Cargo Cult (22 page)

And so the Earth, moving around the
Sun at over thirty kilometres per second, its surface spinning at
almost five hundred metres per second, like a jewelled part in the
celestial clockwork, twirled the East coast of Australia out of the
sunlight and into the shadow.

“What a day!” said Drukk. He was
sitting on the front step with Wayne, watching the sunset and
listening to the cicadas.

“Yeah,” said Wayne, lost in his own
recollections.

Sam and John and Braxx were in the
kitchen trying to work out what was going on. The Vinggan leader
had decreed that no-one should leave the farm. This had surprised
everyone since they had thought they were hostages anyway. Marcus,
in particular, had taken the news badly. He began banging his head
against the wall after realising that he could have just walked out
at any time in the past few hours but now he’d missed his
chance.

The Pebbles of the New Dawn had
thrown John’s furniture out of the master bedroom and had
established an impromptu temple to the Great Spirit. They were now
alternating between what they called ‘communing’ and guard duty.
The Receivers of Cosmic Bounty were even more confused than usual.
Mostly, they didn’t understand why they couldn’t just get on the
bus and go off to Paradise. Eventually they started drifting out to
the barn where there were bunk-beds and cooking facilities for
those who stayed at the Space Station. The ones, like Jadie, who
would normally have headed back to town for the night, had decided
to hang around, just in case the Sky People did something
interesting.

The Kanaka Downs Garden Club had
proven a godsend to the little group of hostages. With the kind of
practical common-sense that comes from decades of raising children
and burying husbands, a mob of old ladies had set about organising
sleeping quarters and cooking up an enormous meal for everyone. Far
from being disgruntled, the old folk were by far the happiest group
there that evening. It had started when one of the older ladies had
begun complaining that she needed to get home to take her medicine.
This had set off several others and, before long, a deputation was
in the hallway banging on the door of the master bedroom,
disturbing the Vinggans’ ‘communing’ with a list of medical
requirements that seemed interminable. Angrily, one of the Vinggans
had come out with a small black box, thrust it into an old lady’s
hand and said, “There. Use that.”

Assuming it was one of those
newfangled mobile phone things, with which to call a taxi, the old
lady had pulled and poked at the box until it had sprung into life,
wrapped a number of tentacles around her arm and hummed loudly as
her whole body glowed with a blue aura. Then it dropped off her arm
onto the floor. Horrified, her fellow garden clubbers rushed to her
aid but she brushed them off with that special ungrateful
grumpiness that old people practice in front of the mirror each
night when there’s nobody to see them. She was fine, she said. In
fact, she’d never felt better. In fact, where had her arthritis
gone? And that big cyst on her knee? And her gardening chums
agreed, she looked ten years younger. And, holy shit! It was a
miracle.

The next half hour had been a bit
chaotic as the old people had fought each other in the hallway to
get to use the wonderful alien machine that cured everything that
was wrong with them. After the cure, they would skip away, singing
lustily, or stagger about in a happy daze, or sit on the floor,
despite the rugby scrum nearby, and cry and cry.

“Is it always so frenetic and
confusing on Earth?” asked Drukk.

“Not really,” said Wayne. He
thought about it a bit. “Sometimes,” he conceded.

The first stars were coming out and
Drukk wondered if Kodd, his home star, was out there somewhere.

“Is Braxx going to kill us all?”
Wayne asked. “Only that guy Marcus says she’s a total psycho babe
who’s already, like, destroyed Brisbane.”

Drukk shrugged. “Braxx is very
religious. It’s hard to say what he might do.” He looked at the
human called Wayne, who looked back at him with what might have
been a sort of wide-eyed vulnerability. “He’ll probably just try to
convert everyone. Of course, if you choose not to worship the Great
Spirit, anything is possible.”

“What happens to people on your
world who don’t worship the Great Spirit then?”

Drukk shrugged again. “I don’t
know. Everyone worships the Great Spirit, so it never comes up. Of
course, people who miss church more than three times are publicly
de-tentacled but that doesn’t happen very often.”

“I guess you guys aren’t very big
on human rights, huh?”

Drukk laughed. “Human rights!”
That’s very funny.

Wayne tried to smile but wasn’t
really up to it. Gradually, Drukk’s laughter died away. There was a
long silence as they both stared out into the darkness, pursuing
their own thoughts.

-oOo-

Sheila Sullivan downed another cup
of strong black coffee. She had just delivered yet another set of
updates to the Commissioner of Police, the Mayor of Brisbane and
the State Premier. She wondered how long it would be before the
Prime Minister and the Governor bloody General were calling her to
check on progress. The Media and Public Relations Branch was doing
a great job of keeping the press hounds at bay but they were also
pestering her for bulletins on the minute every minute. She’d even
had to deal with Councillor Molly Bleach whose responsibilities
included the sleepy suburb of Kanaka Downs, wanting to know when
her gardening club members would be freed and why nothing was being
done about it.

Sheila wished for the thousandth
time that Mike Barraclough was still out there at the farm. No-one
on the spot seemed to have a clue as to what was going on. As far
as she could tell from their reports, a dozen or so women, who all
looked like Loosi Beecham, had kidnapped a busload of geriatrics
and laid siege to a semi-derelict farm out in the bush. They may
also have kidnapped about twenty UFO cult members who were
squatting at the farm, or they may actually be in league with the
cultists. It seemed reasonably clear though that the women, using
only some kind of hand-gun, had won hands-down in a shoot out with
Brisbane’s finest. In a pitched battle, where not one single
kidnapper was reported injured, they had killed three policemen,
injured six others, and blown a dozen police cars to pieces.

She now had two police SWAT teams
on the ground and scores more police mobilising. Before the
morning, that farm would be surrounded by heavily-armed men, backed
up with armoured cars. Until then, Sheila just hoped that nothing
else happened that the troops already in position couldn’t handle.
Meanwhile, she had one more tactical briefing and then maybe she
could get a few hours’ sleep before dawn.

She pushed through the busy
operations centre and entered the briefing room. There were several
faces among the dozen or so people in the room that she did not
recognise so they spent the first few minutes introducing each
other. As well as the usual suspects, she met a big, square-jawed
bloke from the Disaster and Major Event Planning Branch, a weasely
little bloke from Specialist Services Branch, an overweight woman
from the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence, an even more overweight
man from Forensic Services Branch and the Deputy Chief Executive
(Operations), looking like he would rather be at home in bed, like
his boss, the Commissioner. There was someone from Media and Public
Relations Branch, of course, but also a well-dressed young woman
from the Human Resources Division, eager to help in any way at all,
and even someone from Finance Division, wearing the compulsory
suspicious frown.

Sheila ran through what was known
so far and told them what she was doing and what she planned to do.
They listened attentively with a general air of approval. With an
expectation of this being over relatively quickly, she smiled at
the assembled management and asked for questions.

“Er, Chief Inspector,” the young
woman from HR Division said. “It’s really not my field of expertise
or anything but doesn’t it seem a bit odd that these kidnappers all
look like Loosi Beecham?”

Yes, Sheila agreed, it did seem
odd. “I’ve got one of my detectives following up that angle. These
women seem to have appeared out of the blue about 24 hours ago when
they robbed and vandalised a department store in town. They then
left a trail of minor incidents until they hijacked the bus in the
early morning.”

“But doesn’t it just seem really
odd
?” the woman insisted.

Yes, agreed Sheila, it did seem
really odd.

“And what about that Detective
Sergeant? The one who went missing during the pursuit...?” the HR
woman went on.

“Mike Barraclough,” Sheila
supplied.

“Hmm. That was odd too, wasn’t
it?”

Yes, agreed Sheila, that was odd
too.

“I mean, it was like someone cut
through his car with a gigantic can opener and scooped him
out.”

There was, Sheila agreed, some
anomalous damage to the Detective Sergeant’s car.

“And now he’s missing. Don’t you
think that’s really, you know, really...”

“Odd?” Sheila suggested.

“Yes. Odd. It
is
odd isn’t
it?”

Oh yes, Sheila agreed, it was odd
all right.

She waited for the woman to ask her
another bloody stupid question but none came. So she turned to the
fat bloke from Forensic Services. “Do we have anything yet on the
weapons these women are using?”

The man looked very uncomfortable.
He had some notes with him in a manilla folder and he stalled
briefly by pretending to look at them. He cleared his throat. “Not
exactly,” he said.

“Not exactly?” asked the Deputy
Chief Executive (Operations).

The fat Forensics man cleared his
throat again. “Well, my people are telling me the perpetrators are
using some kind of particle beam weapon which causes the molecular
structure of objects to fail catastrophically.” He looked around
the room, nervously taking in the impatient, hostile expressions
that were forming on the faces of the hard-bitten, no nonsense,
practical police officers all around him.

“That’s odd,” said the HR
woman.

The Forensics man shuddered. “I’m
having them go over the data again,” he said quickly, heading off a
general eruption. “It’s just speculation at the moment, of
course.”

“Of course,” said the Deputy Chief
Executive (Operations), in a voice which clearly indicated that
Forensics had better have a more convincing story than that next
time he saw them.

“What about CIB input on the
perpetrators?” Sheila asked the fat woman from the Bureau of
Criminal Intelligence. She knew it was a waste of time. Her own
private opinion was that they would only have a clue as to what was
going on after they’d stormed the farmhouse, arrested the lot of
them and interrogated them.

The fat woman also had notes. She
looked at them briefly and looked up. “We don’t know anything about
a Loosi Beecham lookalike gang. We don’t know anything about an
all-female terrorist group. We have no reports of any Loosi Beecham
lookalikes entering the country in the past 30 days. We have been
in touch with the FBI and they have confirmed that Loosi Beecham
herself is in Los Angeles right now shooting a film about Albert
Schweitzer and they believe she has not been in Australia in over a
year.” She delivered her intelligence with a level expression. It
may be all negative, her eyes said, but her people had worked
damned hard to get it.

“What about the cult?”

The CIB woman’s challenging eyes
wavered a little at this. “We don’t know anything about them. We’ve
liaised with ASIO and they say they don’t know them either. I’m
trying to confirm that.”

Sheila, smiled and pulled a copy of
the St Stephen’s parish magazine out of her own folder. She passed
it over to the CIB woman. “You might find this helpful,” she said.
“There’s an article about them on page 5.”

“Bloody Hell,” muttered the Deputy
Chief Executive (Operations). He turned to Sheila and his mouth
made a smile without his eyes joining in. “Rather a lot of
unanswered questions, don’t you think, Chief inspector? And the
media seem to be getting more hysterical by the minute. I think it
would be best if you went out there yourself and made sure that
this is dealt with quickly and cleanly. We don’t want this dragging
on for too long, do we?”

Sheila understood completely. “No
sir,” she said.

“Good,” he said to the room at
large. “Has anyone got anything else? Right. Let’s talk about
resourcing...”

-oOo-

The kangaroos stopped when night
fell. They were still a little short of the farm but they’d
travelled a long way and it would be easier to grab a human or two
in the daylight. The humans, they knew, tended to huddle in groups
at night and, in the last century or so, had taken to locking
themselves away inside buildings. During the day, however, they
wandered around and were quite often seen alone or in small
numbers. That was the time to snatch a couple.

“What are you going to do when we
get home, Boss?” asked one of the big bucks, lying on the ground
with his long legs stretched out.

“First thing is, I’m going to get
away from you guys and talk to someone with some brains.”

The big buck chuckled. “No,
seriously. What are you going to do?”

“You think I’m not serious? After
three hundred years with nothing but you for company I feel like my
brains are turning to bat droppings!”

There was a long silence.

“When I get my own body back,” said
one of the bucks out of the darkness, “I’m going down to
Poppopoppipoppa City and I’m going to have sex with five women and
five hermaphroids at once!”

“Man, I miss those
hermaphroids!”