by JT Clay
Pious Kate beamed at Rabbit, then gave Q an antifreeze smile.
“Just the three of us,” said Q. “Oh goody.”
*
“Fresh air. Good company. What could be better?” said Rabbit. He used the pause in conversation to take in a lungful and recharge himself after Pious Kate’s latest story about Pious Kate, starring Pious Kate and featuring, in support, Pious Kate and Pious Kate.
Q walked a few paces behind the pair. She was focusing all her chi on the back of Pious Kate’s head but it refused to fall off. She had underestimated her rival. The woman was chi-proof, no doubt too used to people shooting angry thoughts at her to react.
“And it was only mens rea, but the judge admitted that the expert evidence showed a link between corn-fed cattle and the Western lifestyle diseases of—”
“Kate, that is such a good story, I think you should save it for the campfire tonight,” Rabbit said. He dropped back to walk beside Q. “You’ve been quiet. Tell us about yourself?”
“Yes, do,” gushed Pious Kate. “What is it you do when you’re not reading about how to kill things or molding young minds into corporate drones?”
“Oh,” said Q. “I dunno.” Two vegan animal rights lawyers. What a perfect couple they made.
As if overhearing her thoughts, Pious Kate looped her arm through Rabbit’s and flashed a smile. “You could tell us about your love life,” Pious Kate said. “I gather you live with an older man?”
Q was as dumbfounded as if a blue belt had landed a Flying Monkey on her during training. “What?”
“Yeah,” said Rabbit. “Who was that guy who dropped you off yesterday?”
Q laughed. “That wasn’t a man! That’s my father.” She paused and thought about this. “I guess technically he’s a man, cos otherwise he’d be a transsexual, or I’d be some kind of lab freak, which would be cool, I read a web comic about that…” She trailed off and pinched her leg through the canvas of her pocket.
“You still live with your dad?” said Pious Kate. “How cute.”
“Actually, he lives with me,” Q said. “He moved in after I finished uni. He got lonely on his own after my mother died.”
Boom! Headshot.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Rabbit said. “I haven’t lost a parent yet.”
He looked so sad, Q wanted to make him feel better. “It’s all right,” she said. “I’ve got another one, and it happened ages ago, and we weren’t that close. I would’ve been much more upset if it was the kelpie.”
“Oh.”
Q pinched her leg again. Pious Kate smirked and tugged on Rabbit’s arm. “We should stop here,” she said as they arrived in a dappled clearing. “It’s a lovely spot. You keep going, Q, you look like you could do with the exercise.”
“Well, I think I will,” Q said.
“Well I think you should,” Pious Kate said. She sat down on a log and patted the bark beside her. “Come on, Rabbit.”
“I’ll keep going for a bit,” Rabbit said.
Pious Kate turned the color of outraged beetroot. Q and Rabbit left her.
*
“What are you making?” Q asked.
“It’s an altar to the spirit of the river,” Rabbit said. They had reached the stream and were dangling their feet into the snow-melt water. Q was throwing in sticks. Rabbit was piling up a cairn of smooth stones.
“Really?” she said, embarrassed on his behalf.
“I’m messing with you. It’s a pile of rocks. But it’s funny that people stack rocks when confronted by natural beauty. It might be a ritualistic act that honors nature, buried deep within the collective subconscious.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We vegans frighten you, don’t we?”
“No! Not at all!” said Q. “Okay, yeah, but you and Angela are cool.”
“Thanks. That’s the least awkward thing you’ve said all morning.”
“Thanks.”
Rabbit sniffed. “What’s that smell?”
“It’s my new fragrant spray,” Q said, glad she had made the effort this morning. “It’s called Ocean Flowers.”
“Like algae?”
“Oh,” said Q. “I guess.”
“Cool. I like algae.”
They dangled and they sat. Q, not used to being in the wilderness without a map icon to click on, tried to orient herself. They were a long way west of Sydney, high up in mountain country. The air was cool and rich and full of earthy scent. The ground poured into gullies and choked on shrubs. There were no power lines, no roads, no straight lines from anything man made. They were in someone else’s land.
The quiet of the morning was interrupted by Q’s regular slap! whack! at mosquitoes and ants. After a while, Rabbit intercepted her hand.
Her face burned and her belly flipped. He was holding her hand!
“They’re part of the bush,” he said. He let go of her hand and turned back to the stream. “Let them be.”
Q sighed. It was nothing after all. “Things are biting me,” she said. “Anything less than extreme self-defense would be weird.”
Rabbit grinned and steered away an inch ant with a stick. “She’s all right,” he said. “You have to be— ow!” He sucked his finger and breathed through his nose. Q giggled.
A movement on the bank downstream caught Q’s eye. She couldn’t make sense of the image at first. Something large and brown lurked in the trees, hunched over the edge of the water. Was it drinking?
No. Not drinking. Another color poured from the creature into the stream. Red. The brown shape was the heart of an expanding pool of red.
Q tapped Rabbit on the shoulder, put a finger to her lips and pointed at the shape. He didn’t see it at first.
“What’s there?” he said. Q waited for the image to make sense, then decided she preferred the abstract version.
“It’s creepy old caretaker guy,” she said. “He’s washing something in the river. Something bloody.”
The man stood up and disappeared into the bush. Q waited until he had gone, then walked downstream to the spot where he had been. There were footprints and blood on the river stones, but the creek itself had washed clean. She didn’t like that man. He reminded her of Chapter Seventeen, The Survivor Type and how to avoid being eaten by one. She returned to Rabbit and scribbled in her little black book.
“Are you writing about our walk in your diary?” Rabbit asked.
“No— yes— sort of.” She put the notebook away.
“What do you write about? Your fears and doubts?” Rabbit asked.
“Sometimes. Like, have you ever noticed that the things that scare us the most aren’t just monsters, but monsters that can turn us into one of them?”
“I know exactly what you mean,” Rabbit said.
Q grinned. He understood! “Vampires and werewolves and zombies,” she said.
“Lawyers,” Rabbit said, shaking his head. “I’m surrounded by them every day. All I want to do is sing folk and make the world a better place and I’m terrified that one day, I’ll forget all that and start overbilling on my time sheet.” He looked so sad.
“Cheer up,” Q said. “I reckon that fear is more common than you think.”
“Kate does not agree,” Rabbit said. “She says I’m wasting my life. She thinks I’m a failure.”
“You? Nah. Anyway, how do you measure success? Your first job? Your first house? Your first stalker?”
“I don’t need to be the best at anything,” Rabbit said. “I just want to be a better person.”
“Me too,” Q said. “I just want to be a person.”
Rabbit’s fingers drifted to a piece of cord at his throat and he pulled out another wooden snake pendant, almost identical to Pious Kate’s, except that this one had glinting green eyes instead of red.
He’d made them matching necklaces.
“That’s pretty,” she said, kicking water and thinking corrosive thoughts.
Rabbit dropped the snake as if it had bitten him. Maybe he wa
s thinking corrosive thoughts, too.
“Kate came up with the design,” he said, glum. “She gets upset if I don’t wear it.”
“What’s the deal with you two?” Q asked in a careful tone, in case she got an answer she didn’t like.
Rabbit watched the moss-covered rocks beneath the surface of the water. “We’ve been best friends since kindergarten,” he said.
“My best friend’s in kindergarten, too,” Q said.
“We were thrown together. The only two vegans at school.”
“Oh!” said Q, with sudden understanding and relief. “You were the little Cantonese kids!”
“What?” Rabbit’s face crinkled into that expression so familiar to Q because it was what people wore when they were trying to interpret her.
“The two kids who didn’t fit in. You smelled weird. You had weird food. Your parents were weird. Everyone picked on you.”
“Thanks for bringing it all back,” Rabbit said.
“But it’s okay now,” Q said. “No one cares any more. We’ve grown up.” Q thought of her online crew. They would never have found each other as children, but as adults they stood together against the darkness, with Jeremiah BownZ off to one side and downwind – acceptance had its limits.
Should she venture a hand onto his shoulder? Or just throw herself on top of him and pin him to the ground for a kiss? It was a flawless plan, unless he knew Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. She was about to make her move when he spoke up.
“We should head back,” he said. He put on his sneakers. “You need to soak the lentils.”
“Huh?”
“You’re rostered on to cook tonight.”
Q guffawed. Rabbit did not join her. “No, seriously?” Q said.
“Sure,” said Rabbit. “We take turns.”
What would these hippies expect? Would she have to do it alone? Would Angela help? “Me and my dad don’t do much fancy cooking at home.”
“Make a dish you’ve made before,” Rabbit said. “What do you usually eat?”
“Takeaways. Microwave dinners. Sometimes Dad makes dyslexia stew, where he accidentally replaces every ingredient in the recipe with the wrong one, then adds bacon. It was good once.”
“Ah.”
She could tell by his tone that she had lost face. What had she said? She dropped her head and concentrated on tying her shoelaces, which were much more difficult to fasten than they had been for the past eighteen years. “It’s not like I don’t know how to cook. Sometimes I grill up a couple of ginormous steaks, two huge piles of beef, and we smother them in barbecue sauce on the grill and cook them rare so they’re all gooey and bleeding inside…” She stopped talking. Rabbit was pale. He looked like he was about retch. She took a step back. “I mean—”
There was a brain-shattering scream from the direction of the camp, followed by four clear gunshots. After a pause there were several more shots in quick succession.
“Thank God,” said Q. She ran toward the sounds.
Chapter Fourteen
The walkers had returned.
Tinkabella, in tears, paced a small, tight circle. The Scarlet Terror made indiscriminate posies from pink flowers and strands of grass. Sheath of Power looked as if he had just eaten the porridge.
“Rabbit, see who’s hurt,” Q said. “Angela, go find my phone and check the cabins.”
Q jogged round the campsite but saw nothing to justify the churn in her gut. She had known something was wrong! Why hadn’t she done something?
When Q returned, Angela handed over what was left of her phone. It had been smashed into pieces. Someone had cut them off.
Rabbit had better news. No one was hurt. “But Melissa didn’t come back from the walk,” he said under his breath.
“Who?” Q said.
“You know – long brown hair, tie-dye shirt, about this tall?”
“Oh, you mean Princess Starla, champion of the people and warrior of the way?” Q walked back to the group.
Despite the sobbing, Tinkabella looked the most cogent of the returned walkers. “What happened?” Q asked her.
The woman was snuffling too hard to answer. “Pull yourself together!” Q said. “What would your avatar say?”
For all the wrong reasons, this was the right thing to say. Everyone gawped, forgetting their trauma in their confusion. “Melissa was attacked,” Tinkabella said.
“By what?”
Tinkabella shook her head. “It was big, like a person.”
“It made noises like a sick animal,” Sheath of Power said.
“It smelled like rot,” Tinkabella said.
“No it didn’t, it smelled like candy canes!”
“It had blood on its claws and teeth!”
“It couldn’t walk straight. It limped like a hunchback penguin.”
Sheath of Power brought the description to a close. “I think it was a roo with rabies.”
“That makes no sense,” Q said, writing in her little black book. “Firstly, we don’t have rabies here, and b, a roo doesn’t look anything like a person, and three, why would an animal attack Princess Starla? She didn’t go Irwin on it, did she?”
Rabbit interceded for the group. “Q, what did you say?”
“It wasn’t a roo with rabies,” Q said.
“You weren’t even there!” said Sheath of Power.
“I heard gun shots,” said Angela. “What was that?” No one knew.
“We better go see if Melissa’s okay,” Rabbit said.
“She’s not okay,” said Tinkabella, who had recovered enough to avoid volunteering. “We should get in the van and get out of here.”
“Not until we’ve checked on Melissa,” Rabbit said.
“I’ll come,” said Q.
“Me, too,” said Angela.
“Good on you!” Q said and jabbed her lightly on the arm.
Angela rubbed the spot. “If there’s a rabid roo, I want to be near the chick who can punch through brick walls.” They headed off, Q pausing to grab a long-handled cooking pot on the way.
*
They did not hurry and barely spoke. Angela asked once if they should walk quietly, so as not to attract attention, or loudly, to scare off whatever was out there. Q didn’t think it would make a difference. There had been gunfire. That meant either the attacker had been dealt with or was more than they could handle. But they still had the gunman to worry about.
The path went northwest and uphill. It was easy to follow. The walkers had used an animal track, which was now well- trampled and lined with scraps of cloth. They had not been careful on their flight back to camp. All they had wanted was to get away.
The group found the spot a mile away from camp. Princess Starla was still there, or at least most of her was. Tinkabella was right. The woman did not need their help. Not any more.
“Shiva,” said Rabbit, and vomited.
“I always said walking was bad for your health,” Angela said.
“You’re calm,” Q said.
“Twins,” Angela said. “Plus, it’s either that or join Rabbit in the vomiting, and in my house, only one adult is allowed to hurl at a time.”
Q regarded the body. It was the first corpse she’d seen since Linda’s. She hadn’t been at the hospital when the woman died so she hadn’t seen the body until the funeral. It had looked healthier than the live version in those last few weeks. Q kept expecting Linda to leap up during the service and yell at Q’s father for neglecting their training schedule. The burial itself felt like murder, the body was so lifelike. Q had decided death would never again take her by surprise.
This body did not look healthy. It looked like it had been eaten by something that wasn’t a member of the clean plate club. Q felt something hot and sour in the back of her throat and turned away. Ridiculous. It couldn’t hurt her. It was dead. What was wrong with her?
She turned back to the body and pixelated the scene in her head, like level six on Crypt Robbers. That was better. She trod a careful circle around Prin
cess Star – around the body. She didn’t want to touch anything. Touching might make it real. The smell was a problem, too. She wasn’t used to smells like this. Meaty, raw and rotten, a mix of blood and shit and something she couldn’t identify.
Focus.
There were two clean bullet holes in the forehead. They may not have been what killed Princess Starla. Some ghoul had torn off most of the face and there were large chunks missing from the mid-section. There was less blood than Q had expected. There was also a long, flattened trail leading away from the body, as if something heavy had been dragged through the scrub. Like a second body.
There was no trace of gunman or ghoul. Maybe they were the same person, and there was a maniac on the loose. She had one lead candidate for that theory. Q considered following the flattened trail, but decided against it. She probably wouldn’t find anything that way. Worse – she might.
Rabbit was back, pale and sweaty. He nodded, opened his mouth to ask a question, then turned away to vomit again.
Angela kept her distance and breathed through her mouth. She was an unlikely ally in an emergency, pale, tubby and with absolutely no firearms training, but Angela sure kept her head in a crisis, and her breakfast. Her kids were lucky to have her.
Hannah! Q better get back to camp and call her hotline to check that her friend was okay. Just in case this problem wasn’t local. “We gotta get back,” she said.
“Shouldn’t we try first aid?” Rabbit said.
Q and Angela exchanged looks. Q tried to exchange looks with the body, but was hampered by its lack of eyes. “You haven’t done a lot of first aid training, have you?” she asked Rabbit.
He replied with a dry retch. They headed back.
*
It took them longer to return. Angela talked constantly to Rabbit about whether it was likely to rain, and how glad she was that there was no snow this late in the season, and how much her kids would love tearing up the bush. Rabbit’s face was the color of the gum leaves around them. The gray-green skin was the first thing Q had seen on him that didn’t look good. She’d thank Angela later.
They were almost back when they heard quick, light footsteps. They stopped. “Is that it?” Angela said.
