Cargo Cult (11 page)

“We are visitors from the planet
Vingg,” Braxx announced, trying to keep it simple. “We require you
to convey us to this place.” He thrust the church magazine at
Marcus and waited for him to take it.

Marcus tore his eyes off the
ravishing beauties before him and looked at the magazine in the
speaker’s hand. As he did, her words began to penetrate the dense
fog in his brain.
Visitors from the planet Vingg
, he heard,
require you to convey us
. Strange words, making no sense. He
saw his hand reach out and take the magazine from the speaker.
Why is she wearing a wedding dress?
his brain asked, but
there was no-one there to hear it. The magazine was strange too.
His eyes caught references to God and prayer and UFOs, none of
which helped him out of the surreal treacle he seemed to be
drowning in.

“Is it sentient?” one of the women
asked, crossly. He looked up at her and saw she was wearing a
short, pink negligée with fluffy pink trim.

Braxx looked down the aisle of the
bus to find twenty wide-eyed faces staring back at him. “This
vehicle is a bus, is it not?” he shouted. Twenty wide-eyed heads
nodded in agreement. “And its purpose is to convey people around
the surface of your planet, is it not?” Again, they nodded. He
turned back to Marcus. “Do you disagree?” he asked.

“No,” said Marcus, without even
noticing that he had spoken.

“Then take us to that place.”

Marcus looked again at the
magazine. It was opened at an article about a UFO cult in the bush
outside the city. It named a suburb and a farm. Something was
nagging at Marcus. “You mean you want me to take you out into the
bush so you can go to this cult place?”

“It is a religious centre,” Braxx
explained.

“No,” said Marcus. “I’m going to
Toowoomba.”

“You’re going to what?” asked
Braxx, alarmed.

“I’m taking this bus to Toowoomba.
These people,” he waved a hand in the direction of the wide-eyed
heads behind him, “have chartered this bus for a gardening club
outing.”

Braxx shook his head in
frustration. “Whatever that means, you can do it later. First, you
will take us to that place.”

Marcus was coming quickly to his
senses. Whoever these insane women were, they were the last thing
he needed on a Wednesday morning. Or any morning for that matter.
Three years of disappointment and resentment came to the aid of his
rising temper. He simmered for an instant, then the dam burst.
“Look! I’m not a bus driver you know!”

The Vinggans looked at each other
in confusion. So did the old folk in the back.

“I’m a writer! I’m only doing this
for the money. It’s a stupid, boring job. Look at them!” He
gestured again at the Kanaka Downs Garden Club staring at him from
their seats. “Do I look like I want to spend my life driving that
lot up and down the bloody motorways of South East Queensland?”

“It seems even more irrational than
the others,” said the woman in the pink negligée. “Why don’t we
shoot it and drive the vehicle ourselves?”

Braxx shuddered, remembering his
experience as passenger and navigator when Drukk drove them to the
department store. “No,” he said quickly. “This one must drive us.
We will threaten him into compliance.”

“Hey, wait a minute!” Marcus
bridled. Who did these weirdos think they were?

Braxx and a couple of the nearer
Vinggans drew their blasters. “Somebody shoot something to scare
this human,” he ordered. The one in the pink negligée fired through
the bus window at a passing car which exploded spectacularly.
Another, in a green bikini, sent a shot down the aisle of the bus,
vaporising the little old lady who had been talking to herself.
There was pandemonium on the bus as the nineteen surviving retired
persons screamed and wailed and tried to get as far away from the
Vinggans as possible. There was also pandemonium out on the street
as the early morning commuters also ran about wailing and
screaming. The external pandemonium was made somewhat worse by the
rest of the Vinggans who, unable to hear what was going on from the
steps of the bus and out on the street, had assumed they were under
attack by the humans and had therefore also drawn their weapons and
were now blasting away at anything that moved in their vicinity.
Elizabeth Street became a war zone, with cars swerving and crashing
into buildings and each other, people flying through the air as
office blocks and vehicles exploded all around.

With a cry consisting only of
expletives, Marcus tried desperately to burrow under the dashboard.
The madwoman in the wedding dress was shouting for them to stop and
invoking some deity or other but it still took a little while for
the destruction to abate. When there had been no explosions for a
whole ten seconds, Marcus peered up at the women.

“Now,” said Braxx, straightening
his dress with dignity. “Will you please take us to that
place?”

Marcus, who was trembling all over,
managed to nod his head and grabbed up the magazine from where he’d
dropped it. As he struggled to make sense of the jumping words he
desperately needed to read, the crazy women filed onto his bus and
took their seats.

-oOo-

Detective Sergeant Barraclough was
standing at a window watching the morning rush-hour building up on
Roma Street. He was tired and grumpy. He hated puzzles. That is, he
loved puzzles. He just hated puzzles he could not solve.

Douggie and Nick were lying little
toe-rags, they were small-time crooks and big-time hooligans but
the one thing they were not was imaginative. How in God’s name
could they come up with a story like this one?

He tried to step back from the
problem. He knew he had become too emotional about it and was
trying too hard to make the pieces fit his firm conviction that
Douggie and Nick had been up to no good. What if they were telling
the truth? He fought down his immediate reaction against the idea
and tried to consider it but he couldn’t. All right then, what if
they were telling some of the truth? That was easier, he could cope
with that — as a hypothetical, anyway.

So Douggie and Nick had set off to
rob — not Steiner’s but something. They came across the hole in the
wall, just like they said, and went inside to take a look. Here he
hit problems again. For a start, those two would not just wander
into a hole in a wall out of curiosity and certainly not out of
public-spiritedness. So they wanted to be inside Steiner’s for some
reason. Maybe they wanted something from Steiner’s after all and
they were pissed off to find some other crooks had beaten them to
it? Park that and come back to it. So they’re in Steiner’s and they
find... what? A bunch of crazies shooting the place up and throwing
clothes all over the floor? Some sort of drug party? Some new kind
of religious nuts, or terrorist atrocity? Whoever was in that
building, they had cut a hole in the wall in a way that the
forensic team could not explain and they had carted away a tonne of
rubble without leaving a trace.

He leaned his head on the cool
glass. He should go home to a cold beer and forget about all this
for a while. But why had they made up that stupid story
about...

“... Loosi Beecham...”

He whirled around. “What?”

Two uniformed officers were passing
by him, talking to each other. They stopped and looked at him.

“What did you just say?” he
demanded.

“We were just talking about the
shooting in Elizabeth Street, Sarge,” said one, taken aback.

“What shooting? Why did you say
Loosi Beecham? What’s going on?” He had stepped closer to them, his
great bulk alone enough to make them nervous.

“We just got a call in. There’s
been some kind of shoot-out over by St Stephen’s. Witnesses are
saying that twenty or thirty women looking just like Loosi Beecham
have shot up the street and hijacked a bus full of pensioners.”

Barraclough exploded. “What! Out of
my way! Wait!” He grabbed the radio off one of the officers and
then raced down to the car park, listening to the pandemonium on
the way. As he threw open his car door, he heard what he’d been
listening for. The bus was heading west out of the city with every
available squad car in pursuit. He slammed his light onto the roof
and crushed his pedal to the floor.

Sam threw her mobile onto the seat
beside her in disgust. Her editor had stopped taking her calls, the
weasel. Well, she’d show him. She’d brought her own camera with her
and she’d take her own pictures and she’d charge the weasel through
the nose for them!

She already had some good shots
that she and Wayne had taken at the unit before they’d left. The
one with Ms Beecham holding up a copy of today’s Courier Mail made
her look like a kidnap victim but at least it would prove she was
there. She’d also taken a couple of Ms Beecham with Wayne and Wayne
had taken one of Sam and Ms Beecham. Then she’d put the camera on
the timer and taken one of the three of them together. Unknown to
Sam, when she had gone off to get her car keys, Wayne had also got
Ms Beecham to pose for a few shots of his own.

“Which way?” she shouted to Jadie
in the back seat as a T-junction approached. She’d picked up
Wayne’s friend on the way, realising that, obnoxious little creep
as he was, he was the only one she knew who could direct them to
the Space Station. He’d grumbled and protested about being woken up
before noon and told them he was too busy but, as soon as he’d seen
who else was travelling with them, he’d changed his mind and
decided to go. Both Jadie and Wayne had insisted on sitting in the
back seat with Ms Beecham — or Drukk as she liked to be called —
and Sam had had to fight all the way to get Jadie’s attention off
the spaced-out mega-star’s body and onto the road so he could
direct them.

It was not helping her mood.

“Jadie? Which way?”

“Er, like, what?” he asked but by
then the car was screeching to a halt.

Sam shouted, “Right!” threw open
her door and leapt out of the car. For a brief, peaceful moment,
the gentle sounds of the outdoors were all they heard, with Sam’s
determined footsteps overlaid as she marched around to the opposite
rear door and threw that open too. Reaching in, she grabbed her
distractable navigator by the ear and dragged him out of the car.
Opening the front passenger’s door, she pushed him inside and
slammed the door on him. Then she marched back to her own side and
got back in.

She smiled sweetly at the
dishevelled youth as he rubbed his ear with an expression of
injured innocence. “Now, which way do we turn?”

Jadie started saying, “I dunno. I’m
usually, like, hitching a ride, you know,” but, seeing the sweet
smile harden to cold steel, he took a swallow and said, “Go right.
Yeah. Right.”

“Thank you,” said Sam and they
moved off.

They drove in silence for a
while.

"Just how far away is this place?"
Sam asked, crossly. They’d been driving for hours.

"A long, long way," muttered Jadie,
still holding his ear.

Jadie’s words seemed to strike some
kind of dismal resonance in their famous travelling companion
because she suddenly said, "I miss my home." Then, as they all
absorbed that, "It is hard to live among strangers."

"What exactly are you doing over
here, Ms Beecham?" Sam asked, seizing her opening.

"It was an accident," Drukk
answered, morosely, not even bothering to correct Sam’s persistent
error about his name. "Our ship crashed. I'm not sure why. They
just do, sometimes."

"Oh my God! You mean it ran
aground?" Sam suddenly saw a reason for the celebrity's strange
behaviour, even her strange dress. She must have narrowly escaped
drowning, throwing on whatever was to hand as she scrambled to
safety, probably taking a severe blow to the head that left her in
this dazed and disoriented state. Oh no! She was probably suffering
from concussion. She might have a fractured skull or brain damage.
And Sam Zammit, ace reporter, had kidnapped the poor woman and
driven her out to the middle of nowhere when she should have taken
her straight to a hospital and informed the police. God! What a
mess!

"Are there any other survivors?"
she asked, her dreams of fame and success becoming a nightmare of
prosecution and incarceration.

"Only Braxx and a few of the
Pebbles of the New Dawn," Drukk lamented. "The Captain is dead and
all the crew. All my friends are gone." Saying it aloud like that
suddenly brought the tragedy of what had happened home to Drukk. If
he had still had them, his nose fronds would have drooped in
sorrow. Instead, his new body excreted clear liquid from its eye
sockets and interrupted his breathing with rapid abdominal
spasms.

"Er, she's crying, Sam," said Wayne
helplessly, thinking he ought to be doing something to help.

Sam was beginning to panic. She had
a vague recollection that people could die if a concussion was bad
enough. And what about the other survivors, if there really were
any? She thought about turning back, retracing the three-hour drive
back to the city and getting Ms Beecham to a hospital but she could
be too late by then. Maybe the best thing was to stop, call for
help and have them send a helicopter to get her?

"There it is," said Jadie.

But what about her story? So what
if it was a shipwreck now, not a drugs thing? It was still her
story! If she got the Emergency Services involved, it all became
public. How could she keep it to herself?

"Hey. We're there," said Jadie,
louder.

"Will you shut up, you annoying
little creep? I'm trying to think." Then she noticed the big sign
beside the dirt track, a huge, hand-painted picture of a comic-book
alien, skinny, green, naked, with a big head, big eyes and a little
mouth. Unusually, the alien was smiling and holding out its hands
to offer an assortment of silly-looking gadgets to whoever might
pass by. She stopped the car in front of the gigantic sign. Under
the alien were the words, "Church of the Receivers of Cosmic
Bounty" and, below that, "All welcome." Below that, in spray paint,
someone had written; “ET go home”.