The Tankermen

by Margo Lanagan

  ‘If only we could get them outside,’ Janet said. ‘It’s so uncomfortable in here, and so hot. Not to mention demoralising . . . What do you think, Don? Should we try it?’

  ‘I think they’d probably be a whole lot better, but I don’t like to move them without stretchers.’ Definitely the man’s eyelids moved, and Finn murmured more assurances to him.

  ‘I guess not. I hope Stella’s managing. What if they don’t believe her?’

  ‘They will,’ said Finn firmly. He couldn’t bear to think anything else.

  A distant clanging a few minutes later made them look at each other and silently creep to the cage door.

  ‘It’s from way down the back,’ whispered Janet. ‘Can you see anything?’

  ‘Yes, but—I don’t know. It’s so far away. It’s them, all right. More of those guys in the suits. What they’re doing, though . . . Hang on, it looks like they’re taking one of the cages apart . . . They’re putting the bars in a pile—that’s what all the racket is.’

  ‘God, I never thought I’d be praying the ambulance wouldn’t come,’ said Janet. ‘Not just yet, anyway.’

  ‘I know, ‘cause it looks like they’re coming up here.’ Finn scooped the weapons up off the walkway and hid them under the skirt of one of the women they had rescued. He fetched the gun Stella had used and thrust it into Janet’s hands, and they both stood just inside the cage door, motionless.

  There were four tankermen, each carrying a number of cage bars. They trooped by without a glance, then busied themselves setting up a framework next to the first cage.

  Janet signalled to Finn and pointed at the walkway. It was moving, extremely slowly. No, he realised, they were moving, cage, floor and all, being shunted back down the corridor to make room for a new cage. The floor must be a gigantic conveyor belt. He felt, as he watched from underneath his half-closed eyelids, all his suppressed rage and fear strengthening inside him until he could only just prevent himself shaking with it. These strangers must be either monstrously cruel or terrifyingly ignorant. He preferred the latter possibility—they must not know what they were doing, tearing these people out of their families, out of normality, milking the life out of them. And what appalled him just as much was his own helplessness, because it seemed to him that there was no way he could ever let them know. The only language he shared with them was that of violence; he couldn’t think of any other way of stopping them than killing them. He could see no way to interact peacefully with them, no sign language, no common ground. They seemed to be an unmistakably hostile presence.

  Janet was signalling again. He tore his gaze from the tankermen and saw her pointing to her gun and twitching her head towards the workers. Clearly she was thinking along the same lines as he was: let’s get rid of them now while we’ve got the chance.

  But he shook his head and mouthed no. His own feeling simmered down under the force of cold practicalities. The air was so thick already, he was afraid releasing the tankermen’s fluid would suffocate them all. Not to mention the stuff seeping across the floor—they’d have to move the sick people on to the walkway out of its path, where they’d be hopelessly exposed if another working party happened along. Besides, he didn’t want to sit down here with four more tankermen’s corpses—knowing about the two upstairs was bad enough.

  A burst of speech from one of the tankermen, and the job was completed. They tromped back down the walkway, and Janet and Finn relaxed a little, as they waited for silence again.

  ‘What’s the matter: haven’t they noticed the two dead ones upstairs?’ said Janet. She picked up a water-bottle and sipped from it.

  ‘They can’t have. Or they just don’t care, maybe. Maybe they don’t see us as a threat once we’re inside here—I don’t know. They seem pretty slack about security. Wherever they come from, they mustn’t have any predators on them—they don’t seem to know what to do with us, besides catching us and melting us down.’

  Janet looked across at him. ‘Where do you think they came from?’

  Finn knelt beside one of his charges, a woman in a tattered business suit, wasted to almost nothing inside it. ‘I don’t know.’ He sighed and shook his head.

  ‘I’d like to think, in a way, that they came from another world, another planet or whatever. The idea of things like that evolving here, or being created by—lord, who knows what sort of people? It’s hard to take in. It’s much easier to say that they’re aliens, that they just don’t belong in this system we’ve got here.’

  ‘I guess so,’ said Finn. He sighed. ‘I guess that would make it less awful that we’ve killed some of them—it’s like we were getting rid of a virus or something, killing in self-defence. That’s always used as an excuse, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Janet doubtfully. ‘You know, once upon a time I really didn’t think I had it in me to want to kill anything much bigger than a mosquito. When I had Alex, I thought, “Well, yes, I could kill anybody who threatened this baby in any way”—I knew I could do it, then. And when I see this outfit—’ She glanced up at the things dripping and dangling from the cage and went on, her voice losing its evenness. ‘I just feel that anyone who could conceive of such a thing—let alone build it and make it function—ought to be eliminated, wiped out. That’s my gut reaction; that’s what my instincts tell me. It’s not just my child, or Richard, or you any more. It’s fighting against a whole way of thinking about people, or perhaps not thinking—just using us, the way loggers use trees, or we use battery hens or cattle. It’s an abomination!’ She finished in a whisper and Finn saw her lean close to his father’s face, biting her lip to hold back tears. He looked away—he had to avoid feeling anything if he was going to last much longer down here.

  Then Janet lifted her head, listening, and Finn heard it too—footsteps, human footsteps, running overhead.

  ‘Don! Janet! Are you okay down there?’ Stella’s voice at the grating was urgent, frightened.

  Finn ran to the ladder and released the door. ‘We’re fine.’ If it was possible to feel good in that place, he felt it seeing his mother’s face and three men in uniforms peering over her shoulder, squinting in the unexpected light and trying to rub the pain from their jaws.

  ‘Thank Christ! The tail-light’s been blown off the tanker, and with these corpses up here I thought there’d been a real battle.’ She was scrambling down, giving Finn a quick hug, ushering the men in, all at the same time.

  ‘Jed’s on his way to hospital,’ she told him, and that was the last he heard from her until the whole operation was over. Ambulance officers and police were all over the place in a uniformed, dark-blue swarm. Finn stayed below until all the living people had been put on stretchers and taken out by the trapdoor, until Jed’s bike had been heaved out of the hole, until all the animals that wore collars or tags or seemed to have a chance of surviving had been removed, but he left the police to their own devices when they began the grisly business of detaching the dead.

  Upstairs, police stood about in groups, a squad of them around the bank-vault door. A couple looked Finn up and down as he emerged from the trapdoor, and he realised for the first time how filthy he was, his once-white T-shirt now grey, smeared with brown, and sodden with perspiration. He was still holding one of the tankermen’s guns—he must look like a real desperado.

  He was unable to raise a smile at the thought. How long had he been inside this throbbing white space? It felt like years, as Jed had said. Perhaps you didn’t have to actually touch the cages; perhaps just being inside the wall aged you. He felt as if he’d just lost a twelve-round boxing match—every part of him was bruised and beaten.

  The open rectangle beyond the tanker was alive with red and blue flashing lights, and there was a line of police guarding the entrance. Finn stepped out between them, and one started and looked at him.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Finn.

  ‘People keep doing this, popping out of the wall. Frightens the life out of me every time,’ said the policewoman.


  Finn stood there a moment, silently grateful to be free of pain. His mother was sitting on the kerb wrapped in a blanket, drinking hot tea. ‘Over here, sonny,’ said the ambulance officer tending her. ‘You’ve had a few bad frights tonight. Come and have a cuppa.’

  ‘Did Janet go with Dad?’ Finn asked his mum, wrapping a scratchy grey blanket from the ambulance around him.

  ‘Yes. About five minutes ago. They rushed him off pretty quickly. They didn’t leave me time to come and get you, but they seemed to think he’d be okay. He had a better chance than some of the others, they said.’ She was staring straight ahead, clutching her tea with both hands as if she were trying to thaw them out.

  Finn sat down close to her. ‘Well, I’m glad you didn’t go, too.’

  ‘They wouldn’t’ve let me, anyway. We have to be questioned, you and I. We have to give statements. All that palaver.’ She seemed to be trying to maintain that machinelike frame of mind that had kept her from cracking up inside the wall.

  Finn accepted a plastic cup of black tea. It was hot and very sweet, and immediately it banished the gnawing tiredness in his bones. He looked at his mum, and at last she looked back at him, her stubble hair sparkling red and blue in the lights. Pockets of dark skin hung below her eyes.

  ‘But what are they going to do about the tankermen?’ He spoke through clenched teeth to keep them from chattering. Outside the wall it was possible to think straight, to really register what had been happening, with hallucinatory clarity.

  ‘I heard someone say something about explosives.’

  ‘What, blow them up?’

  ‘To open the door. There are two doors, they tell me, with a little room in between, full of suits and weapons. The first door wasn’t locked, but apparently they’ve had their best “locksmith”—i.e. safe-cracker—in to have a look at the second door, and he’s never seen anything like it.’

  ‘Surprise, surprise,’ Finn said in a choked voice, then added in a whisper, ‘What do they expect from aliens—a Lockwood with the key still stuck in it?’ He and his mother had an attack of slightly insane giggles.

  ‘So anyway,’ his mum said when she had partly recovered, ‘they’re going to blow it open—the inner door, that is.’

  The laughter died in them as more loaded stretchers were brought out from the rock, their burdens covered entirely with plastic sheeting. Full plastic garbage bags, too, were carried out and placed in a police wagon. Finn guessed the police must be getting to the end of the line of cages.

  Then a stumpy man in a grey boiler suit was being escorted in through the crowd. He blinked up at the tanker ladder.

  ‘What, hang onto that and walk into the rock?’ he said, on the verge of bursting out laughing. He carried a large, slick-looking tool box, with DO NOT TOUCH stencilled across both sides in livid red. ‘You must think I’m—’ He stopped speaking as the sergeant in charge stepped out smoothly from the stone. ‘What is it—a hologram or something?’ He disappeared into the wall, the sergeant following.

  ‘That’s the man from Explosives,’ said Stella. Police began filing out of the wall. Then a new species of police appeared, in helmets, boots and blue-black coveralls, toting rifles and machine-guns. They arrived in a tight squad, and Finn had the impression they had all come off the same production line, so uniform were their tall figures, their clean-cut square jaws and their aloof eyes. They had obviously been well briefed—they took the hologram-wall in their stride, showing no surprise. One of them hoisted himself on to the tanker’s ladder and disappeared over the top of the tank.

  ‘Who are these guys—the Army?’ said Stella.

  ‘They must be police sharpshooters or something,’ said Finn.

  ‘Great—more corpses,’ she said sourly, ‘more Rambo carry-on. Where are the scientists? That’s what I’d like to know. Where are the interpreters? Where are the people who can tell us what these creatures are up to?’

  ‘Good questions, Mum.’

  Stella stood up and handed her blanket back to the ambulance officer. ‘Thank you for the tea,’ she said. ‘Come on, Don, let’s have a look inside. Here, I’ll give you a leg-up to the ladder.’

  The nasty tingling invaded Finn’s body again as he climbed to the top of the tanker. His mum scrambled up behind him and they pushed their faces through the stone.

  The Explosives man had disappeared into the cavity beyond the outer door, and the sharpshooters had deployed themselves in a neat semicircle around the door, weapons at the ready. One guarded the open trapdoor and another covered the Explosives man’s retreat.

  ‘They look like something out of Star Wars,’ muttered Stella in Finn’s ear. ‘Almost as creepy as those insect blokes.’

  The Explosives man came out not long afterwards. ‘Three minutes,’ he said to the sergeant, who immediately snapped, ‘Everyone out.’ The sharpshooters re-formed and came out in a block. ‘You too,’ said the sergeant, motioning to Finn and his mum.

  They all waited on the street while the time ticked over. The Explosives man counted down on his watch, until there was a slight shudder under their feet. ‘Thar she blows,’ he said and the sergeant, a megaphone in his hand, slid through the rock-face again behind one of the sharpshooters.

  Finn climbed halfway up the ladder behind another, and craned around the tank. The second door had been blown right through the first, and a black tide was swishing out over it: a tide full of lumps that struggled. It jetted out in all directions like seawater bursting through a porthole. Finn saw the Explosives man and the sergeant baulk and step quickly back out on to the street. ‘You reckon that’ll follow us?’ he heard the man say, and the sergeant barked, ‘Back off, everyone! Evacuate the area!’

  ‘It’s okay!’ Finn cried out. ‘It’s stopping at the entrance.’ The semi-liquid mass splashed against the opening in the whiteness as if against a glass wall, curling back on itself. Finn had to keep his mouth and nostrils outside, the stench was so overpowering, and the man above him was cursing and crawling back along the tanker. It was the poisonous gas he had breathed in the laneway, but with a difference: it had matured, it was fully alive. Dark, ant-like creatures of all sizes fought to stay submerged in it, and the liquid streamed and stirred and swam within itself more busily than was warranted by its tidal sweep.

  As the sharpshooter leapt from the top of the tanker, Finn felt someone climbing up behind him, and his mother leaned in beside him, then drew back choking. She held her nose and her breath and peered through again.

  The liquid was maybe a metre deep now, and slowing. ‘What can you see?’ called the sergeant.

  ‘Insect soup,’ said Stella. ‘There are these big insect things, all shiny and hairy, and they make a noise, like wheezing—’

  Finn held his breath and poked his head further in. He heard it, a sucking whistle, like the noise you get sucking water from a facewasher, only continuous . . . and coming from all sides, emitted by each insect that surfaced and echoing around the chamber.

  The creatures were clearly in distress, as the tankerman up at the Cross had been when the fluid ran from its suit, leaving it exposed. The smaller creatures swarmed, and the larger ones thrashed and fought and wheezed in the blackness. Purple-black themselves, they consisted of three sections: round head, bead-like thorax, and heavy, wedge-shaped abdomen. Their limbs were sticks, like an insect’s, but softer, and they each had only four, pincer clawed. Their faces were all the same, oval fencers’ masks covered with black spikes, among which dark bubbles multiplied in a desperate froth.

  ‘Well,’ said Finn, ‘they’re definitely not people.’ His brain could barely take in what he saw, the three-dimensionality of it, the fact that it was not on a cinema screen.

  ‘And they’re definitely unhappy,’ said his mother on the last of a breath, then pulled her head back for more air.

  Finn felt the charge in the tanker and in the air around weaken, felt the dreadful jumping of his cells gradually slow.

  ‘That gunge
is draining away,’ said Stella. ‘It must be going down into the cellar.’

  The insects were being left high and dry, the liquid swirling more slowly as it sank between their layered bodies. The wheezing sounds rose separately to a certain pitch and faded out, and the creatures staggered like half-drowned flies, heaving their bodies up and then keeling over pathetically.

  ‘What’s happening over by the door?’

  Finn looked up from the grisly scene on the floor in time to see the doorway disappear behind a layer of brown-yellow, traced with wavy patterns. ‘Sandstone,’ he said. ‘It must be the rock, closing back up.’

  Silently the rock progressed towards them, layer by thin layer. The insects stilled as it approached, until they were all locked into a sticky mass. The rock lipped over the end of the tanker, and came gradually along it, encasing it.

  ‘I think we’d better move,’ said Stella.

  ‘I think you’re right,’ said Finn, scrambling down the ladder after her.

  ‘The rock’s closing up,’ Stella called out to the sergeant.

  ‘Terrific,’ he said bitterly. ‘That’ll look good in the report: “And then the rock-face went back to normal, and everyone lived happily ever after.”’

  ‘It sounds good to me,’ said Finn’s mum under her breath. She and Finn stood together, their shoulders touching, and a few seconds later they saw the sandstone face slip down to cover the tanker’s ladder. Finn reached out to touch the wall, and it met his hand, gritty and impenetrable.

  ‘Damn and blast,’ said the sergeant, slapping the wall with the palm of his meaty hand.

  ‘Never mind, sarge, we got photos, didn’t we?’ said a younger officer behind him.

  ‘Yeah, we got photos, and four of these blokes’ corpses, and suits and weapons. Better than nothing, I guess.’ He sighed gustily and turned to Finn and Stella. ‘You two’d better come down to the station, then, and we’ll get your version of things down on paper. Reckon you could cope with that?’