The Tankermen Page 9

  ‘Eat up,’ Jed commanded Finn. ‘This might be your last bloody meal.’

  7

  Into the Wall

  Straight after tea they went to the cutting. It felt like late afternoon at seven; there was still plenty of light in the clear sky, and the city as they rode through it had a loose-collared, relaxed air about it, as well as the sparkle of Christmas decorations in every shop window.

  At the cutting, though, they felt as if they’d been thrown into a pit. The great gap yawned at them, the walls towered and the traffic whipped past at high speed around the curve.

  With difficulty Finn found the two fine lines he’d marked that afternoon. ‘Here. Feel this bit here,’ he said to Jed.

  Jed flattened his hands against the wall and waited. ‘Feels like sandstone,’ he said flatly.

  ‘You’ve got to concentrate,’ Finn scolded, pressing his own hands on to the wall. ‘It’s like really tiny electric shocks or something.’

  Jed listened some more. ‘Sorry, mate, I can’t feel a thing. I’m not saying you’re kidding me, but I’m just not getting any messages.’

  ‘No?’ Finn was disappointed—it hadn’t been much of a clue, but it had been something. ‘Maybe I am just imagining it. It’s not very strong . . .’

  ‘Well, whatever you can feel, this looks about the right place, as far as I remember. It’s where the tanker went in.’

  They took up a position behind a parked kombivan. Jed sat on the kerb near the bike, ready to jump on at the sound of the tanker’s roar, while Finn went back and forth along the cutting wall, listening with his hands.

  ‘It’s definitely there, that signal,’ he said, crossing the road to Jed, ‘Sort of buzzing. I’m sure it’s not just me.’

  ‘Whatever you say. But stay away from there, hey? I’m petrified a bloody great truck’s going to come bowling out of nowhere and flatten you.’

  ‘Yeah, but I guess they won’t come out for a while. What’s the earliest we’ve seen them? Ten o’clock?’

  ‘Last night, yeah. But you saw ’em yesterday morning, and other mornings pretty early. Sounds like they go out all the time, whenever they feel like it.’

  Finn sat down beside him and stared past the kombi at the marked section of the wall. For the moment there was no traffic, and the quietness, beneath the deepening blue sky, was like a lovely lie Finn wanted desperately to believe. But he was awake to everything, suspicious of the peace and inactivity, expecting danger and noise to burst out at any second.

  ‘Stop twitching, Finn. I keep thinking you’re hearing something I’ve missed.’

  ‘Sorry. I just hate the idea of waiting around here for hours. It’s so frustrating. If Dad’s in there, and we’re out here, and we can’t do anything . . .’

  ‘We can’t, and that’s all there is to it. Sit tight, mate. This is the best place for us. We can see ’em come and go, and we might just get through that wall with ’em and find your Dad.’

  ‘But they probably know we’re here. If they followed me yesterday—’

  ‘They’d be on your tail right now. And they’re not, are they? I tell you, they’re smart in some ways and thick in others. I’ve been thinking about it. Why shoot that copper and not you? Why blast the fountain to bits over at Wynyard and let you run off home? Seems to me their security system’s got holes in it you could get a road train through—well, a motorbike, anyway.’ Jed grinned and stuck an elbow into Finn’s ribs.

  Finn didn’t smile back. ‘Gee, I hope you’re right.’

  ‘Course I am. Here, have some dessert.’ Jed pulled a handful of muesli bars from his jacket pocket.

  ‘No, thanks. We just had dinner!’

  ‘Yeah, but that was a whole half-hour ago!’

  ‘But how can you eat, now? I feel sick just thinking about it.’

  Jed shrugged and tore open a wrapper. ‘It’s not so bad for me, I guess. These guys aren’t after me—yet, anyway. And it’s not my dad inside there. I don’t wanna sound heartless, but I guess that makes a difference. Anyway, it’s all so hard to believe, it’s a bit like watching television, isn’t it? As if it’s happening to someone else.’

  Finn shivered. ‘I wish I felt like that.’

  Jed watched him, chewing. ‘So,’ he said, crumpling up the muesli bar wrapper and stowing it in his pocket, ‘you’re not so pissed off with your dad that you want to let him rot in there?’

  ‘Well,’ said Finn after thinking for a while, ‘I wanted to get back at him, but not like this—not hurt, or kidnapped or whatever. I just wanted to worry him a bit, that’s all.’

  ‘Hmm. Well, I guess you did that, all right. He probably thought he was saving your skin, bailing up those guys in that back lane.’

  ‘I know,’ said Finn wretchedly.

  ‘Well, you did warn him, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, but he didn’t believe me. I should have made sure he believed me.’

  ‘Huh, that’d be pretty impossible. There are a lot of things you have to see to believe, and these guys with the tanker are one of them.’

  ‘I should’ve told him it was all connected with that “bomb” at Wynyard, just so he’d know what he was up against.’

  ‘Shut up, will you, Finn?’ said Jed kindly. ‘What’s the point of letting all that stuff get to you? Just concentrate on what we’ve got to do now.’

  ‘Which is what?’

  ‘Wait. Just watch and wait.’

  Finn groaned and lay back on the pavement. Almost immediately there was a roar beyond his feet. Jed grabbed his arm and he sat up to see the tanker slip out of the rock-face, swerve left and drive straight past them towards the city.

  Finn jumped up and ran after them around the curve in the road. The tanker trundled away.

  ‘Yay!’ said Jed, standing and stretching. ‘I guess that means we don’t have to wait all night.’

  ‘How long do you reckon we’ve got before they get back?’

  ‘Half an hour, maybe, if they’re going up to the Cross. Did you see those guys? With those silly gas masks, it’s no wonder they’re so slow on the uptake—they must be half blind. It’s a wonder the cops haven’t stopped ’em—oh. They probably have, haven’t they?’

  Finn’s heart was still racing from the false alarm, and from having seen the tankermen again. It was thoroughly unpleasant, that tanker slipping out through the rock—it made him fear that the men could pop up anywhere unannounced. He wasn’t even safe with his back to a wall.

  ‘Now, just cool it, Finn.’ Jed leaned against the Kombi, which rocked with his weight. ‘The idea is to be as calm and cold as they are. We’re taking a calculated risk here, but I like our chances. They’re based on some pretty crazy evidence, but put ’em together and they look good.’

  Finn tried to keep still. ‘You reckon? Nothing looks good, if you ask me,’ he said dolefully.

  Jed chuckled. ‘No? What about your grandma? She was looking pretty healthy, going on what you’ve told me.’

  ‘Yeah, but it couldn’t have been her. It was a younger woman. They said after the stroke, the second one, there wasn’t much chance of her having a normal life again. She certainly wasn’t getting any better all this year, when I was visiting her.’

  ‘But she sent you a postcard, and somehow she got on the TV. Something’s going on up there.’

  Finn gave a non-committal shrug, but what Jed had said was perfectly true. And what had Danielle written—that Sarah was coming to Sydney with ‘important news’? Maybe Gran had made a miraculous recovery, as soon as her family were out of her hair. What, and taken a quick trip down to the Victorian coast to sneak on to the set of Paradise Row? Come on, if she were that healthy she’d have come bouncing down to Sydney to give him this message in person. He knew his gran—she was incredibly stubborn when she had her mind set on something. She’d have kept watch at the post office for him, day after day until he’d shown up.

  Finn shook his head: it wasn’t possible. But even if it hadn’t been Gran on
Paradise Row, how had she known what was going to happen in the background of that scene? How had she written the postcard? He knew she could talk, or at least make herself understood, when she wanted to, but writing? Her right hand was useless, and she could never have produced such a neat job with her left. It didn’t make sense—but not a lot did make sense these days, he had to admit. His mother gone, his father missing, his step-family’s lives turned upside down—who knew what might have happened to his gran?

  The few scraps of visible cloud were turning petrol-pink, and the cutting, as it darkened, seemed to grow higher and narrower. Finn would have liked to race through the tunnel like the cars, and out on to the broad street that ran along beside the docks, where he could breathe in the watery air and see a more distant horizon. Here it was all closed in, by the warehouse walls and the great doors of the disused pier buildings. The darkness gathered faster.

  Jed stood up suddenly and tipped his head to one side. ‘I think I hear, with my little ear—’

  Finn listened too, and heard the rough engine noise distinguish itself from the city’s low hum. Jed leapt on to the bike and started it up, then stood to peer through the kombi’s windows at the road beyond. Finn climbed on behind him, fear clotting in his stomach.

  ‘Yep, it’s them! And they’re slowing down . . .’ Jed snapped his visor down. Finn hooked his thumbs into the big man’s belt loops and hunched down behind him. Howling down through the gears, the grimy tanker passed them. The bike slid out of its hiding place and straight up to the tanker’s rear end.

  ‘Not so close!’ muttered Finn. The tanker loomed above them, its brake lights burning. There was just space between the right mudflap and the bottom rung of a ladder that went up the back of the tank for Jed to nose in the bike’s front wheel. But what about when they turned? Finn thought, waiting for disaster to strike.

  Jed grabbed the ladder with his left hand as he killed the bike’s engine with his right. Finn at once felt the pins-and-needles sensation, but this time it was strong, to a point just short of discomfort, and it was all over his body, inside and out, as if every molecule of him was jittering. But he hardly had time to notice it before the tanker turned in the cutting. Jed steered the bike around smoothly with it.

  Finn saw the rock wall coming at them around the tanker. For a split second it was solid in front of them, with only Jed’s hand plunged into it as if into water. Finn drew back instinctively and for another moment the wall bit down between him and Jed before it flowed back over him and they were all inside.

  He thought he’d been blinded; whiteness overtook his eyes. Then he thought he was dead, the blank brilliance was so inhuman. But he could feel Jed’s belt loops cutting into his thumbs, and the bike beneath them, and hear the tanker’s engine growling. Gradually he was able to see Jed’s helmet and jacket, pale as if in an overexposed photograph, and the tanker ladder rising into the whiteness. But the most convincing evidence that he was still in his own body was its awareness of a powerful, choking humidity in the air around him. That, and a foul, unnameable smell. Finn opened his visor and gasped for air.

  Jed let go of the ladder and curved the bike to a stop close behind the tanker. Finn slid off and ducked below the chassis, and Jed kicked down the bike stand and followed him. Behind them the place where they’d entered was a hole in the whiteness, a square of normality. Finn could see the far wall of the cutting, and a car zipped by in front of it.

  The cabin doors opened and slammed shut again, and Finn could see splashed white boots standing by the front wheels. He prayed they’d have no business up the back of the tanker. Through the muting effect of his helmet he heard a burst of static speech. That’s it, he thought, they’ve noticed us.

  The boots moved along the truck until they were just about level with Finn’s face. He stared at them, at the smears and droplets of brown-black oil. Then his whole body flinched at a loud clank. The cylinder above his head began to slide out. He sweated there, watching the boots shift as the two tankermen got a grip on the box.

  They carried it a few yards away, then laid it down and knelt on the floor. Jed crept in beside Finn, his visor up. Finn put a hand on his shoulder to keep him still—it would only take one sideways glance for the tankermen to spot them.

  He heard Jed’s whisper, so faint it was like a voice in his own head. ‘Look at their hands.’ Finn tried to focus on the grubby white gloves working on the white floor.

  They were unscrewing something . . . white bolts. But there was something unnatural about the way they did it: the arms of their suits seemed to get very twisted. Finn watched a hand clamp on a screw head and twist it—it made two full turns. And the suit, pulled tight around it, showed up the shape inside as not quite hand-like. The thumb was okay, but the fingers seemed too narrow, as if there were only two of them, and those welded together, and locked into a curve.

  ‘Pincers,’ he mouthed to Jed.

  ‘Bionic men,’ Jed mouthed back. The oval of his helmeted face was vivid red and trickling with sweat.

  Finn tried to shrink against the floor as the two figures stood and picked up the cylinder. One lowered himself into a hole that had opened in the floor, and the other followed him down.

  As soon as they were out of sight Jed took off his helmet and wiped his face and neck with a handkerchief. Then he froze, and Finn heard two sounds that made his skin shrivel: a low moan that could only be human, and the constant, alarmed mewl of a kitten. He tore off his own helmet and tried to tune his ears to the sounds coming from the opening in the floor: dull thuds and shufflings, the dreadful mewing, something that flapped.

  ‘What’s going on down there?’ he muttered to Jed.

  ‘I hate to think, mate.’

  They both ducked their heads uselessly as a gloved hand appeared, gripping the rim of the opening. The two tankermen climbed out. One reached back into the hole, and the slab door slid up into place, and they screwed it closed with their pincer-hands. Finn felt the back of his neck tighten: now they would turn, and see them, and get their guns, and—

  ‘They move slow,’ whispered Jed about a centimetre from Finn’s ear. ‘If they see us, hop on the bike and we’ll burn out of here.’

  Finn nodded and watched the blank ovals of the tankermen’s eye-pieces as they stood and walked past the tanker, farther into the whiteness. He spread-eagled himself underneath it and tried to see where they were going.

  Their suits were near-impossible to pick out against the prevailing white glare; Finn had to use their dirty boots as his guide. The only other thing he could make out was a circle of metal around what looked like the door of a bank vault, directly in front of the tanker at some unjudgable distance, and it was towards this that the tankermen walked. They opened it, stepped inside, and pulled it to behind them without casting a single glance backwards. Finn and Jed both let out their breath, and Finn rested his forehead on the glossy floor for a moment.

  ‘Did you see the way they walked, though?’ said Jed, and Finn raised his head and nodded.

  ‘Kind of . . . slow, and . . .’

  ‘Kind of spastic. You know, as if they couldn’t quite control it.’ Jed was still whispering.

  ‘Yeah.’ Finn remembered his first sighting of a tankerman, noticing the effort involved in holding the hose still. Maybe the hose hadn’t been the problem; maybe it had been the tankerman’s own limbs. There was something wrong with them, maybe. Maybe the suits didn’t work and the people inside had been contaminated by the stuff they handled—partially dissolved, maybe. Finn shuddered.

  ‘Know what I’m reminded of?’ Jed was wriggling out backwards. ‘That movie Terminator, where the guy’s really a robot, sort of dressed up in a person’s body. But he’s a bit clunky, a bit basic. You know, just programmed to do a certain range of things.’

  ‘Like terminate? Thanks, Jed, that’s really cheered me up.’

  Jed kicked Finn’s behind as he too squirmed out. ‘I mean, those guys are like robots that haven’t ha
d a body fitted yet. Those suits are to make ’em look human without having to go to all the trouble of making a body that looks realistic.’

  Finn stared hopelessly up at him. ‘Someone’s already gone to a lot of trouble, making robots that walk, and fire weapons, and drive. What kind of money would there be behind that amount of technology?’

  ‘You’re right. We’re dealing with big bikkies here, real power.’ Jed was stripping off his jacket; underneath it his T-shirt was patched with sweat. ‘You’d think they could afford air-conditioning,’ he said in his normal voice, glancing around at the nothingness, the exhausting, shapeless light.

  ‘They’re probably watching us or listening to us, somehow. The place has got to be bugged.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Finn hung his helmet on the bike’s handle and they both ran, doubled over, to the door-sized opening in the floor. It was a grating, not a slab—a white-on-white pattern of squares that filled the rectangle made by the screw heads.

  ‘Whatever that smell is, it’s from down there,’ said Jed, pulling his head back and making a face.

  ‘And so’s whatever’s making those horrible noises.’ Finn glanced at the bank-vault door, then knelt and grabbed the ridge in the centre of one of the screws. Jed reluctantly followed suit. He didn’t want to see what was causing that moaning, that mewing. But what else were they here for?

  ‘Maybe we should go through that door after those guys,’ Finn said, pausing in his work.

  ‘No thanks. If they can’t stand fresh air, I’d hate to try breathing what they can stand! Besides, you never know how many mates they’ve got in there, or how many weapons. Ah, there we go.’ The head of his screw budged at last, and Jed unwound it about ten centimetres, at which point it refused to move any further.

  ‘Funny stuff they’re made of,’ Finn said. ‘Is it plastic or metal?’

  ‘Beats me. Something you can only get at Martian Mitre 10 probably.’ Jed began work on the last screw.