Draw the Brisbane Line Page 3

  YVETTE: Of course Darren, of course. So how is it this morning in the smart city?

  DARREN: Bloody hot Yvette, bloody hot.

  YVETTE: Lovely. And Chloe in Canberra?

  CHLOE: It’s, ah … it’s OK in Canberra, Yvette. Yeah, it’s OK.

  YVETTE: Good to hear. Now, you might have heard rumblings about our neighbours to the north. Tensions in the nation’s capital have been high since -

  PAULA: Hello, Yvette?

  YVETTE: Um, hello?

  PAULA: It’s Paula in Adelaide, Yvette. You forgot Adelaide.

  YVETTE: Oh my goodness, you’re right! Can you believe that Jeff? I completely forgot Adelaide.

  JEFF: I was just about to mention Adelaide, Yvette.

  YVETTE: I’m so sorry Paula! And Adelaide! I’m so red right now. How is it in Adelaide this morning Paula?

  PAULA: [sighs] Oh, it’s raining cold hard cash here, Yvette. The sun has turned purple and cats and dogs have started talking.

  YVETTE: Sounds lovely Paula. Darren, while we have you there, what can you tell us about what’s happening in your corner of the country this morning? We’ve been hearing rumours about military forces gathering off the Gulf of Carpenteria.

  DARREN: Yes Yvette, Twitter has been buzzing over the last twelve hours or so with reports of both Indonesian and US warships moving very close to Australian waters. So far the Australian Defence Force has denied knowledge of any foreign threats, but Yvette, we’ve seen an increased step-up in both Australian and US military presence in Queensland over the past two days. There were joint exercises planned with the two forces, but that wasn’t for another two weeks.

  YVETTE: That’s very troubling Darren. Let’s take a look at the Samsung Twitter board.

  Dean Bossman @deebo27

  Yanks pouring into Townsville by the planeload #invasionOz

  Nth Territorial @NTfishy

  Been ordered to clear out of the gulf. HMAS Toowoomba in da house #invasionOz

  Omnikunt @deep69

  Ozzie, US forces give the nod, it’s a setback for your country #invasionOz

  JEFF: Certainly some troubling details coming in there. Could any of this be coming from Wikileaks?

  YVETTE: That’s certainly possible Jeff. And what can we make of the report of HMAS Toowoomba taking up a position in the Gulf of Carpentaria?

  JEFF: Well, I’m no military strategist, Yvette, but that sounds like a defensive position to me.

  YVETTE: Me too, Jeff, me too. We’ll of course bring you any new updates as soon as we get them. We’ll be back after the break with Michael Billington on the growing superannuation crisis facing the country, and then we’ll be joined by a special guest, tennis legend Dave Holden! You’re watching Good Morning Today!

  Chapter 4

  A fight broke out in the petrol station while Nero was waiting in line. One minute he was in the middle of a longish queue, everyone lined up to pay for their petrol and snacks, and the next, someone takes offence to a gloating comment from this gen-y dickhead about how he’s been able to renegotiate his rent down by over a half, with all the miners pulling out of the area. This grey-haired guy in his mid-fifties in a heavily faded orange high-vis shirt just snapped and punched the guy in the back of the head.

  Nero had his eye on a sausage roll in the heated display, so when the fight started spreading and infecting every pissed-off bogan in the place — and that included the manager — Nero casually threw his legs over the counter and helped himself. He filled a plastic bag with the sausage roll, two emaciated dim sims, a bottle of Coke and three packs of unfiltered Camels. He noticed the stack of Chiko rolls in the display, five or six of them, and decided to liberate them as well. One of the boys liked them, Hammo or Suss. He dropped them into a second plastic bag.

  ‘Oi!’ a guy shouted at him, stepping around the counter and pulling his arm back to telegraph a punch.

  Oi? It wasn’t enough that he was dressed in bright orange high-vis gear, he needed to attract more attention to himself? Nero’s hands were momentarily full, so he drove the heel of his right boot hard into the inside of Oi’s right knee. He went down with a more high-pitched and distressed ‘Oi!’ Nero took a step back and followed up with his left boot, driving its steel reinforced toe into into Oi’s head.

  ‘Gah,’ Oi squeaked, and crumpled to the floor.

  No-one else gave him any trouble on the way out. He could tell some of them recognised him, and that recognition was wordlessly transmitted to the others via some collective consciousness. Call it survival.

  As Nero drove back to the house, munching on the sausage roll with his free hand, he saw similar fights and straight-up criminal break-ins springing up every couple of blocks. He was surprised by how quickly it was all breaking down, this manufactured outback civilisation, but he saw the sense in it. With the latest coal mine shutdown, a lot of the guys in town had nowhere else to go. A lot of them had relocated all the way up to Rockie or Mackay just for the mines. What could they do now that no-one was hiring? Go robbing.

  Nero slowed his car as he came to a stop sign. He normally wouldn’t have bothered, it was such a quiet intersection with a clear view in all directions for at least fifty metres, but the two cars in front of him had decided to obey the traffic signs. The car at the sign, a V8 Commodore with a custom electric blue paint job, abruptly emptied its four passengers who all stalked up to the car behind it, a mine-spec ute complete with the orange flashers on the roof. They looked like they might all be fresh out of prison, but Nero figured they were most likely recently laid-off contractors.

  The ute shifted into reverse, but Nero was too close to allow him to manoeuvre his way out of there. He was boxed in. He hit the flashers and gestured frantically at Nero to move. Nero stayed where he was and ate his sausage roll as the four men dragged the driver out, screaming blood oaths and took turns on him. When the last of the sausage roll was licked from his fingers, Nero backed up enough to get around the ute and continued on his way.

  On the drive back to the house, he played scenarios around in his head, lining them up, measuring them, pitting them against one another. He was trying to think how the current outbreaks of lawlessness might play into his hands. It couldn’t, not really. His business model was simple: keep it quiet, but if you can’t, pay someone who can. It was a model which had kept him in profit and out of prison so far, and he saw no reason to go changing it now.

  He never gave much thought to his hired help having other ideas on the matter, not until he pulled up to the house and saw five Harleys parked up on his front lawn.

  ‘Fucking Blinky,’ he muttered, and pulled on the handbrake hard enough to make it squeal.

  He reached his right hand under the seat and felt around for the faint cut-out in the hard plastic. He pushed it, and with a soft click, the small compartment flipped open. He pulled free the loaded Smith & Wesson thirty-eight from under the seat.

  The Harleys shouldn’t be there. He’d chosen the house, the neighbourhood, because it was as bland a base as he could have hoped for, a low brick house in a street of identical low brick houses, and his neighbours were mostly miners and truckers, coming and going with a monotonous regularity. The whole point of the house was aimed at discretion, which was the opposite intent of a Harley Davidson.

  He knew who owned the bikes because he’d watched the small gang of Bush Rangers very carefully before he approached them to offer employment opportunities. Four Low Riders and a Fat Bob. The Bob was Blinky’s. They knew, they fucking knew, that being pegged as a Ranger was a guaranteed pass to prison, thanks to the VLAD legislation that just wouldn’t go away.

  Nero knew why it wouldn’t go away. It wouldn’t go away because morons like Blinky apparently hadn’t suffered enough.

  And he never should have hired them.

  He wedged the Smith into the back of his jeans, felt it cutting into the small of his back too hard and had to shift his belt to a fresh notch. Better. He considered the bottle of Coke in the p
lastic carrier bag, thought he should maybe stick with water for a while.

  The front door was ajar, so he nudged it open with the toe of his boot. He spotted Suss first, the skinny bugger leaning into the arm of the cheap black pleather sofa, and threw the bag of Chiko Rolls at him.

  ‘Eat up, ya fucken rake,’ he snarled.

  Suss caught the bag in the middle, and one of the rolls flipped out and rolled under the sofa. He reached underneath, found it and started munching. ‘Three second rule,’ he said through a mouthful of glutinous mess.

  Hammo was near the door, and he moved behind Nero to close it. His hard boot-heels thumped into the thin utilitarian carpet like a boxer pounding a bag. Rudolpho stood at the kitchen counter, cleaning a stripped-down pistol beneath the bleach-bright fluorescents. He wore his Rangers vest over his bare torso, the front hanging open to expose his full-coverage Escher-esque tattoo, impossible staircases folding over one another in geometric knots. It had impressed Nero when he saw it, so he asked what had inspired the tattoo. Rudolpho said it was the artist’s idea, he needed something to cover up the massive Swastika he originally had there. Hammo, the giant Tongan enforcer, had made him do it.

  He looked around for Blinky and Clapper. They were somewhere else in the house.

  The air in the sparsely furnished living room was tainted by new cigarette smoke. Nero made them smoke outside whenever they were around. It wasn’t that he was worried about getting the deposit back on the house, but it helped to enforce some of society’s expectations on the boys. It was like trying to train feral dogs sometimes, keeping these Rangers in his employ.

  But now there was smoking. And those fucking bikes and gang patches.

  ‘Do you fuckwits want to get locked up?’ Nero said to the men in the room.

  ‘What?’ Rudolpho said in his thick Afrikaner tongue. ‘For smoking in your house man? That sounds a bit harsh.’ He looked at Nero through the barrel of the pistol before stabbing a delicate wire brush through it.

  ‘You think the cops won’t worry about the sudden reappearance of fucken Rangers in town? Just because of a bit of fightin, bit of lootin?’

  ‘There is that, yes,’ Blinky said, stepping out from the short hallway which led to the bedrooms. He also wore his full motorcycle leathers and Bush Ranger vest. He moved silently despite his heavy boots, a characteristic Nero always found unsettling. A sawn-off shotgun hung loosely in his hand. ‘And there’s also the fact that we are Bush Rangers, not your bitches to fuck over when you feel like it.’

  ‘I can think of prettier things to fuck over than you lot,’ Nero said through a shallow smile.

  Suss stood up and wiped his greasy fingers on his jeans. Rudolpho stepped around the kitchen bench. The pistol was still in pieces on the counter, but a heavy leather sap now rested in his hand.

  ‘We know what you were going to do,’ Blinky said. ‘We know all about the boom-boom. And I think we could do a better job running that side of the business. What do you think?’

  Fuck, was all Nero had time to think. He reached around to grab the revolver from the back of his jeans, but before his finger could even touch it, he was hit in the back of the head by a speeding car. That’s what it felt like. He spun as he fell, and caught sight of a grim, angry Clapper clutching a wooden baseball bat. He must have slipped in as Hammo was closing the door.

  That first blow was a bitch, and that was a good thing. It meant that while he was aware of the rest of it, up to a point, the sharpness of the pain had been blunted somewhat by that first collision of wood on skull. No, the physical pain wasn’t the worst of it. The worst part was the eventual understanding, just before he slipped into a deep hole of unconsciousness, of what they meant to do. They meant to step all over his core business interests, but his core business interests weren’t in Moranbah, or in Emerald, or in Rockhampton. They were in Brisbane.

  With Lily.

  Chapter 5

  Epoch took a seat right up the back of the Greyhound, deep in the unpopular toilet zone. The smell was rank, but the position afforded him better odds of privacy than any other place on the bus.

  He pulled the shade closed. Maybe no-one was out looking for him, but he saw no sense in taking that chance. Blinky might not have acted on the information Epoch sent his way. Maybe he enjoyed being screwed over. Maybe he had done something about it though. Maybe he confronted Nero, drew down on him like a comic book outlaw. Maybe they were both dead, killed by each other in a straight-up gunfight.

  Or, Blinky could have snitched, run to Nero like a whiny bitch fourth-grader to tell him what naughty Epoch had told him.

  He doubted it, but it was better to be safe than stupid.

  He was travelling light, like he always did. Just the backpack on the seat beside him. He seldom took his hand off it, and when he slept he placed it in his lap. If he had to use the bathroom, as convenient as it was to his seat, he’d slip the bag over one shoulder.

  Occasionally a new arrival would venture down his end. He combated this by performing loud voice searches on his Android Eyes glasses.

  ‘OK Google, search three-way interracial arse-to-mouth.’

  ‘OK Google, search bareback sheep love.’

  ‘OK Google, find video of midget felching party.’

  God but he loved these things. Occasionally he’d watch the resulting video through the glasses, switching to virtual full screen mode for a few minutes. He’d had to root the things for the full screen hack. Mostly though, he read his Twitter feeds and made plans.

  ‘Tweets from stir list,’ he said, and the little blue bird started moving up in the air on the right side of his field of vision, dragging short blocks of text behind it.

  Nine News Retweeted

  Great Northern Cross @gr8nthx

  Where are the Liberals in Rockhampton? In Mackay? Fighting has started over scraps while Sydneysiders laugh their arses off. #classcrash

  BBC News Retweeted

  Re-dystope @redyst98

  Looting in full swing in Moranbah, coming to Emerald soon! Just saw this guy helping himself to a new Playstation from EB Games!! #moronbar #classcrash bit.ly/1Rtty3

  ABC Retweeted

  Billy Billy Moore @b_billybilly6

  Lot of Yank movement in Townie, Army and Navy. No exercises planned that I’m aware of. Please explain?

  Bubble What Bubble @toilntrble

  Protest march by striking unions in Brisbane is turning ugly, aviation workers joined by cleaners and taxi drivers, fights breaking out. #classcrash bit.ly/3xxcyu7

  Seeing the re-tweets always gave him a buzz. Great Northern Cross, Re-dystope and Billy Billy Moore were all Twitter handles he owned. He didn’t create them, he bought them on Silk Road after someone else had established their credibility, over several years of reliable and verifiable tweets. Epoch had to periodically keep them tweeting, tickle their feathers, usually recycled news from the Twitterverse, but every now and then he was able to sow his own headlines into the dirt. He had to do little more than sit back and watch them sprout.

  He tittered at the Moranbah tweet. #moronbar. Disorder and looting actually had broken out in the depressed mining town, Epoch had been there for some of it. But the picture of the man nicking a Playstation? Epoch beat him in poker, and the not-yet-owned Playstation was in the pot, along with a crate of mining explosives. Big Dave Razinski, crazy bastard, the sort of guy you’d cross the street to avoid if you saw him coming from three blocks away. Wild eyes, beard like week-old roadkill, six feet tall and a body shape best described as slab. Absolutely shit at cards. Epoch didn’t actually want the game console, he just wanted to see how the guy went about getting into the shop. He went in with very little finesse, a sledgehammer and a cordless drill. Epoch offered to let him keep the Playstation in exchange for a tutorial on handling the blasting gear he’d won. Big Dave peeled his lips back from his broken teeth in a smile so foul it made ugly seem pleasant and said, ‘Mate, I’ll even let ya have a fuggen practice run.’


  Epoch patted the backpack on the seat beside him, felt the rolling contour of the tightly wrapped tubes. If he’d had more time, he probably would have concealed the explosives in something, tennis ball cans or Pringles tubes. It might be enough to get him past the dumbest of nosy cops, which he figured accounted for about eighty percent of them, maybe more.

  The bus stopped at a shelter on the nowhere highway. Epoch saw a woman standing by a suitcase and an overstuffed Ikea bag, the big plastic ones you could buy at the checkout when you realise just how much unnecessary small shit you’ve picked up on the way through. There were no cars in sight, someone must have dumped her at the stop and kept on going. He put his face to the glass to cut out the interior reflections to get a better look at her. If he had to guess, he’d say she spent the last twenty years driving trucks in the mines and either forgot about femininity or hid it away.

  The driver went through the routine of opening the luggage doors on the side of the coach and loading the newcomer’s luggage, and she came up the steps and made her way towards the back of the bus, right in front of Epoch.

  Jesus Christ, he thought, half the bus to choose from and this is the spot she picks?

  He was about to give Google some of the most colourful video searches he could imagine, one involving a horse and the world’s tallest woman, when the driver re-boarded the bus and started them on the road again. Miss I-don’t-understand-personal-space immediately stood up and moved to the toilet. Her wide denim-clad hips brushed his seat as she passed, and she smelled of men’s deodorant. Through the gap between the seats, he could see she’d left something behind, a big multi-pocketed brown leather handbag.