The Condimental Op

  Another shot rings out, this time sourced from Taylor, and half the yells end.

  Seconds pass, nobody moves. Silence, aside from the gush of the improvised, raging waterworks — an abstract fountain complex thrown together by a madman on acid.

  “Floyd! Are you all right? Floyd!”

  The woman freezes, pinned up against a sagging, buckled wall with floral wallpaper and a sea of mildew.

  Tux frowns when he sees her face, but before either can further react, there are scattered footsteps and a spotlight suddenly swings round the huge space. Taylor is caught right in the middle of this, shielding his eyes, and then something happens to his waist — it bucks to one side — followed quickly by an echoing explosion, and he falls in silence.

  A man in a hat, cast only in silhouette by the roving spotlight, grabs Taylor’s gun, tosses it away — and then sprints in the direction of the woman and Tux.

  “Crap!” she hisses, throwing herself across the corridor and diving into the room behind Tux, the one where Archer lurked. That spotlight framed the doorway she’d come through, followed by the thunder of three explosions. Tux reels past, staggering, and he ends up crashing through a wood-covered window and falls out.

  “Go!”

  For the first time since she met him, Archer has spoken, but she has no time to cherish the moment.

  The big man pushes at her as he thumbs the open window, and then he turns away and vanishes into twisted shadows beside the entrance. She doesn’t need any more counsel, jumps for the windowsill as someone barges through the doorway behind her, and takes a leap as a bullet whistles past her ear.

  Two storeys aren’t as easy as they might sound.

  The height had broken Tux’s back, but judging from the bullet wounds in his chest and stomach, grapefruit sizes torn out, he would’ve been dead anyway.

  She hadn’t busted her spine but crunched some bone in the right ankle at the end of the drop — heard it snap when she landed — and the pain now is blinding. Even so, she makes out two more shots high above. Archer. Assumed he would never say another word. So there remained only her, just as there had been when she first started.

  The woman hobbles along, unable to put any decent weight on the busted foot, but having decided to refuse to stand about — anyway just as painful — to be recaptured and Hospitalized, or more simply gunned down like the others.

  “Stop where you are!”

  That’s a man’s voice somewhere behind her, same one she’d heard in the short fight upstairs. The warning serves only to make her move quicker, despite the torture.

  “Shoot, man!” someone else is bleating back there, all whiney. “I’ve got a brill long-shot, but you’ve gotta do it now! Shoot! Blow her away! Do it!”

  She refuses to look back, focuses ahead, and then the first man’s voice speaks again. She barely hears it, but the message carries: “Fuck you.”

  It’s said right before she hits a corner, one where she can scramble to safety away from a bullet, but the woman can’t resist — she has to turn and look.

  The killer with the Fedora is there, his gun hand lowered, and the skinny camera kid is gesticulating wildly, shouting in his ear.

  He ignores the boy. His and the woman’s eyes meet, for the shortest moment. It’s enough. She has to smile — though she doubts he sees this — and then she’s rounded a brick wall into the next street and ducks down a secondary alleyway. Needs to open up as much distance as possible, no matter the agony the leg delivers up. Time enough to scream, mope, wail and bawl her eyes out later.

  But the lane has no end, the straight lines of the brickwork around abruptly swing to diagonal, and she’s swimming in inky darkness. A white pinpoint appears. Wonders if she should head there, or retreat in the opposite direction, but the light’s getting bigger and the current is headed that way. Treading water, she’s indecisive, shooting pains speaking nonsense from her ankle.

  And suddenly she’s awake.

  Sitting up on the side of a plasti-steel cot, cords and wires hanging from places all over a half-naked body.

  An extremely elderly nurse is unstitching the devices, pulling them out, rolling them up. The woman has a pert mouth with thin lips and zero expression on her face. It’s like looking at another wall.

  On three other cots nearby lie the shapes of people. They’re hidden beneath plastic sheets, so she cannot see their faces. They seem to be breathing, but there is no other movement.

  “These gentlemen failed.”

  The announcement comes from a slightly built, middle-aged man standing near the door. He has a grey beard, a drab plastic folder tucked under his arm and a starched white outfit, but his voice is rich. There’s a nametag that reads ‘Dr. Kern’, pinned above a biro in his shirt pocket.

  “Failed what?” she asks.

  “The Test.”

  “What test?”

  “The one you undertook just now.”

  “Oh. So that’s what it was. Right.”

  “Don’t overly worry yourself. Far more eminent is the fact that you passed, Patient…er—” He consults cheat-notes in the folder “—14111922. Congratulations.”

  As the nurse leaves the room, the doctor steps forward and hands his patient a beige business card, made of some kind of plastic hybrid. It had the name from his tag, plus the words ‘Management Control Division’.

  “I can imagine you’re rather tired of Hospitals by now,” he waffles on. “How about a nice change? We have a job opportunity for you at MCD, out in the real world.”

  She glances at him. “How real?”

  “Terra firma, I assure you.”

  “No more games?”

  “I can’t guarantee that.”

  “But a job.”

  “That’s right.”

  “As one of the good guys.”

  “Precisely. With Controller Branch. Hunting down and rounding up the bad sort.”

  As she sits there on the side of the bed, the woman chews her lower lip. All this has unravelled quickly — is it any more real than the warzone she just escaped? Still, she is at a loss for options and realizes it doesn’t matter. The man might’ve been channelling Mephistopheles, but virtuous alternatives failed to present themselves. They always had been missing. Besides, what had the world ever given her? At least now she’d be the one with the stick.

  “All right,” she says.

  “Bravo. Welcome to the team.” He hands over an A5-size clipboard. It has several sheets of paper on it. A contract. The pen is already in her hand.

  The good doctor is rattling out a stream of kooky caveats, something about how he needn’t remind one that, as a Controller, she’d be in a position of authority and therefore bear a certain amount of responsibility, plus there’d be a brand new identity — Constance Ockelman — and some secrecy provisions. Blah, blah, blah. She tuned out the moment the flow began.

  “What happens to them?” Having interrupted his speech, she nods at the three people on the beds in their shrouds, could only guess they were her companions. One of them was certainly as mountainous as Archer.

  “If they’re lucky, they recover.”

  “And who are you? Really?”

  The man rubs his hands together in a childlike manner, but his chuckle comes across wizened and fractionally sinister. “The future, my dear.”

  Slowly, she raises her leg. The ankle is stiff, but it isn’t broken. She rotates her foot and smiles. “Whatever. Are you paid to sprout that kind of nonsense?”

  “Actually, I do like to indulge in a spot of theatre sports on the side.”

  “Mmm. Do me a favour?”

  He looks mildly irritated. “You will find we are already doing that — by giving you a second chance.”

  “Still.”

  Dr. Kern’s expression assumes a dubious glint. “Name it.”

  “Revive them.” She sweeps here renovated foot in the air with a wave that takes in the motionless trio under their plasti-sheets.

  “
Why?”

  “We make a good team.”

  “Difficult. The procedure can be…tricky.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. I’m sure you’ll succeed, since you’ve revived me after I ‘died’ — several times over.”

  The good doctor is impressed. “You remember.”

  “How could I forget?”

  “Most people do. The trauma is too much for them. Very well, I’ll see what I can arrange regarding these gentlemen. All three?”

  “Mmm. Even the little guy. By the way, is his name really Taylor?”

  Kern again scans his notes. “Yes, it says so here. I believe that is the case.”

  “Well. There you go.”

  Linoleum Actress was the first short-story I’d written in years, put together straight after publishing Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat in 2011 — for a new website, Dirty Noir, which was co-run by a fellow Aussie writer named Doc O’Donnell.

  It’s something that spins out of the hardboiled scenario in TSMG, and to my mind the narrator could easily be Floyd Maquina…but not necessarily.

  I decided to reboot it for the anthology The Tobacco-Stained Sky, this time as a graphic story with artwork by Canadian Michael Grills (Runnin’ With a Gun), and a couple of months later inserted the written version into One Hundred Years of Vicissitude —as Wolram Deaps’ surly yarn about the fate he wished for Floyd.

  Incidentally, Linoleum Actress is also the name of one of my Little Nobody EPs, released through IF? around the same period with remixes by Justin Robertson, Paul Birken and Sebastian Bayne.

  Linoleum Actress

  The first thing she does is she powders her nose.

  She unzips her tobacco-coloured Louis Vuitton purse in the same manner a lioness, basking in the sun on an African savannah, tends to flick her tail — in a deceptive, lazy kind of way, but in reality it’s a quick and precise gesture.

  She drops her hand in the bag and fiddles about a few moments before her long, slender fingers emerge with a compact. Leaning toward the half-length mirror attached to the wardrobe, as I said, she powders her nose.

  I’ve never seen anybody do it with such style.

  Straight after her eyes in the mirror shift to mine, she smiles a fraction, then changes her mind and blows a kiss.

  I’m pretty certain it misses, and that was the point. Attention returned to herself in the mirror, she adjusts the bra strap on her left shoulder, straightens out the dress strap next to that, rotates both shoulders to make the ensemble sit better, and pushes her hair back.

  “What’re you looking at, babe?” she says in a distracted kind of way.

  I don’t answer. I just stare at the beauty in that reflection and find it remarkable that such a serpent could sit so pretty.

  “Snake got your tongue?” She seems to know my every thought, and I find that spooky. Not that it matters now, I guess. Her laughter is husky and it drifts around me. I loved that sound. I loved her. I thought the feeling was mutual, but I’m beginning to suspect I was wrong.

  She’s on top of me now, the aroma of lilacs intense, pressing her face as close as possible to mine, so that our eyes meet and her two hazel peepers become one in my struggling vision.

  “Cyclops,” she whispers — it’s our age-old game of affection, yet right now her tone sounds more vicious than vivacious.

  Straight off the bat she breaks away, sits up, and stares down at me. “Well, you are rather boring today, my love. You could put in a little more effort.”

  She eases herself off my lap, heads into the kitchenette, and pushes two slices of bread into the pop-up. The cap’s off the tequila and she’s swigging straight out of the bottle. She’s wandering that savannah again, eyes pushing wild, before a return to civilization and pouring a shot into a glass.

  She paces the kitchen waiting for the toast. The way she walks takes her out of my sight every now and then, but I can hear her breathing and can still smell the perfume.

  “You got any Vegemite?” she asks. “Oh wait, found it!” Her next pace takes her to the fridge, where she peers inside. “Oh crap. Margarine? I hate margarine, you know that. Why couldn’t you get Western Star butter instead? A girl might get the feeling that you don’t care about what she wants.” The toast pops, and then she’s laughing to herself as she spreads condiments. In her next breath she’s singing Foghorn Leghorn. “Oh, doggy, you’re gonna get your lumps. Oh, doggy, you’re gonna get some bumps…”

  The way she stands there on the linoleum floor, I’m watching her from behind. She definitely knows how to move that body of hers in that tight satin dress — truth is she always did, especially in my field of vision. Her hips sway as she spreads and serenades, and it’s a mesmerizing sight.

  Finally breakfast is over, followed by a sizable slug of tequila, and she comes back into the bedsit — with the bottle — to stand before me.

  “I’d offer you some brekky,” she says, “but I have a feeling you’d just play mum. You know?” After she swirls the tequila around a bit, she glances at it and back to me. “So, what’s your poison? …Oh, wait, you’ve already had it.” She leans over me on the couch and pries away the empty tumbler that’s been stuck in my mitt for the past half hour. “How’s that paralysis coming along, babe?”

  She puts a playful finger to my mouth, though I can’t feel it. At all. I also can’t catch the lilac anymore.

  “No need to answer. Shouldn’t be long now. Probably your vision will start botching up next.”

  I can still see her clear enough, but the edges of my eyesight are starting to get haggard, and that haggardness is creeping in from all sides. She sniffs the glass that she took from me and frowns.

  “Say, you can smell the extra bonus stuff a mile off. You really have only yourself to blame. Someone who was a bit more cautious would’ve whiffed this before the first sip. But you just love your booze, don’t you? Down the hatch before you even stop to breathe.” She sighs. “Well, I was nice, anyway — at least this concoction isn’t as painful as others. It’s also not very quick. Sorry about that.”

  She’s right. At the moment I’m feeling nothing, my senses numb, but as I say it’s been over thirty minutes according to the big, kitsch, 3D crucifixion-scene clock on the wall.

  There is a query nagging away at the back of my noggin. I just wish I could enunciate it through dead lips, or express it to her with my fading eyes; some kind of mental Morse code. Hell, sign language would be fine, if my fingers still worked.

  The question was a simple, one-word no-brainer: Why?

  She picks up the phone and makes a call, and right about then the lights go out.

  A slap brings me back to consciousness.

  I can barely see but I do make out a small white saucer held up a few inches from my face, with a lump of distorted yellow gunk sitting on it.

  She’s showcasing the thing like a ‘50s Tupperware party hostess.

  “It’s incredible,” she says, “what these days a girl will do for thirty grams of butter.”

  Before you browse the following artwork, I’m going to get all finicky.

  As Floyd Maquina would say, it’d put you in solid with me if you’d already read my two previous novels Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat (2011) and One Hundred Years of Vicissitude, which are stand-alone tomes but connected by about 5% of content.

  Some of that percentage turns up in the following short 4-page comic strip, which I did in collaboration last year with wunderbar Argentinian artist Marcos Vergara.

  It’s kind of like the missing link — a story intended to stand alone, but also the absent jigsaw piece between one scene in One Hundred Years…(Chapter 35, pages 226-229) and another in TSMG (the chapter ‘The Salt of the Turf’, pages 167-168).

  Hence we have characters that could be Floyd and barkeeper Ziggy, along with Wolram Deaps and Kohana.

  To cut further to the chase, it kind of explains away the presence of the Webley revolver in both novels…if you want to see it that way.

&
nbsp; I wrote the story in a bit of a hurry as I had a tight window of opportunity to work with Marcos, and this was one of my first attempts to write comicbook-style for an artist.

  I love what he sent back.

  This next romp is actually an ending — the one I toyed with for the 1992 manuscript of Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat, back when I called the book We Are Not Afraid, We Serve.

  Hence the title here.

  I abandoned this finale when I did the final version of TSMG, the one published through Another Sky Press in 2011, but not because I disliked the tangent. I just felt TSMG was already so oppressive, it needed uplift in the final chapter.

  So, when I decided to do a self-indulgent compendium of short stories and other odds and ends, naturally I grabbed this off the rear-end of the old manuscript, rewrote the thing so it now stars Floyd’s Seeker Branch buddy Hank Jones, and gave it a wayward wax and polish.

  We Are Not Afraid, We Serve

  Annoyingly floodlit and humid it might’ve been, but I continued to walk the underpass burrowing deep beneath City Centre.

  In the plus column, there was zero traffic at this time, so I could proceed down the middle of the road with carefree abandon, at least till catching sight of a security post.

  I had no idea of my plan of action once I reached the Senator’s abode — if I reached the place, given the excess of sentries and surveillance doohickeys I expected to encounter between here and there.

  The tunnel, only four lanes wide, stretched on indefinitely and time was precious. I could probably find a more convenient entrance from within the Dome, above me, but this route offered a discreet alternative. Working off a few excess kilos would never hurt.

  Having rounded a gradual turn, I spotted my first guardhouse directly ahead. I fled the road to press up against a wall, and straight after recoiled — chocolate-brown seepage, hopefully from the Yarra, oozed down the concrete.

  In an attempt to steady ransacked nerves, I scrutinized the small, two-or three-man building. How many people were there? What was my excuse for passing through? Hi, saw your lights on, thought I’d drop in? Why should the bozos begin to believe such a rort?