Dead Kelly (The Afterblight Chronicles)

by C. B. Harvey

  McGuire started forward, but thought better of it. “So this is it, then? A fuckin’ stalemate?”

  Trex looked surprised. “Fuck, really? I fuckin’ hate stalemates.”

  “Me too,” McGuire said. “What’s the alternative?”

  Trex grinned at McGuire, baring his teeth. “We’re like, um, a couple of bucks, you and me, ain’t we? Struggling for control of the herd?”

  “If you say so, Trex.”

  McGuire watched as Trex unhitched the hand scythe from his belt and hold it aloft. “Remember this? Remember what I’ve done with it?”

  McGuire shook his head in disbelief. “Look at you, mate. You walk with a cane and you’ve got fucking leg-braces. Hardly a fair fight.”

  Trex emitted a low grumble. “All it does is even it up a little. I mean it, you fucker. You and me. Toe to toe.”

  McGuire rubbed the back of his head. “And the winner gets everything?”

  Trex laughed. “I think that’s a fair bet, don’t you?”

  McGuire’s eyes played across the tranquil faces of Trex’s acolytes, weapons at the ready. He wondered how serene they would remain if he gutted their deity. “One thing. The ones who really think you’re God...”

  Trex smirked. “Not liable to be an issue. But yeah, I see what you’re getting at.” He pivoted awkwardly on the spot and addressed himself directly to his faithful. “Listen to me. I am your God; you know that. I am about to battle this man. I will win. But if I do not, my spirit will move to the body of the man who triumphed over me. He will henceforth be my vessel. You will obey him in my stead, in all matters. You understand?”

  Some of the acolytes looked uncertain, but most smiled beatifically, nodding their understanding.

  Trex turned back to McGuire, smiled at him, and let the cane clatter to the ground at his feet, swaying for a moment. He passed the scythe from hand to hand, feeling its weight, focussing himself.

  Trex watched with amusement as McGuire lowered the iron helmet gently to the ground, pulled off his leather gloves and with measured movements removed his armour, placing each piece in turn beside the helmet. He bent to remove the Bowie knife strapped to his shin, and before he could straighten, Trex was on him, swinging with his own blade. It struck McGuire’s shoulder, piercing his battered canvas jacket and plunging into muscle. He grunted with pain and threw Trex over his shoulder, the scythe ripping flesh as it pulled free. Trex landed heavily, cracking the tarmac.

  McGuire staggered backward, torn jacket flapping, blood cascading down his arm, and roared. Trex pulled himself awkwardly to his feet, the dripping scythe in one hand.

  “Sneaky bastard,” spat McGuire.

  “Faster than you, mate,” retorted Trex, leering. “Even with these fucked legs, I’m still faster than you.” He leapt forward, swinging the hand scythe, leg-braces buckling with the impact of the landing. This time, though, McGuire was ready for him, and sidestepped the manoeuvre.

  Behind him now, McGuire swung his boot into Trex’s calf. The braces on Trex’s left leg splintered completely under the force of the blow, folding him backwards. McGuire plunged his knife into Trex’s side, ripping down and forward, and Trex fell to his knees and desperately shoved McGuire away.

  The gash in Trex’s side ran deep, right across his abdomen. The colour seemed to have drained from his body, perspiration coating his face and torso. He tried to rise but couldn’t; his free hand moved to the tear, scrabbling to keep his innards from escaping.

  “You fuckin’ killed me, you bastard,” he said. Still on his knees, a look of abject shock on his features, he swayed gently to and fro, the remnants of his braces creaking with the movement.

  “Face it, Trex,” hissed McGuire, staunching the flow of blood from his ripped shoulder. “You’re a fuckin’ dinosaur, mate.”

  “You fucker!” One of Trex’s lieutenants, the massive bloke with the bandana and wraparound sunglasses, stepped forward and brought his submachine gun to bear. McGuire, too far away to stop him, braced himself for the inevitable, but the man was turning away, training the weapon on the doctor and the baby. He saw the doctor desperately trying to leap out of the way, her precious burden clutched to her breast.

  And abruptly the man’s head exploded, in a torrent of skin, skull and brain. His headless body fell to the ground, revealing Reverend Sarah, smoking shotgun clutched in her pudgy, wrinkled hands and a look of supreme satisfaction on her lined face.

  She turned to the people around her and shrugged. “They had a bargain,” she protested. Nobody spoke.

  McGuire had dropped to Lindsay’s side. She was covered in brain and blood, but otherwise she seemed unharmed. She stared at him in bafflement.

  “You’re dead,” she said simply.

  “Look after her,” whispered McGuire to Baxter, swinging his Bowie knife through his friend’s bonds.

  In the silence that had settled, McGuire heard a gun being primed, and then another. He glanced at Wilcox aboard the tank, who nodded in readiness. McGuire spun, pulled his submachine gun and let rip, filling the air with the noise, spent cartridges bouncing on the road at his feet. With his other hand he snatched up Ned Kelly’s iron helmet. “Listen up!” he yelled, leaping onto the front of the tank, grasping hold of its gun barrel.

  “Trex is gone. Bennett is gone. In the last few days I’ve dealt with others, too. They were fuckers, all of ’em; chancers, miscreants. And there are more to come, biding their time, hiding, waiting for the moment to strike. Scum, wanting to fuck you over. If you do as I say, we will root ’em out. We’ll fight ’em, and together we’ll fuck ’em.”

  From his vantage point atop the tank, he saw someone he recognised, emerging from behind a teetering brick wall. It was Jess, the girl with the pink Mohican, hair slightly singed but otherwise going strong. She was with the blonde girl from Ritzo’s gang, and a smattering of Spider’s people. As he watched, McGuire saw others emerging from their hiding places, some he recognised, some he didn’t. In their eyes he saw wonderment, but something else: he saw hope.

  “First, we must have order. There will be law, and it will be my law.” McGuire pointed at one of Trex’s men, a bearded hulk of a bloke with a Kalashnikov. “You,” he said. Then he pointed at Nancy, who raised her eyebrows in surprise. “You.” Finally he thrust a finger toward one of Bennett’s burlier soldiers, whom McGuire recognised as one of the few professionals amidst the remnants of the military. “And you.”

  “The three of you are the beginnings of our police force. Find others, people you trust. There’s a building—you might know it—called Parliament House, at the intersection of Bourke and Spring Street. That’s our base, from this point onwards.”

  “Who the fuck made you leader?” said the bloke with the Kalashnikov. He’d stepped out from the crowd, cradling his weapon.

  McGuire looked at Trex, lying face-down in the dirt in the midst of his death throes. The God’s final thrashing movements, it seemed, were anything but mysterious.

  “He did,” said McGuire, pointing to the bloodied heap. Then he lifted aloft Ned Kelly’s battered iron helmet for all to see. “And so did he.”

  Silence dominated. The crowd looked to him, blinking, trying to comprehend what was happening. Then he heard a single voice—Baxter’s—chanting. The cry was taken up by a second voice, and then a third. Just the old gang members to begin with, pumping their fists in the air each time, then joined by the others: Trex’s acolytes, Bennett’s soldiers, the remnants of Ritzo and Spider’s gangs, a few random survivors who had simply joined the throng. Soon the words folded into one another, becoming a beautiful paean, and the air was a sea of thrusting fists.

  Dead Kelly.

  SHE SHOOK HER head, feeble, but still incredulous. “I thought they’d killed you. The newspapers said...”

  McGuire knelt beside Lindsay, her hand in his. Blood was oozing from the wound in his shoulder, but he ignored it. “The fuckers couldn’t catch me. No-one can catch Kelly McGuire.” Around them, his foll
owers from the raid on the military compound barked instructions. For now, at least, the disparate factions seemed willing to accept their authority, Bennett’s former soldiers particularly eager to prove their allegiance to the new order. McGuire would establish more disciplined chains of command once he was ensconced in Parliament House. He would build structures, implement protocols, construct rituals. In short, he would impose order.

  He stared at Lindsay searchingly. The tatty shift she was dressed in was ripped to fuck, her face swollen. But she was still the woman he loved. “Why were you with Spider?”

  Lindsay hugged her knees to herself. “Don’t be angry with me,” she said. “I thought you were gone. After the Cull... There was no-one else.”

  McGuire reached out to gently touch her cheek, and saw her flinch. It was probably the scar on his hand.

  “Where’s Liam?” she said.

  “The baby,” said McGuire. “Baxter!”

  Baxter emerged through the crowds, holding the child tenderly in his arms. “He’s here, Boss.”

  “He’s here,” echoed McGuire, as Baxter handed the bundle to Lindsay. McGuire watched the relief on Lindsay’s face.

  “She needs rest,” said a weary voice at his shoulder. The doctor. “So does the baby. They need to be away from here. From this...”—she cast about herself despairingly—“whatever this is.”

  “Of course,” said McGuire. “Reverend!” he called.

  Reverend Sarah wore a broad grin as she approached, swinging her open shotgun.

  “What can I do for you?” she enquired mildly.

  He pulled her aside, while the doctor checked the child. “I need your help again, Reverend,” he said. “Can I trust you?”

  The Reverend shrugged. “I saved your life. Isn’t that good enough?”

  “The tattoo,” said McGuire, gesturing to the base of her neck, just above her dog collar.

  The elderly woman chuckled, spat on her finger tips and rubbed the tattoo, pulling her hand away to reveal a smudge. “It’s pen ink,” she said. “I have to reapply it every day. Just above the dog collar, you understand.”

  McGuire cocked his head to one side, impressed. “I think that makes me less fuckin’ likely to trust you.”

  She returned his smile. “Not sure you have a choice. You want me to give Lindsay and the babe sanctuary in the cathedral?”

  McGuire nodded. “Until our headquarters are ready, yes.”

  “Very well,” said Sarah at length. “I’ll do a deal with you. In return for saving your life, and in return for protecting the life of your child, you will protect the cathedral. Yes?”

  “So that’s your game. Protect the cathedral at all costs. Was that your arrangement with Trex?”

  Sarah shrugged. “More or less. It worked, too.” She beckoned for Lindsay to pass her the child. “Of course, the real question should be, why should I trust you? Why should any of us trust you?”

  McGuire returned the shrug. “You’ve no choice either.”

  The old woman cradled the baby. Without looking at McGuire she said, “Ah, that’s where you’re wrong. My allegiance is to God, not to fuckin’ butchers like you and Trex.”

  “You saw what happened. I kill only when I have to. Just like you.”

  Reverend Sarah cooed at the baby, not looking at McGuire. “What you’re doing is different. There’s no necessity for revenge, McGuire.”

  “An eye for an eye and all that.”

  “Don’t give me that Old Testament bullshit,” she snapped, suddenly locking eyes with him. “The thing is, you want to be certain, don’t you, McGuire? So you go after each and every one of ’em and then you kill ’em. The only problem is, that won’t tell you who betrayed you. Will it now?”

  He glowered at her without answering, until she returned her attention to the baby.

  “This child needs changing.”

  McGuire watched as together with the doctor she powered Lindsay and the baby into the crowds, Lindsay throwing him a bewildered look over her shoulder.

  “You did it, Boss,” said a familiar voice in his ear. “This is your world now.”

  McGuire turned to see Baxter, features drawn wide in a grin. “Not yet,” he said. “There are still scores to settle.” He stared into the crowd where the three women had disappeared.

  “You mean the Kendalls?”

  McGuire ignored that. “You almost got Lindsay and the baby killed.”

  Baxter shook his head. “Yeah, I’m sorry, man. There was too many of ’em. I couldn’t get away.”

  “You heard what I said, Baxter. I want certainty in all things.”

  Baxter’s eyes were wide with innocence. “I’m sorry, Boss, really I am,” he protested. “It won’t happen again. Honestly it won’t.”

  McGuire licked his lips, his eyes playing on the lizard-scale tattoo across Baxter’s neck and shoulder. Unlike Reverend Sarah’s, there was no doubting its permanence. “I need a sign, mate. A token of your loyalty.”

  “Anything,” insisted Baxter.

  McGuire smiled slightly, then beckoned toward Rudy. The old man made his way through the milling crowd, still clutching his homemade flamethrower. “Rudy, Baxter here needs your assistance. He needs something removed.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE MULTICOLOURED TOWER swayed but did not collapse. “Red one,” piped a child’s squeaky voice.

  “It’ll fall,” said McGuire softly. “It’s too much.”

  “Red one,” insisted the child.

  “Okay,” responded McGuire, picking another chipped red block from off the floor. He bit his top lip as he placed the block gingerly on top of the tower. The auburn-haired child giggled as the tower swayed one way, then the other, before inevitably collapsing.

  “I told you,” said McGuire. The little boy simply laughed, clapping his stubby hands together. McGuire pulled himself awkwardly to his feet and left the child alone on the hessian mat. This was why he seldom played with the kid.

  “Little fucker doesn’t know when to stop,” observed Lindsay, with a faint smile. “Maybe it’s hereditary.” She was sitting on the window sill, painting her toenails.

  “Uh, Boss,” said a gruff voice. Baxter stood in the doorway; McGuire could see Wilcox and Nancy the Nun beyond him, making eyes at one another. The thought that the two might do something as normal as hook up fair made him wince.

  McGuire took a swig from a tinny of flat lager, grimaced, and placed it back on the wobbling table. “What is it? Better be fuckin’ good, mate.”

  Baxter’s hand played involuntarily across the enormous burn scar travelling from beneath his neck all the way down the left side of his body. McGuire recalled his screams as Rudy went to work. The bearded mountain men of Katoomba probably heard the fucker, he was so loud.

  “It’s Zircnosk,” blurted Baxter.

  McGuire nostrils flared. “You got him?”

  “Sort of. We’ve got a, uh, lead.”

  “A lead? Is that it?”

  “The thing is, Boss,” said Baxter hesitantly. “The thing is, you’d better come.”

  HE SAT, GRIM-FACED, as Wilcox powered the Humvee down Lonsdale. Food, shelter, fuel, armaments, vehicles. McGuire controlled all of these things, and from all these things arose the one thing he cherished above all else: certainty.

  The Humvee slowed as they passed one of the work details. McGuire looked out of the tinted window at the ashen faces of the people, of all ages and ethnicities, their clothes tattered, faces bloodied and battered, spirits fractured like the fragments of rock and metal they sought to collect. He saw, too, the well-fed guards. In the midst of this chaos he had imposed an order, with him at the apex, his guards managing discipline, the people being helped to build a new world. It was an exchange: their toil in exchange for protection, for food. There was no hope in their eyes anymore, because no-one needed to hope anymore. They had what they needed, as far as this world was concerned. Certainty had been delivered unto them.

  There were exce
ptions, of course, the occasional blip that tested the system. In the year and a half following Trex’s demise a number of individuals—even a few groups—had arisen to mount a challenge. Most of them were known quantities, minor figures with some sort of gripe who’d mistakenly thought they could mount a successful challenge to his power. There was the occasional chancer, too, who’d blown into town and fancied taking a pop. Whatever their MO, they’d been dealt with, ruthlessly and with precision. Some of Trex’s people, in particular, found adjusting to the new regime problematic. Not the religious ones, of course: Trex had told them his spirit would inhabit McGuire on his death, and they weren’t the type to question.

  No, the most serious threat to his authority had been initiated by hardened former gang members, the ones McGuire knew of old, the ones who had been part of Trex’s army at the cathedral. McGuire could have gone fuckin’ ballistic at the mutiny, but he chose not to. This, he felt, was a sign of true leadership, something he had learnt from watching TV biographies of tyrants, back before the History Channel itself became history. In a way he didn’t blame the revolutionaries: they were programmed to be rebels, and he, McGuire, had become their enemy simply by dint of being in control. Funny how things turned out.

  Even so, they’d still had to be dealt with. When the conspirators were rounded up he’d utilised some techniques he’d read about in an old library book—a heavily singed copy; one of the few tomes to survive the fire in the State Library—about the Great Leap Forward. He’d even gone so far as to stage his own show trial and public executions, picking off a few other individuals he thought might prove problematic into the bargain. In the end, all very satisfying.

  So Ritzo had been wrong: the past wasn’t so easily dismissed, and could be of use if properly—that is to say, selectively—employed. All the same, though, there were elements of his own past that he wished he could erase. Not the murdering or the brutality or the drug-taking or the stealing, of course. Those were the things that made life worth living, and made an otherwise wild and unpredictable world manageable. What worried him was his need for revenge, which remained as intense as ever, even if the actual details of the heist had become hazy after all this time. What he needed, he realised, was closure. To be certain. Though it was a wrench to admit it, the elderly Reverend had been right: eliminating all of the potential suspects was not sufficient. He needed to know who and why. He needed the cop, Jack Zircnosk, the man who’d dealt directly with McGuire’s betrayer; the man who’d alerted the media to the heist, including but not limited to twinkling talk-show host Danny Kline.