Blood & Dust. Jason Nahrung
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white woman straddles him in a room smelling of violets and the heavy, sweet aroma of sugar cane. It's him, but it's not him; his skin is black, and yet it is him. Sweat beads on her lip and dangling breasts as she gasps above him. Then her teeth grow, mesmerising in the candlelight, four fangs gleaming. Nails, clear and sharp, slice into his chest where, in another age, he might have worn the charcoal-filled scars of manhood. His mind screams at the wrongness as she bends over him, breasts pointed and firm, stomach flat, hips wide. She pins him, then latches onto his throat. He flows into her. He is in her and she is in him and it is rapture, rapture that tears his soul as a cockatoo's scream slices across their panting. She bleeds for him, binding him to her - for now but not forever.
A flash of white by the bed. A girl - Willa - in bleached blouse and skirt, a ghostly presence in the fluttering candlelight.
'Welcome, Chris,' she says, and places a hand on the woman's sweaty shoulder where her hair sticks like weed on rocks. 'Welcome to the family.'
He screams in fury. In shame. In hate. Then he is free. Free to run. Free, too late.
Kevin jerked awake, fighting the bedclothes, his chest heaving. What the hell was that about? He grabbed the bedhead for support as he levered himself up. Still a bit weak around the knees. And very, very thirsty. Running a fever, maybe, like his mum said. Is this what having concussion meant - weird dreams and a cold sweat? It was so quiet: midnight quiet. He cracked the curtain - just gone sundown. He shook his head - hadn't been out that long, then - and dug jocks and jeans and a shirt out of the drawers. A crow's call rasped like a rusty hacksaw as he left the room. The hallway light was on, making him squint against the brightness. The house was still, like a museum. It felt as if they were leaving, as if everything was just waiting for the removalists to come. It was not a happy move. Tea. He could smell tea. Hear the chinking of china; murmured conversation interspersed with sobs. Voices: his mother and Meg.
He walked faster, bare feet making barely a sound on the threadbare runner, its burgundy faded to brown. To his left, the familiar sofa and armchairs and television, the front door; straight ahead, the breakfast bar with the kitchen beyond; and to his right, the dining room, just big enough for a cabinet and table. The women were at the table, his mother facing him at the kitchen end, Meg on the far side from him near the back door. His father's .243 leaned in the corner behind his mother with a box of bullets nearby on the bench. Strange, to see the rifle there instead of in the gun safe. Strange to see it there without his father holding it.
'Mum?'
She jumped, knocked her tea over. Swore, dabbed at the mess, then ignored it to hug him. She smelled of English Breakfast and sweat; she wore sorrow like an overcoat. The lines in her face had never seemed so deep. Fresh tears brimmed and she gestured for him to sit at the table. It was as old as he was, big enough to comfortably seat six though there'd only ever been the three. Knife cuts, coffee stains and teapot burns marred the timber. Looking at it now, running his fingers over that abused surface, it was as if he'd never seen it before.
Meg fetched a cloth and mopped up the spilt tea where it puddled around the little glass vase in the centre of the table; a single rose curling to brown drooped over its lip.
'You should be lying down, Kev,' his mother said. 'How do you feel?'
'Just hungry.'
'That's a good sign. I had snags out for dinner.'
'Don't, Mum, it's okay.'
'Don't be silly. We have to eat.'
She went into the kitchen and dug out utensils.
Meg pulled up a chair next to Kevin and said, voice low and anxious, 'Smithy only let us come back to collect some stuff. We weren't meant to stay.'
God, she was beautiful. That tanned skin, smooth there on her chest and the side of her throat where her pulse bobbed. His throat constricted, his stomach tightened with love or lust or both. He needed her, needed to bury himself in her smell and her heat and -
A sharp clank made him jump. He swallowed, aware of the tension in his muscles, the shame of his distracted daydream; here she was, all care and concern, while he could think only of jumping her bones. And with his mother standing right there, too. With his mother standing right there, and his father not.
Meg lifted her hand to reveal a set of keys. 'Smithy gave us these. Found them out the back of the servo. Yours, see - the key ring I gave you. It's not scratched up too bad.'
He mumbled an embarrassed 'thanks', his fingers lingering on hers as he took the keys, the Holden emblem unmarked. He shoved them in his pocket. Keys to a servo that didn't exist, but he'd take them off the ring another time. When he could do it without crying or smashing something.
'We're going to have your mum stay with us for a few nights, at least until the police are finished down at the servo,' she said. 'You can stay, too. Mum and Dad won't mind.'
A car drove past, slow, its headlights glaring against the front windows.
'Is that the ambulance?' his mother asked as the sausages sizzled in the pan. The room filled with the smell of meat frying. 'Or Smithy?'
'I'll check,' Meg said. 'If it's Smithy, let's hope he's got good news.'
FIVE
Reece, barefoot and shirtless, cradled a stubby of beer and forty years of regret. He took in the massive wall of storm clouds building in the west; the humidity had thickened during the day to be almost choking. His body ached all over, as if he'd been dragged here from the roadhouse behind Smith's Land Cruiser rather than in the passenger seat.
He felt bad for Diana Matheson. She was an impressive woman. If his own mother had been that strong, that stoic, well, maybe he wouldn't have joined the cops. If his mother had stood up to the drunken thug of a husband of hers, maybe Reece would've gone on to a respectable public service job, or even, who knew, if he'd stuck with the schooling, to university. Now that would've been funny. It might've been him brandishing a sign on the street march instead of taking names and busting heads. Maybe he wouldn't have had to drive over to the morgue and ID his sister, just another overdosed prostitute dredged up from a Valley gutter. Or maybe it wouldn't have made any difference at all.
The story about the Night Riders being drug traffickers wasn't a line. Taipan's bunch would sell anything, do anything, if it meant staying a step ahead of the Hunters. Whereas drugs were the one thing that the Von Schiller organisation would not touch. Despite the lure of big turnover, Maximilian would have nothing to do with what he described as pollution in society's bloodstream. His people had carte blanche to deal with drug dealers any way they felt fit, as long as it didn't come back on the firm. Reece had done his share, and it still hadn't made up for the loss of his sister. Hell, he'd never even found out who'd sold her the junk. That'd been the spring of '71 and he'd been on Springbok duty. His path had crossed with Mira's and, well, here he was. Smoking and shooing flies on the back veranda of a decrepit pub in a dying town, waiting for the axe to fall. Him and everyone else here, by the look of the place.
A presence tickled at the edge of his brooding mind. Mira. It was never a good sign that her control had slipped enough to allow that sensation to filter through their bloodlink. Hunger stirred, different to the steak and eggs he'd polished off. Pavlovian, that's what it was. Needing that taste, needing it today more than ever to ease his many pains. How angry was she? He blew his concerns out with a last lungful of cigarette smoke and ground the butt out.
Back in his room, he checked his pistol where it lay on the bedside table, then rinsed his face, pulled on shoes and buttoned up his bloodstained shirt. He'd just double-checked that the internal door into the pub was locked when someone knocked on the verandah door. He didn't need to look through the window to know who it was. He could feel her, a seething thunderhead; could see in his mind's eye that boot tapping impatiently on the floor. He opened the door before Mira could kick it in, then stood back with a bob of the head and a muttered 'Strigoi'.
Mira stood, dark and electric, eyes glinting green from the shade of her hood, her custom Driza-Bone draped about her like bat wings. 'What happened, Reece?'
'We