Draw the Brisbane Line (4 page)

Epoch took a seat right up the back of the Greyhound, deep in the unpopular toilet zone.  The smell was rank, but the position afforded him better odds of privacy than any other place on the bus.

He pulled the shade closed.  Maybe no-one was out looking for him, but he saw no sense in taking that chance.  Blinky might not have acted on the information Epoch sent his way.  Maybe he enjoyed being screwed over.  Maybe he had done something about it though.  Maybe he confronted Nero, drew down on him like a comic book outlaw.  Maybe they were both dead, killed by each other in a straight-up gunfight.  

Or, Blinky could have snitched, run to Nero like a whiny bitch fourth-grader to tell him what naughty Epoch had told him.

He doubted it, but it was better to be safe than stupid.

He was travelling light, like he always did.  Just the backpack on the seat beside him.  He seldom took his hand off it, and when he slept he placed it in his lap.  If he had to use the bathroom, as convenient as it was to his seat, he’d slip the bag over one shoulder.

Occasionally a new arrival would venture down his end.  He combated this by performing loud voice searches on his Android Eyes glasses.

‘OK Google, search
three-way interracial arse-to-mouth
.’

‘OK Google, search
bareback sheep love
.’

‘OK Google, find video of
midget felching party
.’

God but he loved these things.  Occasionally he’d watch the resulting video through the glasses, switching to virtual full screen mode for a few minutes.  He’d had to root the things for the full screen hack.  Mostly though, he read his Twitter feeds and made plans.

‘Tweets from stir list,’ he said, and the little blue bird started moving up in the air on the right side of his field of vision, dragging short blocks of text behind it.

Nine News Retweeted

Great Northern Cross
@gr8nthx

Where are the Liberals in Rockhampton?  In Mackay?  Fighting has started over scraps while Sydneysiders laugh their arses off. #classcrash

BBC News Retweeted

Re-dystope
@redyst98

Looting in full swing in Moranbah, coming to Emerald soon!  Just saw this guy helping himself to a new Playstation from EB Games!! #moronbar #classcrash bit.ly/1Rtty3

ABC Retweeted

Billy Billy Moore
@b_billybilly6

Lot of Yank movement in Townie, Army and Navy.  No exercises planned that I’m aware of.  Please explain?

Bubble What Bubble
@toilntrble

Protest march by striking unions in Brisbane is turning ugly, aviation workers joined by cleaners and taxi drivers, fights breaking out. #classcrash bit.ly/3xxcyu7

Seeing the re-tweets always gave him a buzz.  Great Northern Cross, Re-dystope and Billy Billy Moore were all Twitter handles he owned.  He didn’t create them, he bought them on Silk Road after someone else had established their credibility, over several years of reliable and verifiable tweets.  Epoch had to periodically keep them tweeting, tickle their feathers, usually recycled news from the Twitterverse, but every now and then he was able to sow his own headlines into the dirt.  He had to do little more than sit back and watch them sprout.

He tittered at the Moranbah tweet. 
#moronbar
.  Disorder and looting actually had broken out in the depressed mining town, Epoch had been there for some of it.  But the picture of the man nicking a Playstation?  Epoch beat him in poker, and the not-yet-owned Playstation was in the pot, along with a crate of mining explosives.  Big Dave Razinski, crazy bastard, the sort of guy you’d cross the street to avoid if you saw him coming from three blocks away.  Wild eyes, beard like week-old roadkill, six feet tall and a body shape best described as slab.  Absolutely shit at cards.  Epoch didn’t actually want the game console, he just wanted to see how the guy went about getting into the shop.  He went in with very little finesse, a sledgehammer and a cordless drill.  Epoch offered to let him keep the Playstation in exchange for a tutorial on handling the blasting gear he’d won.  Big Dave peeled his lips back from his broken teeth in a smile so foul it made ugly seem pleasant and said, ‘Mate, I’ll even let ya have a fuggen practice run.’

Epoch patted the backpack on the seat beside him, felt the rolling contour of the tightly wrapped tubes.  If he’d had more time, he probably would have concealed the explosives in something, tennis ball cans or Pringles tubes.  It might be enough to get him past the dumbest of nosy cops, which he figured accounted for about eighty percent of them, maybe more.

The bus stopped at a shelter on the nowhere highway.  Epoch saw a woman standing by a suitcase and an overstuffed Ikea bag, the big plastic ones you could buy at the checkout when you realise just how much unnecessary small shit you’ve picked up on the way through.  There were no cars in sight, someone must have dumped her at the stop and kept on going.  He put his face to the glass to cut out the interior reflections to get a better look at her.  If he had to guess, he’d say she spent the last twenty years driving trucks in the mines and either forgot about femininity or hid it away.

The driver went through the routine of opening the luggage doors on the side of the coach and loading the newcomer’s luggage, and she came up the steps and made her way towards the back of the bus, right in front of Epoch.

Jesus Christ
, he thought,
half the bus to choose from and this is the spot she picks
?

He was about to give Google some of the most colourful video searches he could imagine, one involving a horse and the world’s tallest woman, when the driver re-boarded the bus and started them on the road again.  Miss I-don’t-understand-personal-space immediately stood up and moved to the toilet.  Her wide denim-clad hips brushed his seat as she passed, and she smelled of men’s deodorant.  Through the gap between the seats, he could see she’d left something behind, a big multi-pocketed brown leather handbag.

As soon as the lock engaged on the bathroom door Epoch slipped out of his seat and into the row in front. 

The key to this sort of ad hoc enterprise was speed and confidence.  People take more notice if you hesitate. 

He unzipped the bag and began tossing the contents.  He didn’t expect to find much of value, not from someone like Dump Truck Debbie, but he couldn’t resist having a peek.  He didn’t even bother flipping through her black leather purse because he doubted there’d be much in there of value.  It was also the first thing she’d check if she realised that maybe shouldn’t have left her bag unattended so close to the strange little man who talked to Google about GILF gangbangs.

He found a set of keys, a roll of fruit-flavoured Mentos, receipts from Coles and Liquorland, a small metal cylinder holding a clutch of Tampax, hair bands choked with twisted strands of peroxide blonde hairs, and a yellow plastic tube bearing a prescription label made out to Harriet Webb.

Epinephrine.  Interesting.

He moved back to his seat and slipped the epi pen into his backpack.  Epinephrine was a handy thing to have if a pick-me-up was required in a town without decent coffee.  Or if he was bored.

He switched back to Twitter and scrolled through the news headlines, reading about protests and strikes and fights up and down the country.  He glanced out of the window as the coach slowly overtook a truck hauling a tyre the size of a Ferris wheel.  He wondered how much damage all that rubber would do to the steadily thickening traffic if it broke loose of its chains.  No passenger car he could think of would survive an encounter like that.  Not that he’d do anything like that.  He was just curious.  He wondered how the chains might be weakened to give out in transit.  Maybe acid?

A sucking flush came from the bathroom and Harriet Webb squeezed out of the narrow opening, dragging a smell behind her like small dead animals.  She actually smiled at Epoch as she passed him.  He returned the smile, but his grin came from a very different place than hers.

‘OK Google,’ he said.  ‘Search teen necrophilia fetish.’

‘OK Google, search blonde fucked by amputee stump.’

He didn’t need to think up a third depravity, Harriet Webb found a seat further towards the front.

The traffic thickened and slowed with every kilometre of highway the Greyhound swallowed on the approach to Brisbane.  It was like a python trying to eat a crocodile, realising too late that, shit, it might be a struggle to squeeze the tail in.  The Maryborough to Gympie leg took an excruciating three hours instead of the usual one.  Gympie to Noosa should have been another hour, slower as suburbia started to poke its head through the bush and the scrub, but another four hours passed before they finally arrived at Noosa Junction Bus Station.

Everyone on board blamed it on the airport closures.  Every bastard with wheels and a petrol tank was out on the road.

The driver killed the engine after they stopped at the park-up stand.  Epoch thought it must be time for a rest break.  He unplugged his Android Eyes, which had been charging through a USB cable in the armrest, and slipped them onto his head.  The PA system on the bus hummed to life and the driver cleared his throat in tinny surround sound.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Noosa Heads,’ he drawled.

Muted ironic cheers, some slow clapping.

‘Unfortunately, as we’re so far behind schedule, the bus won’t be moving again for another eight hours.’

No response from the passengers this time, just the creeping comprehension that they were stuck.

There was plenty of cursing and complaining once the penny dropped, but Epoch didn’t let it bother him.  Look at the traffic they’d just endured.  It’s not as if it was going to free up any time soon, so he might as well spend some time checking out Noosa.  He really wanted to get quite a way further south, to where the money was, but he thought there should be some upper-class spoils in this place too.

Epoch shouldered his bag and started to walk through the the early morning streets, directing his Android Eyes to highlight any locations which lined up with the addresses in his rich and famous database.  He didn’t even need a hack to enable that functionality, it worked out of the box.

Approximately ten minutes after Epoch left the Greyhound behind him, Harriet Webb took the same path.  She’d waited until the queer little fucker from behind her was out of sight before she made her way towards the beach.  She hoped to get some breakfast in one of the cafés, one with good coffee.  She’d planned to be in Brisbane hours ago, and hadn’t packed anywhere near enough food to see her through the journey.  She found a nice spot on Hastings Street, a café with tables and chairs made from tidal driftwood and named, unsurprisingly, Driftwood.  Although the prices were a little higher than what she’d usually pay for breakfast, she decided to treat herself.  There was always the possibility that she could get some of it back from Greyhound.  There should be some sort of compensation process.

Maybe it was the early hour and the inevitable fatigue that came with a long road trip.  Maybe she was just in the habit of knowing what was in her food, and what wasn’t.  Whatever the reason, when she ordered the Thai omelette, she never considered for a moment that the dish might contain peanuts.  Who puts peanuts in a breakfast dish?

Apparently Driftwood did.  At first, she thought she had a piece of egg stuck in her throat, but it just wouldn’t clear.  And breathing, God, when did breathing become so hard?  It took her brain three seconds to realise what was happening.  Her memory stretched back to her mid-teens, the last time she’d experienced anaphylaxis from ingestion of the dreaded peanut.  She fumbled through her bag, looking for the familiar yellow tube, and panic seemed to compound the contraction of her throat as she couldn’t find it, not anywhere.

She tipped the contents of the bag over the table.  Staff ran to her, as did a couple of patrons.

‘Epi … pen,’ she managed to gasp.

Brent Schtumke, a middleweight champion boxer taking in his post-workout egg-load at Driftwood, dashed across the road to the pharmacy. They maintained a 24-hour emergency service, made possible because the pharmacist lived in an apartment above the store.

Accounts vary over what followed, but the most popular version was this:

The pharmacist would not give the angry boxer any epinephrine, not without a prescription.  The pharmacist, in his defence, probably couldn’t see the commotion down the street at the café, but that had less to do with a red-faced Schtumke occupying his attention, and more to do with his unwillingness to unlock the door.  He spoke to the boxer through an intercom.

Schtumke wasn’t one to be told what he could and couldn’t do.  He sprinted back to Driftwood, picked up the most solid gnarled chair he could find, charged back to the pharmacy and drove the furniture right through the front window.  The pharmacist ran back to his apartment when the first blow was struck, leaving Schtumke and a few other café patrons to search for the life-saving sticks.

They found them eventually, but too late.  Harriet Webb died next to her barely-touched omelette.  Her strained and rasping breathing slowed, stuttered, and stopped.  The shouting kept on going in the background though, building quickly, and the sound of breaking glass peppered the early morning air like gunfire in a war zone.