oh, what an idiot I am.’
Everyone stood very still and watched her. ‘What can we do, then?’ someone asked cautiously.
She bit her lower lip and shook her head. ‘The record shows that a Caloprymnus coronatus was released at four-fifteen yesterday afternoon, carrying four young. They don’t last much longer than twenty-four hours outside, even left in the chamber.’
Quietly Macka slipped her hand inside the schoolbag and rested it on the curve of the rat-kangaroo’s spine. Its pulse was steady in her palm, its fur transmitting the usual flush of energy up her arm.
‘It’s deleted, then?’ The man’s question sounded heavy on the echoing air of the warehouse. Another man cast him a sharp look. ‘Sorry. Obvious question. I always find it hard to take in, that’s all.’
The woman shook her head again. ‘That’s okay,’ she said, looking rather lost.
Macka dithered. Should she rush out with the rat-kangaroo and let them see that it wasn’t deleted? They’d know what to do, how to get it back safely, wouldn’t they? But instead she lay there, her fingers stroking it, her brain whirring as the team in black covered the pod again, unplugged the blanket, said their goodbyes and left the warehouse through the end office.
The last light was switched off, and Macka heard a door slide closed with a mechanised wheeze, then a deep silence. Her heart gave a thump and a little flutter.
‘Okay,’ she said, ‘now it’s just you, me and the chamber, my furry friend.’ She scrambled out of her hiding-place and ran across to the pod.
8 THE POD
Macka took hold of one edge of the blanket and pulled. Nothing happened except a terrible wrenching of her elbows.
‘What is this stuff?’ It was smooth to the touch and about a centimetre thick, with a burnished sheen. It draped itself cloth-like over the pod, and Macka could lift no more than a corner of it a time.
‘Well, I’m sorry, but that’s not good enough,’ she panted after a few tries. ‘I’ve got to get in. I might not have a whole lot of time.’
As if answering her complaint, the forklift caught her eye. It was facing the right way; all she had to do was move it forward a bit and work out how to make it lift.
It turned out to be surprisingly easy. She didn’t need a key to switch it on, and after a bit of tentative pedal-pressing she worked out how to stop and start the thing. Extremely slowly she rolled it forward so that the fork slid under the edge of the cloth. She braked, and eased up one of the levers beside the steering wheel, as she’d seen the woman do outside VideoZone. The metal cloth fell into neat folds on the forklift’s rising arms, heavy and smooth as caramel, and the pod rocked slightly underneath it. Macka switched off the forklift and crept underneath. She put her hand to the catch of the pod door; it clicked, and the door swung open.
She picked up the bag and climbed in. The screen was a dead blank. She took the rat-kangaroo from the bag and put it in her lap, where it lay coiled up asleep, the babies round pink spots among the fur.
‘I’m a bit worried about you lot,’ she said. ‘You’d better wake up before you go back into this game.’
The pod shuddered, and kept shuddering, as if shaken by a mild earth tremor. There was a sound like a recorded voice massively slowed down; a word or two issued in a deep moan. Macka clutched the animal, her eyes wide and flickering everywhere.
Finally the shaking stopped, and there was a loud click. The screen woke, dull yellow.
‘Thank you,’ said Macka acidly. ‘Okay, do I put this animal on the screen now, or what?’ She thought back over what she could remember of the Koori girl’s directions. The big black button on the right, the one with no sign. And you’ve got to hold your mind right, and that’s hard. She wondered what she should hold her mind on—how dark it was in here? how nervous she was? how she wished she could be riding the train home with Vinnie’s empty schoolbag on the seat beside her?
‘Well, I have to at least try, like Vinnie says.’
She placed the sleeping rat-kangaroo on the screen, giving it a tentative shake to see whether it would wake up. It lay still, its red fur pulsing light against the yellow background.
Macka pressed the button on the right and held her breath. Nothing. A few seconds passed, and then the rat-kangaroo fell through the screen and landed with a thud on sandy ground. Macka felt the blow to the back of her neck, and as she shook her head to clear it sensed a vast space around her, felt a light breeze, heard a bird’s cry far overhead.
A vacant blue began to bleed across the screen. She felt her animal-self stirring awake; the fur along its back rose warningly. Macka tried to focus and look around. She could feel how the animal’s head fell about on its neck. Was it broken, from the fall?
In the course of one barely-controlled pan her eyes picked up the dark T-shape of a bird of prey far overhead. ‘Get moving, you,’ she muttered to the rat-kangaroo, pushing the run button. The picture swam, then realised itself into the familiar red sand and grey-green spinifex humps. She must be upright. She pushed the button again, and began making slow, drunken progress across the sand.
Each hop felt as if it would have to be the last, it took so much energy from what she realised was a seriously depleted body. The screen image kept breaking up and coming back together all distorted; it was hard to see more than the vaguest outline of things.
And all the while she was aware of that bird, whose presence made her movements all the more clumsy, she was sure. Its gaze swept around her like a searchlight; it was only a matter of time before it spotted her.
Home wasn’t far away, she knew. ‘Come on,’ she cried impatiently, pummelling the button, and the rat-kangaroo bounced and lolled a few steps. The screen flickered and darkened for a moment, and Macka felt animal breath tearing into and out of animal lungs, somewhere around her throat.
Then she came to, all cold attention. Her spine stiffened as the bird’s gaze hit it and stuck. She raised her head and saw the shadow descending, faster than she’d thought any creature could move. It was a black shape at first, then it was all scaly claws. At the point where it was about to smack into her, the whistling as it dropped and the wind of its approach cut out. Macka sat sweating in the pod, in the silent warehouse, her hand hovering over the controls, the bird’s hollow black eye open like a vacuum on the screen.
The signs above the ‘fight’ and ‘flee’ buttons glowed gently up at her. ‘Fight a monster like that? I’d be slashed to pieces!’ she said. ‘And as for running …! This is hopeless. I haven’t got a chance!’ She sat hunched over the screen for a little while, eyeing the frozen bird worriedly.
‘Well, I can’t just give in.’ She sat up straighter and pressed both buttons at once.
All the visual clues whirled, useless; she closed her eyes and felt herself roll against a clump of spinifex. Braced against the spikes, she flung out her hindlimbs and met the bird’s chest with a blow. It squarked, and she saw it tumble off to one side to recover it
self.
‘It’s broken me,’ Macka gasped, her legs numbed from the strike, but almost before sensation began returning to them she was off, new energy flowing with her terror. Again she closed her eyes and trusted to instinct, bounding through the tussocks towards a place she knew. As she leapt, she felt a tiny patch of coldness on her belly, a slight difference in the way she automatically balanced herself.
‘Uh-oh,’ said Macka, releasing the run button. ‘I think you’ve lost one of your babies, Mum.’
She turned, and saw the bird toss itself into the air and flutter low, its cold eye on the ground. She saw it drop again and its head darted forward, then back, the way a chook’s does when it picks up a seed and throws it down its throat. Macka fled, her human stomach turning, her animal mind intent only on finding shelter.
In a window of clarity hemmed in on all sides by darkness, she saw up ahead a worn patch of hard red earth that led to her scrape under a ratty grey bush. ‘Nearly home,’ she thought, and allowed herself the luxury of slowing down for the last few hops.
Whanng! The world turned brilliant lemon yellow, spun, disappeared for a moment, and then came back spinning red, sky-blue and spinifex-green. The rat-kangaroo lay stunned and needle-stuck on the path. The yellow claw of a front-end loader had come down square across the mouth of the scrape.
‘Oh, what?’ Macka watched horrified as the thing sank into the earth. Its engine panted, its joints rattled and clanked; the rat-kangaroo could feel its lumbering, the horrific vibration of it. It sank up to its neck, and in a series of awkward motions lifted the scrape and the bush out of the ground and carried them off, leaving a deep gouge into which red sand trickled.
The ‘flee’ button’s bleeping woke Macka from a disbelieving daze. She fell on it with a suppleness of wrist gained from months of Laser Warrior games, propelling herself blindly through the grasses. ‘Don’t fall off,’ she prayed to the three remaining babies. She surged onward, trying to skirt the front-end loader, trying to find the limits of the vibration rippling out from it.
WildGame Page 8
