The Tankermen Read online

  Finn heard the familiar hectoring tone creep into his father’s voice, and automatically bent his head to allow the lecture to pass over it. But there was silence, and he looked up to see his father, with an effort, close his lips. They both looked at the desktop, which was clear except for the sample and the pad of paper on which Finn’s father had been drafting a letter in his slanting, even handwriting. Finn felt a lecture hovering in the air somewhere very close, ready to break through at any second.

  The phone rang. ‘Uh-oh,’ said Finn’s dad, and picked it up. ‘Okay, put him through. Sit down, Don. I’ve been waiting on this call. I’ll be as quick as I can.’

  Finn resisted approaching the desk and sitting in the visitor’s chair. That businesslike voice didn’t have any power over him, he told himself, at the same time as he felt his habitual obedience trying to drag him forward. The telephone conversation, incomprehensible, flowed soothingly around him, and images flashed through his mind of his own room at Dad and Janet’s, of his comfortable bed, of some of the meals his dad cooked, like lasagne alla Finley, the Parmesan cheese softening into the tomatoey mince . . .

  His dad looked up, waving him towards the chair. Finn hesitated, then shook his head, mouthed ‘Gotta go,’ backed out of the office, and pulled the door closed behind him. He hurried away down the corridors, rubbing his hands down the thighs of his jeans, his heart still thundering.

  Outside, he was just in time to catch a city-bound bus. He sat right down the back in a corner, breathing deeply, wobbly with relief. At least, he thought it was relief. He’d done it—delivered the sample, escaped without a scene, without having to explain himself or make any promises about returning or go through any kind of third degree. Maybe he was disappointed—maybe he’d really wanted his father to make a fuss, force some kind of showdown.

  He should have known, though, that his dad just wasn’t that kind of guy. He’d never begged in his life, and Finn wanted him to beg. He wanted to hear him say he missed Finn and needed him at home. He wanted one of those forbidden hugs. But even during the split with his mum his father hadn’t said any of those things fathers tell their kids in the soaps, about how the kids are loved whatever happened to the parents. His mum had talked, and cried a lot, and talked some more—maybe too much. She’d let Finn see the stretch and twang of every nerve, and even nowadays, when she prided herself on a full recovery, the instinct to protect her and the wish to be protected by her were always fighting away inside him.

  From his father, though, he’d been shut out, along with the rest of the world. His father’s distrust had clanged down between them like a steel gate. The first year, before Janet had arrived and found the chink in the gate, had been murder—Finn and his dad being ultra-polite, moving around the house stiffly, silently, like thieves. But even then, at the end of every excruciating day, there’d been this bedtime ritual that had made up for the distance: his father reading him some stories, and then Finn falling asleep in front of the television and waking up in his father’s arms being carried to bed. He’d doze off again with his dad rubbing his back, at first a little too roughly, then softer. That hadn’t happened much, since Janet, since Alex. Often it was Finn himself settling Alex while Janet and his father talked in the sitting room—one voice calm and constant, the other full of knots and strains and irritations, bursting out at intervals. And Alex’s whisper: ‘I want a drink of milk, Donny.’ ‘You can’t, mate. You just cleaned your teeth. You want a story instead?’ A faint rustle on the pillow as Alex nodded in the dark.

  Finn tapped his fingers together on his knees, glanced out the back window of the bus and stopped breathing. A couple of cars away a grimy tanker was keeping pace with the bus. He could see no brand name on it, and the cars in front of it obscured the numberplate. What gave him the shivers, though, was the tinted windscreen. What truckie would ever darken the windscreen almost to black, so that he and his passenger could only be seen as bulky shadows propped in the cab?

  Finn sank into his seat, the back of his head prickling. The bus began to slow down towards a bus-stop, and he watched the side windows, expecting the tanker to overtake. It didn’t. When the bus pulled out into the traffic again he risked another glance out the back and saw the tanker, too, pulling away from the kerb.

  The journey into town was long and harrowing. For a while Finn could keep out of sight by lying across the back seat, but eventually there were too many people on the bus for that. He shifted forward a few seats so that there were some protective layers between himself and his pursuers if they should decide to fire at the back of the bus. Where were the bus’s fuel tanks, he wondered uncomfortably. Right underneath him, probably.

  At every bus-stop he heard a series of angry toots on car horns as the tanker halted behind them. And he couldn’t stop himself glancing behind, bracing himself against the jerk of fear in his stomach every time he saw the tanker following. Some of the passengers behind him began looking slightly unnerved, and a couple glanced over their shoulders to see what was making Finn so jittery.

  As they crossed the bridge Finn began to panic. The bus route ended at Wynyard Station. He couldn’t hide from them much longer.

  Feeling doomed, he peered forward and saw the greenery of Wynyard Park approaching. As the bus slowed he waited for a few people to gather at the doors before he stood; maybe he could protect himself by surrounding himself with a human shield.

  But the shield dispersed, striding off in all directions as he stepped on to the pavement. He skipped after the greater part of it, which was a single file of shoppers crossing the park.

  Halfway over he looked behind. The tanker had stopped in the middle of Clarence Street in front of a line of hooting vehicles. The cab window was gliding down. Finn thought he saw a red twinkle behind it, but he couldn’t be sure; he was running too fast, darting as erratically as possible among the shoppers. He dashed past the fountain and ran down the path beyond.

  A shock wave rushed forward and splattered his back. Thrown water and shards of brickwork flew past him. He felt something embed itself in the back of his thigh, but it didn’t burn and it caused him no pain, so he kept right on running.

  He veered around a woman who was standing stunned, gaping at something behind him, and took a couple of flying leaps over people who had been knocked over by the blast. There was a little arcade he needed, right by the Menzies Hotel. His eye was on it, and all the people turning wide-eyed to see what had happened would come between him and the tankermen. Just as long as they didn’t fire again.

  Two pillars of the covered walkway sheltering the bus-stops changed from green to orange as he approached, and flew apart as he charged by. He flung up his arms to protect himself, and kept running; a piece glanced off the back of his head. He dodged a slow-moving bus, nearly slammed back into it as a taxi pared his toenails, and threw himself into the arcade entrance. Behind him there was much crashing and shouting as the walkway roof collapsed, but he didn’t dare spare it a glance.

  He didn’t stop running until he reached Martin Place and was on the Kings Cross train. The pain in his thigh hit him then, like a bad cramp locking up half his leg. The other passengers tried not to notice as he sat groaning in the seat, feeling blood trickle down his calf.

  At the Cross he managed to hobble out, get up the escalators and fall into a taxi on Victoria Road.

  ‘I should take you to hospital, no?’ the driver said nervously, risking short glances at Finn’s body stretched out shaking on the back seat.

  ‘No, it’s okay,’ Finn said weakly. ‘I’m going to my friend’s place. He’s a doctor—he’ll look after me. I’m sorry, though, for messing up your seat.’ He waved a bloody hand.

  ‘Is okay. All plastic; it wipe off.’ The driver cheerfully flapped a rag at him, then swerved and swore with fright. ‘I nearly run dat bloke over!’

  Finn laid his head on the seat and passed out.

  5

  On the Case

  He woke up a couple of
times, but not properly—once when Jed, the taxi driver and one of Jed’s mates were manhandling him up the stairs to the flat, muttering instructions to each other, and once when Jed extracted the piece of debris from his thigh. Then he yelped and began to shake, feeling terribly cold. He felt Jed’s big hand firm on the middle of his back. ‘It’s okay, mate. You just rest a bit now, hey?’ And he sank away again as a blanket was spread over him.

  When he surfaced again the room was empty and incongruously beautiful. There was a big tree outside the open window, and a couple of birds were sitting in it somewhere, unravelling a complicated duet in the afternoon light. Sunbeams moved about in the floating dust of the room and lit up circles of the crimson carpet.

  Finn lay still, his eyes open but the rest of his body totally relaxed. He could feel a crowd of thoughts hovering at the edge of his brain like Christmas-sale shoppers waiting for the doors to open, but for the moment he refused to let them in. He stared at the leaves moving near the window and listened to the sounds beyond the room, the murmurous traffic, the scratchy sound of a voice on a radio, the footsteps of two people passing on the pavement below. There was the odd shift and thump of someone moving around the flat. Jed?

  Finn turned his head on the arm of the sofa and his body woke up, stiff and cranky in every joint. He tested both legs, lifting and twisting the foot of each in turn, and discovered that it was the right one that was injured—it felt as if the whole back of it was sheered off and raw, but when he put his hand to it there was only a narrow strip of bandage around it. Someone had taken his jeans off to get to the wound. He pushed the blanket aside and twisted around trying unsuccessfully to see the damage.

  Every skerrick of blood had been sponged away from the back of his leg. He looked at the carpet, but could see no darker blots on the crimson that might be blood. He couldn’t see his jeans anywhere, either. It was as if nothing had happened—except for the pain, of course.

  And except for the fact that he was here, back at Jed’s. Thank heaven for Jed, or he’d have had to get that taxi to take him to Strathfield, or, worse, to hospital. He’d be lying there now with cops all around him firing questions, for sure. But he was left in peace—or in as much peace as anyone could expect after seeing the things he’d seen.

  There were footsteps outside the door and Finn hurriedly pulled the blanket back over himself. Jed’s head appeared.

  ‘Oh, you’re back in the land of the living, are you?’ He grinned. ‘How you feeling?’

  ‘Okay,’ Finn said uncertainly, feeling the doors in his brain open and the shoppers flood in. ‘Seen my pants anywhere?’

  ‘Yeah, they’re in the dryer. I’ll go get ’em.’

  The jeans were spotlessly clean and hot, with a neat tear a couple of centimetres long in the back of the right thigh. ‘What was it?’ said Finn, poking his finger through the hole.

  Jed produced a sharp little grey stone from his pocket. ‘This. I kept it for you.’

  ‘Hey, gee, thanks.’ Finn rolled his eyes and grinned. He fingered the stone and then spoke with an effort. ‘I s’pose you want to know what happened.’

  ‘I already do. It’s been on the radio since before you got back.’

  ‘Yeah? What are they saying?’

  ‘This happened round about Wynyard at eleven this morning, right?’ Finn nodded. ‘A couple of bombs went off, they reckon.’

  ‘Bull, they did!’

  ‘Okay, tell us your side of the story, then.’

  Firmly stomping on the panic he was beginning to feel, Finn told him about the tanker following the bus and his flight through the park with the tankermen firing at him. He had a sick memory of the people toppling around him. ‘Did anyone get killed?’ he forced himself to ask when he’d finished.

  ‘Minor injuries all round,’ said Jed. ‘A bruise here, a few stitches there. The bomb squad reckons it was lucky no-one was hurt worse.’

  Finn ran his hands over his face. ‘I was lucky they had such lousy aim. But how come no-one saw them firing, no-one noticed them? Why do they think it was bombs?’

  ‘I dunno, mate.’ Jed gazed at the windowful of yellow-green coins of moving sunlight. ‘Maybe they say one thing and think something else. Maybe they don’t want to scare people. I dunno.’ He gave Finn a long look. ‘One thing they do want to do is talk to you.’

  ‘They do?’

  ‘Slightly-built youth in black jeans and a white T-shirt seen running from the scene. Sound familiar?’

  ‘What, they think I did it?’

  ‘Mate, they don’t know what’s going on—they want all the clues they can get, I’d say.’

  ‘If that taxi driver hears the news, he’ll know it was me. He’ll lead ’em straight here.’

  ‘Is that so terrible? I mean, wouldn’t it be good to have the professionals in on this game?’

  Finn closed his eyes for a moment. His father’s face, battling for control above his white shirt and grey tie, swam before him.

  Jed touched his arm. ‘You’re getting hurt, mate. You’re lucky you weren’t blown to bits out there. A lot of people are lucky, come to think of it.’

  ‘I know,’ said Finn in anguish. ‘But I can’t help thinking, if it’s so dangerous just to have seen those guys with the tanker, then to tell more people about them is like daring them to come and get me.’

  ‘Think so?’

  ‘Yeah. They’re after me, for sure,’ said Finn. ‘Somehow they know I reported them, and that I gave the sample to my dad. They know I’m on to them, and they want me out of the way. But what’s really scary is, they know where I am. Somehow they found out where I went this morning, ‘cause they didn’t follow me out there—I would have seen them. They just suddenly turned up, coming after the bus—’

  Jed stopped him. ‘Right, and face it, what a dumb time to turn up!’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, you’d already got rid of the sample, hadn’t you? It was in the lab. Why didn’t they blow up the lab or something? Or why didn’t they come here last night? The sample was sitting right there, on that table, all night—what stopped them coming here and blowing us apart? If you ask me, these fellers are pretty slow off the mark. They may have fancy weapons, but (a) they don’t use them very well and (b) they have a hard time locating their target, wouldn’t you say?’

  Finn soaked up every word like a sponge, trying to conjure a feeling of relief. ‘Yeah, they seem a bit clumsy. Shooting that cop instead of me, for instance. They didn’t come looking for me then, and I was just behind a fence.’

  ‘And what’s more, for people who don’t want to draw attention to themselves they’re pretty dumb to go blazing away in the middle of town in broad daylight, hey.’

  ‘But maybe they disguise themselves. Maybe other people don’t see them, and maybe their weapon is made so that the marks look like bomb explosions.’

  ‘Come on, Finn, that’s just ridiculous,’ said Jed.

  Finn looked hard at him for reassuring disbelief, but Jed was looking at the floor. Then he glanced at Finn and they both heard how thin his words sounded. ‘Jed, they just don’t act like any people I’ve ever heard of.’

  ‘I don’t know about that.’ Jed looked away again. ‘You watch the TV, any of the heavy news documentaries—there are terrorists, crime bosses. Rubbing out one policeman and a few innocent bystanders’d be nothing to people like that. They don’t operate like us normals. They don’t know how to feel guilty. They just go after what they want, and if you’re in the way—splat!’

  ‘But like you say, they didn’t get me. They react too slow, they’ve got lousy aim. Why would some big, rich company hire such useless people to get rid of its waste?’

  ‘Because it’d be no loss if they got caught, maybe. I don’t know. Maybe they don’t even know who they’re working for—they just get a shipment of stuff and orders to dump it.’

  ‘And a licence to go after anyone who sees them—and eliminate him.’

  Finn
looked at Jed, hoping again to hear him scoff. But Jed stood up slowly, stroking his beard. ‘Let’s have a nice cup of tea,’ he said.

  At four-fifteen Finn came off the phone and joined Jed on the fire-escape steps.

  ‘Well, what did Pops have to say?’ said Jed in a too-ordinary voice.

  ‘It’s toxic, it’s illegal and it’s . . . well, it’s alien.’ He widened his eyes at Jed and they both laughed nervously.

  ‘Alien how?’

  ‘Well, there are some elements in it that they can’t identify. And Dad says the sample must have got contaminated somehow—there are cells in there that just couldn’t survive in that mix of chemicals, but somehow they’re there, and they’re multiplying. So.’ Finn shrugged. ‘Maybe the jar wasn’t as clean as it looked. They want another sample. One of their tests went wrong or something. But they definitely want to know where we found it.’

  ‘So did you tell ’em?’ Finn nodded. ‘So what can they do?’

  ‘They can get the police on to it.’

  ‘Did you tell your Dad how dangerous it was?’

  Finn shifted on the step. ‘I told him they were armed, and where we saw them, and the times, and that. I didn’t let on about them following me, or any of that stuff.’

  There was a pause while Jed thought. ‘Yeah, I guess that makes sense. So what do we do now?’

  ‘Beats me. Keep out of sight.’

  ‘Oh, I get it. This whole thing is an excuse to bludge off me for a place to stay.’

  Finn looked up, horrified. ‘It’s not! I wouldn’t—’

  ‘Just joking, mate, just joking.’ Jed shook Finn’s shoulder until his jaw rattled. ‘You can stay here as long as you need to.’

  ‘What about the other guys?’

  ‘What about ’em? You’re a mate, right? Trev has mates round to stay all the time. Don’t get your knickers in a knot, Finn—no-one minds you being here. Come on, let’s go inside and watch some telly till the aliens come for us.’