Underground

UNDERGROUND

Also by Andrew McGahan

Praise
1988
Last Drinks
The White Earth

ANDREW
McGAHAN

This is a work of fiction.

Nothing in it is meant to be taken as fact.

This edition published in 2007

First published in 2006

Copyright © Andrew McGahan 2006

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National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

McGahan, Andrew.

Underground.

ISBN 978 1 74175 330 1 (pbk.).

1. Terrorism - Australia - Fiction. I. Title.

A823.3

Set in 12.5/15 pt Granjon by Bookhouse, Sydney

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Its name was Yusuf.

Probably a joke by someone in the Department of Meteorology. Or maybe that’s just official policy now. A state of emergency decree from the government. If something looks big and dangerous, then find a means to link it to Islam.

Either way, it was surely the biggest cyclone to hit that part of the Queensland coast in decades—a great-granddaddy of a tropical storm. Category five. Winds gusting over two hundred and ninety k; walls of horizontal rain, like Allah himself was pissing in your face; and a storm surge that had lifted the Pacific Ocean by twenty murderous feet or more.

I was right there in the middle of it all. Six storeys up, my belly on the tiles and one arm wrapped around the balcony railing, hanging on for dear life as I peered over the edge, nearly deafened by the unearthly shriek of the wind. My face stinging. My slotted eyes agonised. The rest of me drenched.
With a whisky glass clutched in my free hand, holding more sea water now than alcohol.

Below me, three years of work was being steadily destroyed. The artificial beach had been the first to go. Huge waves loomed there now, their crests torn into a brown froth that streaked ahead wildly. I couldn’t even tell where the beach had
been
anymore. Hundreds of dump trucks had emptied thousands of tonnes of white sand down there (it cost a fortune) but now it was all just part of the raging ocean.

Even drunk and half-terrified as I was, I could appreciate the irony. Leave the mangroves alone, the environmentalists had said. Leave the dunes behind them alone. They had protested and petitioned and chained themselves to bulldozers—and gone to prison for their troubles. But what did I or my investors care? We wanted a pristine beach for the punters, not mudflats. We wanted open ocean views from the rooms, not the backs of old dunes covered with scrub. So I’d let the construction company loose to rip out the mangroves and level the frontage.

Three years later, the environmentalists were all long gone, no doubt locked up for good these days, but Yusuf was teaching me a lesson. The storm surge had drowned most of the resort. The beach and, behind that, the lawns and gardens and pathways that led to it. Wreckage floated everywhere. The four-acre pool was underwater, with its cabanas and bars, as were the tennis courts, the croquet pitch, and, from what I could see, a fair percentage of the championship links golf course. But what was truly awesome was that the great muddy waves were rolling clear over the lot of it, two hundred metres or more from the normal coastline, and slamming like thunder into the resort’s main buildings.

Up in one of the penthouse suites, I could feel the hotel wing shake with every watery detonation, solid concrete or not. From the floors below came the sloshing din of shattered glass and broken furniture rolling about. And squinting into the
storm I could see that the other buildings were faring worse. The luxury villas, off in their private gardens, were inundated up to the gutters. The restaurant/reception centre was roofless, a mass of papers and tablecloths and curtains, whipping away into the wind. And the great big block of the two-thousand-seat convention centre was crumbling with each wave, like a sandstone cliff collapsing into the sea, filmed on video over millennia and set at furious fast-forward.

‘Come on,’ I yelled at the sky. ‘
COME ON
!’

I was enjoying myself, actually.

In fact, the cyclone was doing me the biggest favour possible. That is, the cyclone, and an insurance policy that was a good month yet from lapsing. Because, to be frank, the Ocean Sands Green Resort was the white elephant of all white elephants. Despite all the money we’d spent, despite all the work we’d done, the place had never opened to the public. And it never would have, storm or no storm. World events had put paid to any hope of that. So I, managing supervisor and public face of the project, was free to cheer and sob and laugh myself sick as it dissolved away like a sandcastle.

The cyclone whooped and sobbed and laughed along too.

It was time for another drink.

I let go of the handrail and allowed the wind to drive me back through the shattered glass doors into the suite proper. I was bleeding from that glass, and from other flying debris, but none of the cuts were serious. Indeed, I felt invulnerable. And why not? God knows how much scotch I’d tossed down or how many grams of dodgy cocaine I’d snorted by that stage. I crawled about the room, a jumble of overturned chairs and empty bottles and filthy plates and torn bed sheets, praying there was still some alcohol surviving somewhere.

Of course, the room had been like that even before the cyclone hit. Julie and I had been living it up hard. For the resort had actually welcomed
two
guests before its untimely
demise. Me, and my assistant publicist, Julie Favmore—twenty-eight years old, cunning as the devil, and horny as all hell. The pair of us had set ourselves up in one of the suites—indeed, the only one that had been properly fitted out, for display purposes, before financial reality sank in and construction ceased. All that time and effort deserved at least one party, I’d decided.

And what a time we had, with the whole place to ourselves. Oh, Julie . . . I wonder where you are now? My old balls are still aching from the things you did to them. It was less than a month ago, after all. And yet you were the very last fuck of my life, it looks likely.

But Julie was long gone by the time the storm really got going. She cleared out as soon as the first warnings came. She was a sensible local lass, for all her sexual depravity, and had seen cyclones before. So I was alone. True, there was a security team on station at the main gate, but they were under strict instructions to let no one else in and, more importantly, not to disturb me. No doubt I should have hauled out of there too, but I was hardly the man to let a mere storm get in the way of a promising bender. Besides, my career was in the toilet once again and, an empty resort aside, I had absolutely nowhere else to go.

Anyway, I found a bottle at last, then sat spreadeagled on the wet marble floor, grinned at the fury out there on the ocean, and drank.

The next thing I knew, everything got quiet. The wind, the noise, the rain—in just a minute or two, it all faded away.

‘Ah!’ said I.

I’d been hoping for this. It’s not every day that you get to see the eye of a cyclone. I lurched to my feet and went back to the balcony to look.

Now I’ve heard that sometimes in the eye of storms people have seen clear blue skies. I didn’t. There were still clouds above. But they weren’t like any clouds I’d seen before—they were a creeping, glowing grey. And they capped a gigantic
bowl of warm, faintly misty air, drifting between towering walls of cloud that curved off into blackness. Five miles across, ten, it was impossible to gauge distances. So vast and calm, and yet the atmosphere thrummed with an electric sense of threat. And while there was no rain or wind, the ocean was still sending breakers across my resort—their sand-stained crests glassy now, and all the more ominous for it—and shuddering booms still quaked through the building.

It felt like the end of the world, and I don’t know how long I stood there, gazing up. But finally a new sound grabbed my attention. It was the crack and splash of something large falling into the water. I peered down over the railing. Several storeys below, the balconies of the lower floors were breaking away from the building and toppling into the sea.

Through the drunkenness and the hum of chemicals, some alarms finally sounded. It was time to get out of there. I was more than happy for the hotel to collapse, but not with me in it. I looked up. The walls of Yusuf’s eye reared in every direction, almost unmoving at a glance, and yet swirling with the slow hypnotism of ferocious speed, seen from far away. Or maybe not so far away. But a carelessness still possessed me. As if I had all the time in the world, I hunted out the bottle again, then reeled off lazily through the bare hallways.

Moisture dripped everywhere, and awful echoes rang up and down the stairs. I descended to the first floor and found it awash up to my knees—and this was still a good fifteen feet above ground level. I paused to open a door that led to a seaward-facing suite. It was a horrible sight, like gazing out from the back of a cave, a tangle of broken concrete and glass, and only the ocean beyond. Even worse, a monster was rolling across the water towards me. From above, each wave had looked big, but now, from sea level, I saw an evil, dirty-brown wall. The water in the room receded to meet it, and in horror I
slammed the door. An explosion seemed to erupt behind it, and water jetted through the cracks like twenty fire hoses.

I staggered away to the other side of the hall and entered a suite on the leeward side of the building. Here, there was much less damage. I waded to the balcony. These would have been the cheaper rooms, for instead of facing the ocean they faced the low coastal hills. Staring out now, I could see that the front car park and landscaping were drowned deep, but perhaps less than one hundred yards away rose a muddy hillside of storm-ravaged scrub and trees. Dry land.

Truth to tell, I hadn’t given much thought to my escape, until then. I’d probably assumed that I would be driving to safety. But my Mercedes was somewhere down in that car park, or sailing halfway to Tahiti by now. I would have to swim. I considered the water—it was relatively calm, here in the lee of the hotel—but it still had a malignant look, with all sorts of debris tossing in greasy undulations. I swigged from the bottle, mustering my resolve, but then the water in the room surged and lifted, and I didn’t so much jump off the balcony as float off it. The bottle was gone from my hand and I was swimming.