Coming Home

by Max Bolt

  Coming Home

  By Max Bolt

  Copyright © 2017 Max Bolt

  All rights reserved.

  Smashwords Edition

  E-book formatting by www.gopublished.com

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  Also by Max Bolt

  About Max Bolt

  When we assumed the soldier, we did not lay aside the Citizen.

  —George Washington

  We trained them. We coached them. We turned our young men and women into exactly what we wanted them to be. Then we sent them out to fight.

  But when they came home we did not like what they had become.

  —Anonymous

  Chapter 1

  Restructuring. Cost cutting. Downsizing. Resource optimisation. Strategic realignment.

  Whatever. Just call it what it is – corporate culling.

  The process of company redundancies mirrors nature’s survival of the fittest. The strong kicking out the weak. And the weak walking out the door.

  Sitting opposite his now former boss, Mason Turner, a former Australian soldier, survivor of several tours to Afghanistan, a man who has stared down the worst of the world, wonders how he became one of the weak.

  Mason glances at the letter. They roll them out en masse; same impersonal content, just change the name, date, print, sign.

  Regretfully… inform you… want to thank you…wish you the best… future career… yours sincerely.

  Mason Turner is forty-two years old, and as of now, the former purchasing manager of the Penrith branch of Southern Cross Building Materials. He is tall and strongly built, with dark hair and intense eyes. Those eyes served him well in Afghanistan, sifting through the lies the local women spun to protect their Taliban sympathising husbands and sons. He chased those wily Taliban all around Afghanistan, from Kabul to Kandahar, across the desert plains of Registan, to the booby-trapped mountains of Pamir. And somehow he dodged the bullets and returned home a decorated soldier but as of now, an unemployed social discard. Hey soldier, about your good work in Afghanistan, thanks yeah, really appreciate it.

  “I am sor–”

  Mason cuts his manager off with a stare. Mason is shaking. He has not taken his pills. The pills keep him stable and out of trouble. They keep him, in his doctor’s words, social standard.

  Boss man, a fidgety individual, watches Mason carefully. He has learnt that you can never predict an employee’s response to this conversation. He hopes Mason will go quietly.

  “Are you alright Mason?”

  Mason processes the question.

  Let me see. You just sacked me, removing my only means of supporting my son’s schooling and medical expenses. You just stole the last remaining hold I had on my estranged wife; she hates me but can always use the money. And then there’s the nasty thought that this is the thanks I get for risking my life for you and every other citizen in this country. But hey I’m fine. Never better.

  “Is there anything else?” Mason asks.

  Boss man shakes his head.

  “How long have I got?”

  “You can pack up your desk. Say goodbye.”

  People avert their eyes as Mason returns to his work station. He places his personal belongings in an empty photocopy paper box. A framed photo of his estranged wife and son distracts him for a moment. They are smiling. It is a different time and place. He sees his pills in the top drawer. He knows he should swallow two now and take the rest with him. The internal demons are waking up and sticking him with their pitchforks. But the pills will take him to a desensitised world where everything is so fake he might as well be dreaming. And for what Mason has in mind, he wants to feel everything.

  Mason opens a blank email.

  Choices; life is full of them.

  Does he go quietly or does he deliver the proverbial email hand grenade. Tell the Company what he really thinks.

  Mason instead prints the Sydney CBD address of the Company’s head office.

  Now, back to that email. Mason gets it all down and sets the email to delayed send; the email hand grenade becomes a ticking time bomb, set to detonate in the mailboxes of his former colleagues in ten hours time.

  Mason takes his life in a box and starts the walk of shame out of the place. People look down and pretend to be talking on phones or tapping on keyboards. There are no bad lucks and good lucks and you’ll be rights. Only the receptionist, the face and body (in this instance) of the place, looks up, curling her peroxide blonde hair around her index finger.

  “What you going to do Mason?”

  He shrugs. “Gonna get me job back.”

  “How you gonna do that Mason?”

  “You’ll see.”

  *

  Hot.

  No, it is more than hot. Cooking. Roasting. Hotter than a Parklea Markets Rolex. Hotter than Satan’s sauna.

  And Mason feels it as he drives the streets of Sydney’s outer West. The road and buildings are blurred by a heat haze. It reminds him of the Afghan desert.

  Talk of bushfires is all over the radio. The media commentary is so alarming that you might think that Sydney is surrounded by a ring of flames each with a brain, intent on razing the city to the ground. Mason glances at the smoke in the mountains; the Blue Mountains not so blue. The fires have been raging for days, inspiring the usual comparisons; worst since Ash Wednesday, Canberra and Black Saturday all over again. Only this time the headlines might be true. The already grim conditions are predicted to deteriorate as the wind strengthens. The convection oven turning fan forced. Hundreds of houses lost. People missing. People doing dumb-arsed things trying to protect their homes. People dead. As the fire with a brain flexes its muscles.

  But Mason does not care about the heat and fires. He has a plan. It involves a long drive into the city and an unannounced one-on-one with the CEO of his former company. He intends to share some personal insights about sacrifice and respect and–

  Mason is interrupted as his car coughs and rolls to a stop. He taps the fuel gauge; it still shows half a tank. He turns the engine over. No response. He tries again. Nothing.

  “Bastard.”

  He feels uneasy. He does not like surprises. He thinks about the pills he left at the office. The pills would cure the anxiety. But the pills would also remove his connection with the world, and Mason wants to feel things today. The way he used to before they turned him into a doped-up zombie. And right now, he feels the suffocating heat curling around him.

  He gets out and sets his briefcase down in the middle of the road and rolls up his shirt sleeves. The road is lined with abandoned brick warehouses. Shattered windows and walls splattered with graffiti. Litter tangled in the knee-high weeds. There is a profound silence, just the hiss of the wind in the weeds. The heat radiates off the road and surrounding concrete. An urban Death Valley.

  The scene reminds Mason of a show he once saw called Struggle Street, where the cameras followed a bunch of people living in Mt Druitt, a suburb not too far from where he now stands. The cameras followed the would-be stars of the show going about their lives. The weekly visits to Centrelink, the shops and rehab. The arguments and violence on the street. The blea
k corridors of the public housing estate. It was social porn for the Eastern Suburbs. Where viewers could sit down in front of their infinitely large flat screen TVs and tut-tut and shake their heads and discuss all the ways they could fix things. It was real. Real people, real drugs, real prison, real domestic violence. The reality made it compelling. The reality of the reality made it unnerving. But it was ok, it was all out West.

  Thank god for the West. Because without the West, there would be no East.

  Mason hears the clack clack clack of a train and starts walking toward the sound. He passes an elderly man, all bent over in the heat.

  “That your car?”

  Mason has left the driver’s side door open and the keys in the ignition.

  “You want to lock her up,” the old man says, “bastards will take anything that’s not screwed down.”

  “Getting me job back,” Mason says and keeps walking.

  *

  Emu Plains train station is empty except for a couple of school kids, or non-school kids as they are, shoving each other around.

  “City,” Mason says to the station attendant.

  Mason remembers a time when the bloke selling train tickets didn’t hide in a barred cell.

  “Single or return?”

  “Single,” Mason says, “not coming back.”

  “Track work today,” the man says, “bitch in this heat. I tell you the heat makes people do some bloody stupid things.”

  One of the non-school kids smashes a bottle on the train tracks and the attendant nods, his point proven.

  “Had my way the little shits’d have a pick and a shovel. Have ‘em buildin' the roads if they don’t want to be in school.”

  Mason takes his ticket and sits in the shade. The non-school kids are talking nearby. All–

  Epic this. No shit that. Like this and like that.

  Don’t need no school.

  School is like for pussies.

  Like where we goin' like?

  Like, we should like just like…

  … learn how to speak, Mason thinks.

  There is a billboard advertisement for the Biggest Loser on the opposite wall. And beside it a poster of the rear side of a semi-naked Kardashian. More booty up there than Blackbeard’s treasure chest. The Biggest Loser or the Biggest Loser, Mason muses.

  He gets on the next train and sits downstairs.

  *

  Death. Don’t ask how or why it comes. Just bury your head in the sandpit of the living.

  Police officer Fitch Turner knows a thing or two about death. He has seen it. He has felt it. He has caused it. He often goes to bed thinking about it and wakes up having dreamt about it.

  It is early morning but already it is hot inside. It is the stuffy, humid kind of heat, that settles over everything like a hot damp blanket. Fitch puts on the same blue and black uniform he has worn for the last three decades. He washes his face and stares into the mirror.

  Cue ball bald, more Kojack than Bruce Willis, Fitch’s face carries the lines of his years of service. A line for each domestic dispute, a crack for each iced up junkie, a crevice for each armed robbery, an abyss for the… he stops himself, he does not want to go there. Six foot, with broad shoulders and thick forearms, Fitch is rarely intimidated. If you show fear you’re finished, just stare it down and get on with things.

  Fitch stops by her room on his way out.

  The bedroom is cool and dark. She likes it dark now. Never used to but now she does. He checks the temperature control on the wall; nineteen degrees. She is just a shape, like some tree roots pushing up the bedcovers. She will be like that when he returns. He runs his hand over her shoulder. She is thin and barely there. A ghost of a ghost.

  Death, don’t ask how or why or when it comes, just get on with things.

  Fitch smooths her hair down, kisses her forehead and steps outside, where the heat hits him like a wave. His car radio is alive with talk of the fires in the mountains. Bad fires. The kind of fires that get out of control and take homes and people.

  “Aw bugger,” he says, as he sees the date on the dashboard.

  It is his birthday.

  *

  Craig King looks out his forty-sixth-floor office window in Sydney’s CBD. The sunlight flares off the harbour like a billion diamonds. Boats bob in the breeze. Ferries chug back and forth in the sunshine.

  Craig thinks the scene particularly ugly today.

  A view is a relative thing. It is very much influenced by the mood in which you regard it. Craig watches it from a bleak place.

  CEO of the Australian operations of Southern Cross Building Materials, Craig is king of the Australian castle. The role was always going to be his. His father, the Global CEO and majority owner of the company, had prepped him for the position since birth, and gifted it to him two days after his twenty-seventh birthday. And right now, Craig would like to re-gift it to someone else.

  Most wannabe executives do the hard yards through the ranks, get themselves a dime a dozen MBA, squeeze in the obligatory Harvard or INSEAD business school facetime (more theory than practical relevance but it’s dynamite for your CV) and then hope to get lucky with a senior appointment. But that route is for the plebs, not the son of the CEO of a global corporate empire. And the result has been telling.

  Craig has single handedly run the Australian branch into the ground. The Australian operations are bleeding money. But Craig’s Executive Management team would never dare challenge him, for fear of his father. Craig’s father is god to them. His father could piss all over these people and they would just wash themselves off – why thank you sir, now how else can we help you?

  The truth is Craig never asked for or wanted any of it. Business was foreign and unappealing to him. He lacked his father’s killer Wall Street “Eye of the Tiger” instinct. He didn’t move to the, da – da-da-dunk – da-da-dunk – da-da-daaaaa. Risin’ up back on the… he moved to a more mellow soundtrack. More Calvin Harris and Bruno Mars than Survivor. Good looking, with brown hair and blue eyes, he looks the part, if slightly preppy kitsch, in his Hugo Boss business suit and John Lobb shoes. No tie. Ties went out like last century yeah?

  Craig glances at today’s redundancy report. The latest collateral damage from his own ineptitude. It is the Penrith shared service centre’s turn to feel the heat. The unfortunate employees had been a faceless list of a hundred names until last night, when Craig, sitting alone in front of his office PC, called up every name and face on the Company’s intranet directory. He looked each terminated employee in the eye. If you can order the carnage, he thought, you can at least, kind of, watch it. Craig did not know these people but he saw husbands and wives, young, old, in between. People struggling to pay bills. People caring for family members. People paying school fees. People defaulting on mortgage repayments. People getting kicked out of rental homes.

  People. He saw people. And wondered how he became responsible for the lives of so many.

  Leaning forward and looking out the window Craig can just see the limit of the city’s Western sprawl. The smoke from the bushfires is a black stain on the horizon.

  Tough day for the people out West.

  Tough day for the Penrith call centre.

  Tough day for the people…

  Craig’s father’s words echo in his brain.

  Don’t ever think about the people son. The minute you do you’re finished.

  Chapter 2

  Afghanistan. A roadside IED – Improvised Explosive Device.

  You can’t defeat the invading infidels with numbers and firepower, you improvise. You surprise them. You give them death from nowhere and everywhere. You bury claymore mines in the cracked cliffs. You conceal bombs in the sand by the side of the road. You strap explosives to men herding sheep and street vendors selling chickens. For the martyrs, death is just a destructive instant before the eternal pleasure of virgins in the sky. Then when the infidels get suspicious of the men you send in the women with death strapped beneath their clothi
ng, and then–

  –there is always the children.

  This time death comes from a row of IEDs concealed under a cracked section of road.

  The lead Humvee trips the switch. There is a flash of light and a crack louder than any thunder, and the armoured vehicle launches into the air and lands on its side. The next vehicle in the convoy swerves to miss the carnage and triggers a second explosive hidden in the sand beside the road (as if the perpetrators had anticipated the evasive manoeuvre), and does a monster truck style leap, catching fire and landing in a ditch.

  Mason watches the carnage from the rear of the convoy and remembers how, if not for the mechanical trouble back at base, he’d have been first in the line. But now he is the gunner and when the order comes he starts firing into the hills. It is broad daylight, perfect visibility, the sky a pristine blue. Someone is returning fire. Mason can hear the rounds pinging off his armoured vehicle. Fear and adrenalin overwhelm him. Kill or be killed. And at that moment, in the midst of his first real skirmish, Mason realises how much he does not want to be killed. Not out here. Not shot by an unseen enemy he has no personal gripe with. His rounds decimate the cliffs. His commanding officer is yelling something but Mason’s ears are too full of his own gunfire to understand. He keeps firing, swinging the big black gun back and forth until he has blown the cliffs to bits.

  Then it is quiet. And through the ringing in his ears Mason hears the cries of the dying and injured.

  The number one and two vehicles are on fire and out of the flames emerge people. They stagger about like flaming zombies, wondering where to go, where’s the water, and fall, as soldiers rush forward with fire extinguishers and guns to secure the area.

  Mason watches it all. Wondering where it is that death comes from on such a perfect day. He looks down and sees a line of dents in the protective armour of the Humvee, centimetres from his chest. Does death discriminate? Does death choose? Maybe.

  Then the enemy start shooting again and Mason ducks back inside his armoured cocoon. He’s shaking and crying and pissing himself and picturing long forgotten memories of himself playing as a child with his parents, and wondering what led him to this. As the rounds clatter off the vehicle in a steady clack, clack, clack, clack...