Wish You Were Here (26 page)

‘Bugger,' said Talks To Squirrels, thirty yards behind. ‘Why's he still standing up? I was sure I'd got him.'

‘Can't have done. Here, try again.'

The second bang followed; and still Wesley couldn't feel anything. The lawyer, too, was still resolutely on his feet, though he'd started to go green in the face.

‘This sonofabitch thing ain't working. Here, Two Turtledoves, can you see what I'm doing wrong?'

‘Sorry, Chief. At this range, they should both be stone dead by now.'

Wesley nudged the lawyer in the ribs. ‘Ready to try running away yet?'

‘I'm coming round to the idea, certainly.'

‘Fuck it,' the Indian was saying, ‘it's because I'm a ghost, isn't it? It's just the same with guns as it is with bows and arrows. All right, pass me the dynamite, someone. We'll soon see about that.'

‘My keys,' Dieb whimpered.

BOOM!
The ground shook, and the soundwave hit them before the explosion came anywhere near. As it was; well, you know that gust of hot air you get when you open the door of a fan-assisted oven after it's been going for an hour or so? Well, it was like that. Only rather more so.

‘Gosh.' Wesley, still face down on the ground, could hear the lawyer's voice somewhere over his head.

‘Hey, he was right.'

‘Was he?' Wesley asked, without moving.

‘You bet,' Dieb replied. ‘About the dynamite working even though the gun didn't. They've blown themselves up.'

‘You don't say.'

‘See for yourself. Little bits of them hanging off the trees, like slices of pastrami. Wonder why we weren't incinerated too?'

‘Because,' Wesley was about to suggest; but then it started raining morsels of barbecued Indian, and he didn't feel like saying anything for a while. ‘Can we go now?'

‘I'd still like to have a look for my keys.'

‘Be my guest. I think I'll just stay here for a while.'

A few long, rather horrible minutes passed; and then Dieb came back. ‘No sign of any keys,' he said sadly. ‘The only chance is that they were thrown clear by the blast. In which case, they could be anywhere.'

‘How terribly sad,' Wesley muttered. ‘Were there any survivors?'

‘Huh? Oh, you mean the Indians? No, we're OK on that score. You might just find enough bits to make up a whole one, but only if you weren't too bothered about the colours matching.'

‘I see.' Wesley got up slowly, being very careful where he put his hands and knees. ‘I rather liked him,' he said.

‘Who?'

‘That Chief bloke. He helped me out earlier on, when I had to stalk an eagle.'

Dieb blinked. ‘This eagle,' he said. ‘Did you happen to crack it over the head with a big lump of rock?'

‘I believe so. Why?'

‘That was me.'

‘Oh.'

‘You nearly smashed my skull in,' said Dieb. ‘And I was just about to get my keys back, too. A second later, and I'd have had them.'

‘Is that so?'

Dieb nodded. ‘That girl was handing them to me, and then you came out of nowhere and nearly brained me.'

‘Well I never. Small world, isn't it?'

They stood looking at each other for a moment, neither of them liking terribly much what he saw. ‘Calvin Dieb,' said the lawyer at last, extending a blackened, blood-streaked hand. ‘Pleased to meet you.'

‘Wesley Higgins. Are you having all kinds of weird experiences, too?'

Dieb nodded. ‘I fell in the lake,' he said. ‘I guess that seems to be what causes it.'

‘It is.' They started to walk away. ‘It's because the lake's enchanted.'

‘You don't say.'

‘By an Indian deity called Okeewana,' Wesley said. ‘If you fall in the lake, she makes your dreams come true, or that's what she told me, anyway. Would you believe it, I came all the way from Brierley Hill just to meet her. Took all my money out of the Post Office, used up a whole year's holiday, just to be blown up by a ghost.'

‘I just lost my keys. My car's parked up beside the road, see, and if only I could find them . . .'

Wesley stopped in his tracks. ‘The girl,' he said. ‘You saw her too?'

‘The chubby broad? Yeah, I saw her. Like I said, she'd found my keys, and if you hadn't bashed me over the head . . .'

‘She's not chubby.'

‘The girl I was talking to was. She looked like the Before picture in a slimming advert.'

‘You thought so, did you?'

‘Nice enough kid,' the lawyer went on, apparently not noticing the thin film of ice forming over the other man's voice, ‘but definitely well insulated. The kind that gets real value for money out of a train ticket.'

Wesley made an effort and put aside his annoyance. After all, he reasoned, jerk or no jerk, this extremely unpleasant person was a fellow victim. Working together, pooling their resources, maybe they'd both stand a better chance of—

‘You're no beanpole yourself, Mr Dieb,' he heard himself reply. ‘In fact, if there's anybody round here with an excessive weight problem, it's you. So where do you get off, making cheap cracks about people being fat?'

‘Hey!' Calvin Dieb restrained himself. True, he didn't like people making remarks about the large proportion of him that just hung about round his middle waiting for a hard winter; least of all toffee-nosed Brits who went around beating up on harmless birds with lumps of masonry. On the other hand, here was another guy in the same jam as he was. Maybe if they stuck together, worked as a team . . . ‘Who are you calling fat, you goddamn Limey punk? First you club me half to death, then you get me shot at by a bunch of crazy Indians—'

‘
Me
got
you
shot at? Who was it who wouldn't run away because of his stupid keys?'

‘I wouldn't have needed to run away if you hadn't attacked me, just when I was about to . . .'

In the darkness ahead of them, two horses stood, tethered and patiently waiting.The two men ignored them.

‘May I remind you,' Wesley was saying, ‘that you'd just abducted an innocent girl . . .'

‘I did not. That was that goddamn eagle.'

Wesley sneered. ‘I see. A different eagle, was it? Another huge mutant bird that just happened to be passing? Oh yes, I'm convinced, I really am.'

‘You calling me a liar?'

‘I am now, yes.'

‘Why, you—'

And then, just when Dieb's fist should have connected with Wesley's jaw and Wesley's fist should have landed squarely in Dieb's eye, they both vanished.

 

The moment Linda heard the explosion, she turned and ran.

The scene of the blast wasn't hard to find. There are certain tell-tale signs you look for when you're an experienced newshound, such as huge gaping craters, scraps of smouldering cloth, rashers of roasted flesh; that's the sort of clue your dedicated investigative journalist can read like a book. As soon as Linda scrambled over the rise, her heart stopped still.

One hell of a blast, it must have been; chance of finding anybody even remotely photogenic still alive correspondingly remote. Still, she had to look.

After a lot of grubbing about under fallen trees and scrabbling round in the dirt, she found one survivor, trapped under a large stone dislodged by the explosion. With a display of strength that surprised her, Linda managed to heave the rock out of the way.

‘Hello,' she said. ‘I'm a journalist. What happened?'

‘Explosion,' the survivor croaked. ‘All - killed - except - me.' His face contorted with pain, and he started to cough up blood.

‘Yes, I can see there was an explosion,' Linda replied impatiently. ‘I'm not blind, for God's sake. What was it that blew? One of the Rapier missiles? A reactor core off one of the subs?'

‘Dynamite,' the Indian gasped. ‘Chief threw dynamite into fire. Big explosion . . .'

‘The chief engineer threw dynamite into the fire?' Linda's brow creased. ‘Why the hell did he do that? Wait a bit - was it some kind of internal power struggle between the Cardinals? Tribal infighting between the Queenslanders and the New South Welsh? Or . . . ?'

‘He wanted to see,' groaned the survivor, ‘if it would work.'

‘I got you,' Linda said, her eyes shining. ‘Unauthorised testing of a revolutionary new secret weapon. We could get a worldwide embargo on all US goods if we play our cards right. But then—'

‘No - secret. We - all - knew . . .'

‘And so they had to silence you!' Linda gasped, and sparks crackled up and down her spine like arc-welding ants. ‘A cover-up! They had you terminated so you wouldn't blow the gaff on the illicit arms shipments!'

The Indian moaned softly, and tried to prop himself up on one elbow. ‘No,' he whispered, ‘not that way at all. You got - wrong end of stick. Just accident, that's all.'

Linda gazed down at him sternly. ‘That's what they told you to say, obviously,' she replied, her voice heavy with contempt. ‘Don't try and kid me, buster, I'm a reporter. Now, where were the shipments for? Did the President know? Where did the submarines come into it? And exactly what was the Mafia's role in the overall plan?'

‘You - crazy,' murmured the Indian, falling back. ‘Nothing like that - at all. Only . . .'

Frowning scornfully, Linda straightened up. ‘Ah, the hell with you,' she said. ‘I'll get to the bottom of this somehow, and if you think for one moment you can palm me off with a load of—'

‘Aaagh.'

She looked closely. The Indian appeared to have died; a variant on the old
No comment at this time
routine that even Linda Lachuk found hard to crack. Never mind, she told herself, as she walked on past the crater and the mangled bodies. If they think they can throw me off the scent this easily, they've got a shock coming.

Oh yes.

 

‘Complete dead loss,' sighed Captain Hat, as he slumped into the rabbit-hole where the rest of his company had been waiting for him. ‘Waste of bloody time. Absolutely nothing here worth pinching at all.' He snarled and reached for the bottle, which proved to be empty.

‘Oh,' said Mr Snedge. ‘That's a pity, seeing as how we're stuck here.'

Although he was tempted to refute his first officer's downbeat analysis, on principle, as being bad for morale, Hat decided against it. They'd be bound to ask him why he thought they weren't stuck here; and listening to their commanding officer admitting that he hadn't a clue where they were or how to get home again was likely to be even worse for morale than Snedge's defeatist whimperings. So he ignored them.

‘I blame this crop of punters,' he went on. ‘Deadbeats, the lot of them. I mean to say, here they are acting out their wildest dreams, and not one decent bit of kit have they come up with, between the four of them. No caskets of uncut diamonds, no chests bursting at the hinges with Spanish gold, nothing. All I got was a set of car keys, and I dropped them.'

Nobody commented; an indication that, contrary to all evidence, they weren't quite as thick as they looked. After he'd sulked for five minutes or so, Hat stood up and began to pace the rabbit-hole, stroking his beard thoughtfully and avoiding the piles of rabbit ordure that would have swallowed up a less observant man of his stature without trace. Something was nagging at the back of his mind.

‘I can't help feeling,' he said at last, ‘that I'm somewhere else.'

His men looked at each other. Over the past few thousand years they'd developed a non-verbal shorthand, suitable for eye-contact communication. This particular look meant,
Oh God, he's off again
. Accordingly, they stayed quiet.

‘And it's because of where I am that we're here,' Hat went on. ‘Does that make any sense to anybody?'

‘No, Chief.'

Hat shrugged. ‘That makes two of us, Snedge, because I'm buggered if I know what's going on. Mind you, that's about par for the course in these parts.' He stopped pacing and peered out through the hole at the daylight beyond. ‘On balance, though, I rather think that the me who's somewhere else is hiding from someone and is rather keen not to be found. And that,' he added, closing his eyes, ‘is probably why we're lost.'

‘'Scuse me, Chief?'

‘On the principle,' Hat continued, with the air of someone trying very hard not to listen to what he's saying, ‘that if we can't find ourselves, then neither can anyone else. Does that sound to you like the sort of thing we'd do? Anybody?'

Mr Twist rubbed his chin; fortunately, the skin of his hands was of the texture of boot leather, otherwise he'd have rasped himself down to the bone. ‘Well,' he ventured, ‘I heard dafter things in my time, Chief. Anything's possible.'

‘True.' Hat nodded in acknowledgement of a valid point. ‘We might all get taken rich.You might even shave. Talking of which, Mr Twist, there's something that's been worrying me for five hundred years. How can it possibly be that in all the time I've known you, you've managed to keep the stubble on your chin just precisely the same length? How come I've never seen you clean-shaven, or with a beard?'

‘Dunno, Chief,' Twist replied unhappily, for it was something that had often puzzled him as well. ‘Though they do say,' he went on, ‘as fingernails and hair carry on growing even when you're dead.'

‘But you're not dead, Twist. And your hair never grows.'

‘Maybe it don't grow
because
I'm not dead, Chief.'