The Worm King (37 page)

‘What a damn shame!’ Hensley shook his head sadly,
although Dick got the feeling he’d expected the issue to crop up, perhaps even
thankful to get it on the table. Hensley reached for his glass. ‘Forsyth’s a
bit unstable, I’m sorry to say.’
Glug, glug.
‘Just between you and me,
we think he’s gone on the loose. Troppo. Haven’t heard from him for too long.’
Glug, glug.
‘Still, you never know with these special ops types, and with
the damn weather out there like this . . . ’ The Brigadier
waved his hand in the direction of the window. The curtain was closed and their
discrete, private dining room moderately warm and well lit. Hensley lowered his
voice a notch and Dick noticed the brow sweat had all but disappeared. ‘It happens
sometimes with these chaps. In fact, Forsyth was one of those who came back
from Afghanistan not quite right.’
Glug, glug.
‘Terrible shame, because
he’d done some splendid work before that. Absolutely splendid. The thing is, there’ve
been rumors of assault on women, drug use, that sort of carry-on. You know.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t,’ lied Dick.

‘My guess is you’re right, we actually do have
a responsibility to a degree, to assist with this matter,’ mulled the Brigadier,
taking a smaller, more thoughtful swallow.
Glug.
‘And this may help with
another issue too.’ He lowered his voice again. ‘In fact, this keeps coming up
in officer meetings, and we’re jolly worried about it. A lot of the chaps are . . . well,
just too long in the mouth, frankly. No reason for it. They need a good wiz-up,
so an exercise like this might be spot on. Yes.’

The Brigadier undertook to send a squad of minimum
eighteen men and provide two vehicles to ensure Dick and his chaps didn’t get
into too much mischief.

Two glasses later, Hensley was raving about
his favorite American general: some no-name, shit-wit from the civil war, and
Dick struggled to look interested. He already knew about the Americans. More
than a few had flooded into Canberra at the last moment, but he’d take care of
that. They were like maggots, fighting for the last scrap of festering meat on
the planet. They’d get crushed, just as they’d used and abused other nations
for hundreds of years. Dick had always had a passing admiration for dictators
like Mao Zedong and Stalin and Napoleon and Hitler. They’d effected regime
changes that involved eliminating tens, or even hundreds of millions, but this
time that hard work had already been done. It was the most glorious opportunity
that had ever presented itself to a man of calculating vision. It’d be a
bottom-up restructuring with a difference, and Dick’s mind spun from one
conquest to another in the bat of an eye.

He knew what he had to do. It would be a big
job though.

Kill them all. Kill them all, and start
again.

In the meantime he refilled the Brigadier’s
glass and began unwrapping a brace of Cubans.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Mrs Sheng

N
o, not that door! Maybe this one? The lights were off and you
couldn’t see a stitch.

‘Hello?’ called Mrs Sheng. ‘Gilbert?’ She
knocked lightly and the door opened almost immediately. Gilbert gripped a small
torch in one hand and heavy stainless steel spoon in the other. The spoon was
massive, easily the length of his arm and meant to be welded with two hands,
minimum.

‘Hello sweetie.’ He tucked the spoon under
his arm and squeezed her shoulder. ‘You ready?’

A series of small unpleasant incidents had
unfolded which led Mrs Sheng to believe her life may be in peril. In the normal
course of events these episodes wouldn’t be minor at all, in fact they’d be
heinous, but getting . . . context, with everything going
on, was an impossible affair. Dreadful. However one thing she did know without
any doubt whatsoever was that those two little girls shouldn’t be locked up
like that. And from what she’d seen, theirs wasn’t the only room with an
external lock on it. The spoon was the best Gilbert could come up with to lever
the lock off their door.

Mrs Sheng had formulated a plan to move to
new lodgings, together with the two girls and Gilbert, one of the scared
waiters she’d befriended at the hotel. The hotel already had an old dumb waiter
system, and a couple of fairly evil waiters, but Gilbert was one of the scared
waiters.
Ha!Ha!
Bent as a row of tents too. He’d proposed they simply
walk right out of the place. ‘Honesty is always the best approach, darling.’ He
advised against going via the back of the hotel. ‘Some of the boys in the
kitchen have seen something living out the back. And that fellow with the eye patch
is always hanging around out there.’

‘Bob,’ said Mrs Sheng.

‘Is that his name? He isn’t very chatty. So
we shouldn’t go that way. We ort to leave straight through the front.’

Mrs Sheng hadn’t told Gilbert it was Bob who
struck her, and in truth it’d happened twice. The first time she put it down to
stress, or some kind of sudden snapping on his part given the cataclysm they
were enduring, but she certainly made a mental note to stay away from the man
as much as possible. The second time, he’d jumped out of nowhere and belted her
across the side of the face for no reason at all. She told Dick and he just looked
straight through her, as though he’d bigger things on his plate and a violent unprovoked
assault was hardly worth a moments consideration. ‘I’ll speak to Bob, then.’

‘But what’s his role here anyway?’ Mrs Sheng
persisted. ‘One of the waiters told me he’d heard Bob was in prison! Surely
he’s nothing to do with . . . ’ She trailed off, realizing
she didn’t know exactly what branch of government Dick was even involved with.

Dick proceeded to explain how past misdemeanors
could not legally be held against a said person once the appropriate penalty
had been served, vis-à-vis their current employment contract, and Bob was
proving extremely useful within the administrative procurement department that
the Deputy-Prime Minister had set up within the hotel while the Canberra
offices were being rebuilt.

‘But he hit me! In the face!’

‘Yes, I can see that. Can’t you get some
makeup from lost and found?’

Mrs Sheng knew for a fact, through Gilbert,
that nothing whatsoever was being rebuilt in central Canberra. The whole
district was a gutted shell and you wouldn’t go near the place if your life
depended on it. Something wasn’t adding up. People were starving everywhere,
yet Dick appeared to have authority to send out groups of men to “assess”
weather conditions and these same men were entrusted with “redistributing
resources” where they deemed necessary, which appeared to mean bringing whatever
they could find back to the hotel, as far as she could see.

Another odd thing: all the clocks were gone.
Someone had taken every clock off the walls. Mrs Sheng asked the unfriendly concierge
at the front reception desk about it and he’d confirmed the clocks had been
removed, but didn’t know the precise reason. Thankfully, Mrs Sheng still had
her grandmother’s antique windup.

The most awful revelation had been the
ballroom, on the lower-ground floor of the hotel. Three days ago Dick sent her
down there to find some man named “Pickles.”

‘Is that his last name? Or first?’

‘That’s it. Pickles.’ Dick used his right
index finger to roll a small, metal tube across the top of his desk towards her.
‘Here, use this.’ She picked up the tiny, novelty torch.

As it transpired Pickles wasn’t in the
ballroom. About a hundred others were, but no Pickles, which she didn’t
discover until doing a full circuit of the room. They were all sitting around
the edge, awake, and staring into the dark. Most were men although a few women
were scattered amongst. The air was thick with murmuring. Every few steps she’d
paused, asking whoever fell under her beam: ‘Pickles?’ A few shook their heads
but the majority elicited no response. Back at the door, after going all the
way around, she was about to leave the ghastly place when it occurred she
hadn’t checked the centre, and the torch didn’t even reach that far, so she let
the door swing shut and walked slowly towards the middle of the ballroom,
thinking perhaps there was some noise in that direction too . . . ?

A couple were copulating on the floor. Mrs
Sheng gasped and turned in horror, running for the door, all pretence of
composure gone. Her footsteps echoed over the muttering, which had become
louder and seemingly directed at her. One word over and over, like a mantra.
Queue-jumper!
Queue-jumper! Queue-jumper!

It was a queue.

Later she told Dick that Pickles wasn’t in
the ballroom. He said, ‘Oh,’ and went back to reading the page of handwritten text
on his desk. She craned her neck, trying to read it. A list? A dozen or so short
lines at the top, and three paragraphs scrawled below. Maybe a recipe? Dick had
that same vaguely glazed expression of those in the ballroom, and Mrs Sheng
wondered if they’d all taken some kind of drug. Already he seemed to have
forgotten she was there, so she left.

‘Gilbert?’ What was that smell? Cigar smoke?
Cigars always reminded her of Dick. It couldn’t be Dick, he must still be in
his office: she’d checked less than five minutes ago. And Bob hadn’t appeared
in ages. Hopefully he wasn’t anywhere near the girls, although not long before
the first striking incident she’d seen Bob coming from the room next door to the
twins, so it was hard to be a hundred percent sure where he’d turn up. The
girls didn’t know about the plan yet, but Mrs Sheng was pretty certain they’d
be keen. Getting them packed and ready without fuss might be the riskiest part
of the whole business. ‘Gilbert?’

‘Did you hear something?’ he whispered. They
were at the corner which turned into the wing the twins were on.

‘No.’

‘Shall I put the torch on?’

‘No!’ She remembered the way Bob had leapt
out of the darkness, lashing at her. ‘It’s six doors down on the left. We can
do it by feel. I’ll go first.’

Eighteen hours earlier, Mrs Sheng power-walked
out to the front gate of the hotel, testing the ground. She’d chatted briefly
with the three men on the gate, did a few stretches and jogged back inside. They
didn’t have the gate fully closed and it appeared the guards were more interested
in keeping people out who weren’t guests, rather than locking people in. Six
hours later she did the same thing again, but with Gilbert, which gave the
three men a laugh because Gilbert even power-walked like a pansy. This time she
would take the twins too, and the four would waltz right on through, and just
keep on walking. They’d head for a friend of Gilberts on the outskirts of
Queanbeyan. Gilbert had a small compass which he’d bought from a $2 shop years
ago, and all they had to do was keep walking south-east for about a day. They’d
have to go super-slowly, but he believed it was definitely do-able. Mrs Sheng carried
a day-pack containing four packets of uncooked fettuccini and six liters of
filtered water in three empty coke bottles. The water would be needed for
drinking, so the pasta would have to do raw. Gilbert’s most valuable addition
to their booty was a fully-functioning torch with six (supposedly) new AA
batteries. The torch took three batteries and had a “low-power” setting which
they hoped to eke out for twelve hours, and should see them safely to
Queanbeyan.

The fifth doorway. Her fingers felt ahead
along the skirting board as she kept crawling forward down the hall. There it
was again, that faint waft of cigar. Mrs Sheng paused, waiting for Gilbert to
catch up. The twin’s room must be the next one.

Dick’s truck had smelt of cigar smoke. Positively
reeked of it. That was the first thing she’d noticed when he turned up that day
at Mulloolaloo. The Channel Six team arrived to do live coverage of a lunar
eclipse at the observatory, which turned out to be fairly boring, as is usual
for eclipses, lunar or otherwise. Three days later he phoned, and the following
evening they met in Canberra for cocktails, then dinner in a flash restaurant. She
was a lonely divorcee in a foreign country—and he was loaded—what was she
supposed to do! Afterwards they had sex in Dick’s luxurious hotel room, which
like the lunar eclipse turned out to be big, big build-up, then overall yawn,
yawn. At least it’d been over quick. Somehow, she’d expected more. The only odd
thing was that at 3.15am, when she was lying awake but not moving (as she’d
been for some time) he got up, dressed quietly and left. She thought he might be
sorting something for the TV, or even arranging a surprise breakfast for them
both, which would’ve been nice, but he simply never came back. Two weeks later
he phoned to ask about some unrelated, trivial astronomical event and his early
departure wasn’t mentioned. However he’d quoted Mulloolaloo on the news several
times which her boss at the station was more than happy about. TV coverage equaled
funding, as far as Dr Zoy was concerned. Dick called another seven times over
the following eighteen months but only for comment on space-related who-ha. Never
to meet. Mrs Sheng gradually felt dumped. Which was silly, because there hadn’t
been anything in the first place, as she’d told herself a million-and-one
times. Maybe after you’ve divorced one husband who’s a drunk and compulsive
gambler, anything looks good. For a moment her mind ran back to Macau and her
old life and she realized how infrequently she
did
think about it. But
Dick Snow had been there almost every day, like a virus burrowing into her subconscious.
Latching on during that lunar eclipse then gnawing insidiously away and niggling
at the wound, unforgotten, emerging only when—

Gilbert?

‘Gilbert? Where are you?’ she whispered.

From behind came a muffled, cut-off gasp followed
by a rapid, repeated
thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, thump
on the carpet only meters away, which she couldn’t place at all. ‘Dick, is that
you? Bob? Please Dick, is that you?’

A moment later, out of nowhere, a loop of electrical
wire drooped over her head and settled on her shoulders. Mrs Sheng barely had
enough time to reach up, feel it tightening, then utter a frantic: ‘Oh God!’