PREVIEW: The Issue of the Feral Pig Down at Coffin Creek

Protest poster in West End, Meanjin.

Day Two.
3.04am

IT was ol’ Mangled Jizzy that found those kids, the very first ones, y’know.

Young Donk Cowie’d parked his old man’s RAM – bloody ridiculous vehicle for a dentist – down by the flood marker off Crooked Stream Lane. Jizz told us it looked like the silly bugger’d been trying to get into young Shelsta Gabbatt’s knickers when they’d been taken.

By that I mean he found her knickers, soiled, and a half unrolled French Letter, if you catch my meaning.

The ‘paper, well, the ‘paper’s Facey page, The Coffin Creek Investigator, didn’t really get much into the details, barring that the cops were “treating the situation as suspicious”, “appealing to the public for information” that “parking in a flood zone is hazardous” and to “please welcome investigating officer Constable Ray Fistwell to The Creek”.

That sort of D-grader city journo bullshit.

Ol’ Jizzy may have been as mad as three cut snakes in a Whirlpool, but he’d also been a pretty handy snapper in the day.

He had The Eye, didn’t miss a bloody thing, much to our occasional chagrin.

That means it pissed us off, kid.

Anyway, we’d been shouting Jizz a round or ten when he’d spilled his guts on all the spilt guts.

“Looked like a feral pig what done it, lads. Pulled them kids out the cab before poor ole Donk had a poke, let alone a sniff of his fingers. Not right. Blood and shit and hair and all sorts everywhere. No bodies but. What squealer does that? Drags two kids off and… disappears? ”

Well, none of us had had a fucken clue, and the bastard 4G internet was out again, so we – we being town quack Doc Liversedge, me missus Narelle and Jimbo Paddock… yes, the Mayor (don’t get too excited, kid, that was 10% of Coffin Creek’s population there at the bar) – decided to leave the mystery to the no-doubt exemplary deductive abilities of the new town copper, Fistwell.

For now.

7.15am


Wasn’t long before them deductin’ skills were back in demand, neither.

You’re loca – you’ve heard of Snake Marks, right?
Nope?

Bloody hell, seriously, you kids –
Snake, actual Christian name lost to the vapours of Creek lore, was Mayor ‘round here well before Jimbo’s time (not to mention me and ‘Relle’s).

This was back in the eighties, when state government spooks were scuttling around the valley, rattling gates.

You know, natural gas and all that?
It was a dodgy business then and it still is, kid.

Anyway, I read up on Snake before ‘Relle and I decided to shift out here from the Goldie – his steampunk reimagining of Che’s life sealed the deal, t’be honest.

Yep, Snake was a capital ‘c’ Communist, and that drove the East Coast establishment mental. He’d really put it up ‘em when he was elected to state parliament, but Snake was also a capital ‘p’ Pisshead that all ended real quick, with broken limbs and a few less than exemplary headlines to boot.
Disgraced anywhere with a population over 500, Snake moved back out to the Creek, bought the pub and spent the next thirty-odd years cranking out revolutionary tracts.

It was a life lived like a deadset bloody legend, a real town luminary, until about a week back, when I found one’ve Comrade Snake’s size-13 cowboy boots on my morning run.
The blood on it was black, the other one gone.

Snake’s hip flask was thirty yards up the track, en route to his camper, bone dry.

The 4G was barely 3G that morning, but I got a sketchy line through to Constable Fistwell, who took his sweet bloody time getting there.

Valé Snake and all that…

Read the entire story in BLACK PILLS: 7 TALES TO ASTONISH & CONFOUND, out now!

FIVE STAR SERVICE - short fiction

Ron Devereux had set up shop at the Wangkur GrintCo servo.

They did actual, bonafide five-star service.

Lower Wangkur, situated at the most desolate western point of Leftish Arcadia, was home to about three dozen. Its sister city, Hogg, was a lazy five hundred or so Ks north east.

Ron – former band manager, occasional bush shaman, indigenous to the region for roughly 25,000 years  – pumped petrol, squee-geed windscreens, made laboured small talk, the whole five star deal.

The servo saw ten customers, max, on a busy week.

It was the first day of spring, 2023.

A total fire ban was in effect, not that there was much to burn out here.

The digital thermometer hung next to an ancient cheesecake pin up outside Ron’s office read 47 degrees C.

It was 8am.

Ron had been tooling about with a gas refill, lit cig dangling precariously from his bottom lip, when a late model Beemer materialised out of the desert, encrusted in a shell of thick red mud.

It rolled up to a pump and its noncy German engine sighed as the driver killed the ignition.

The door swung and a chunky looking bloke in full bush costume bounded out.

Freshly pressed check shirt, Levis, suspiciously pristine cowboy boots, a spotlessly clean oversize akubra he’d no doubt got off the internet.

“Hot enough for ya?” he’d enthused, because of course he was the sort of bastard that opened a conversation like that.

Ron sized him up.

Playstation 6 phone case.

Flowing auburn ponytail, turning to rust.

Just shy of fifty.

Yep.

Wanker.

“Fill her up thanks cobber!” old mate chirped, oblivious. “Long drive ahead of me today! I’m a radio journalist, you see – the top brass just shipped me over from Sydney –“

Ron shuddered involuntarily.

“– and I’m off up to do a story on –“

Ron levered the cap off his hip flask, took a swig. He tuned out and pumped the bloke’s petrol. City spivs, especially from that bastard place, got him all homicidal.

The pump clicked and Ron screwed the cap back on.

He lit another cig and squinted at the Beemer.

“Car wash up in Hogg if you need.”

The wanker was still mid-reverie. He handed Ron cash, swung back into the pilot’s seat and flicked a salute as tinted electric windows hummed up…

Read the full story in Yarns From the Fuck-You-Ni-Verse.

PREVIEW: RENTAL HELL

Here’s an excerpt of the edited version of a piece I submitted to the West Australian’s “Best Aussie Yarn” (sic).

Turns out they’re not into downer yarns set in the here and now, nor have they been renters in the last, ah, quarter century or so.

Who’d have thunk.

Anyhoot – there’s a longer form version of this that I have plans for, but please accept this one as a taste of my recent lit-comp alienating stylings for the time being.

(Thanks especial to Steve MinOn for suggesting the edits that squeaked this one in under the word count, too).

You can read the full version in BLACK PILLS: 7 TALES TO ASTONISH & CONFOUND, out now!

THERE had been many disappointments in the DeRoche’s recent rear view, and this catastrophic pile, this hazardous sore, barely a shelter – the sole rental in their budget and within walking distance of a kindy – was the final kick in the guts, confirming the universe held them in considerable disdain. 

Reggie, stoic: “Kudos to the Photoshop guy, they really earned their effing keep, eh babe?” 

Tobey, succinct: “What an effing shit hole.”

Amity, nearly-five: “Does it have an effing kitty door for a meow?”

Reggie sucked air between her teeth, giving Tobes a look.

“Better apply, right, babe? Lucky thirty-seven?”

Tobes just nodded.

*

“Is that… human faeces?” Reggie gasped.

Property Manager Nickala Grezzdl made a note to get back to the bond cleaners…

short: the prospect of unchecked violence

“How do you reconcile being a blunt instrument of The Establishment with oppressing your own class interests?”
It was Officer Chock Fistwell’s first day.
Chock was of average IQ for a cop, and the final question on the entry exam had confused him to the point of violence. 
The squat, coiled pink knot of rage in the all-black boiler suit had wrenched a leg off his chair and assailed his test paper, reducing the desk beneath to splinters.
The department’s personality tests indicated he fit the required profile perfectly.
Psychopath.
Chock passed on the spot and was inducted immediately. 
Officer Fistwell was assigned crowd control out at the Urtabarkkenoo orgone reserves.
A rabble of filthy art students and ferals had blockaded the train line to the port.
Chock was kinky for power. He tugged his shirtsleeve down over his thorny ARBEIT MACHT FREI tatt and rasped a callused palm over his freshly shaved skull.
Officer Fistwell strapped on his beetle-like peacekeeping carapace:
How good was this opportunity to stomp on dissent, to bring the mighty boot of The State down on the skulls of the rabble?
Of course, Chock was incapable of framing a sentence that complex – he’d passed the force language test by failing spectacularly – he just got off on the prospect of unchecked violence.
Chock strained to buckle his tactical codpiece.
He’d  drawn water cannon detail.
That wasn’t as good as being up in this coven of perverts’ grills, getting fisty and spunking hot raw capsicum spray down their throats... but it was good enough.
The force’s arrival in Urtabarkkenoo was announced by a column of police armaments rolling in behind the mounted division, all bulletproof and bristling. The rank and file, the blokes who got to mix it up mano-a-hippy, blood and broken teeth style, thudded in lock step up back.
Chock envied them.
His mood brightened, though, when he discovered that the Water Cartels’ H20 monopoly meant the cannons now pumped raw effluent.
He’d topped up at the sewage station – this was going to be fucking great.
The battalion of cops scuttled, a tide of lethal roaches.
The sun set, ugly and clotted.
Tension, begat by imminent, inevitable violence, settled.
A few hundred yards up the road was the blockaded rail junction, just past a sign that read

CRUSADER-EXCALIBUR HOLDINGS PTY LTD | TRESPASSERS WILL BE EXECUTED

The hippies were dancing, for fuck’s sake, around a glowing pile of orgone crystals stacked a storey high at the nexus of the junction. A snaking diesel freight train was stopped further north, its headlights punching dimly into the  twilight.
Commanding Officer Drongo “Shovelhead” Dutton was in the vanguard of the advancing columns of cops.
Every officer under Dutton’s command had been cloned from his curdled DNA.
As such, they all shared his propensity for undiluted Fascism.
Chock sized up the battalion from his vantage atop the cannon.
They were Legion, and they were all him. 
It was a fleeting consideration.
Chock was rigid as he trained his cannon on a green haired dirt-farmer and adjusted the pressure to “grievous bodily harm”.
The prospect of caving in some hippy skulls pulled him into sharp focus.
The raggedy crew of malnourished protesters locked in a circle around the junction were begging for 100% legal and justifiable obliteration under the laws of the state, he reckoned.Dutton unhooked his squealing loud hailer and held it up to his congenital sneer.
Feedback scraped the scene.
Chock’s trigger finger twitched, chipped teeth gritted.
Sweat stung the nicks in his zero-bladed skull.
Dutton’s monotone rumbled across the expanse.
“Crush them.”
There were 36 protesters in total – all good and very numerological. The coven had been firing up a particularly juicy Working for the approaching fash.
Orgone crystals, a spicy natural resource unique to Arcadia, weren’t just a next-gen fuel source set to power the economy into the next millennium; they also had wild supernatural properties.
The CRUSADER-EXCALIBUR mine site was, in fact, a turbocharged locus for hefty loads of mind-bending etheric energies.
An oil slick of pigs surged, thirsty for a reckoning.
Jade orgone power wreathed the coven, locked together elbow to elbow in a containment circle around the crystal haul. They chanted wordlessly and the red rock beneath them growled.
Chock Fistwell’s trigger finger seized. He felt the surge of the cannon’s pumps as toxic sludge was fed into the cannon –
The ground in front of the coven – the green-haired one  muttered  “This is going to be fucking great”  through a malicious slash of a grin – split apart, spraying an umbra of orgone jizz skyward.
The gouge in the earth’s mantle raced at the looming regiment. 
A screaming  infant could be heard from below, volume escalating rapidly.
The first line of filth seized, bewildered.
Chock’s trigger finger choked. His receding jaw slackened at the unfolding spectacle.
His inert cannon leaked a thick trickle of effluent. 
Look, we don’t do subtlety around here.
The racing void in the desert floor gaped and swallowed the middle of the frontline. Cops on the fringe tumbled in, wailing.
The shrieking intensified along with the coven’s alien chanting, almost subsuming the rending of earth.
Dutton’s panicked order to retreat was lost in the cacophony.
The void swelled, making way for the screeching thing.
Dutton’s Legion advanced, genetic programming overwhelming their urge to flee. 
They continued to tumble into the widening earthen maw, which looked precisely like a giant vulva to the police helicopter humming uselessly overhead.
We don’t do subtlety around here.
The thing beneath the earth crowned, erupted onto the surface in a shower of red dirt and chunks of cloned fascist.
It was bipedal,  fifteen feet tall.
A scorpion’s tail whipped.
Six arms  with hooked pincers snapped.
Blessed black wings folded across its armored back.
Its screeching, six eyed head, a toddler’s, was wreathed in fire.
This, then, was the first recorded earth-dimensional appearance of the BA‎BALÖN force in fifty years.
It ended satisfyingly badly for the cops.

GARBO - short fiction

Brad was in his basement man-cave, scoping the drone footage.

Sickly blue CRT flicks returned from the Wasp’s deeply primitive drone firmware.

It was a bird’s eye view situation. A peloton of soft geezers fizzed past on a tail-wind, lost focus, then returned to clarity as the sky-borne electric eye centred.

Brad adjusted settings, flicked through the bands.

The Outriders – state Gestapo, lycra-shod sentinels in light armour – rode the outskirts at sun-up, enforcing the Curfew. Silent, superannuated cops on thirty-K carbon fibre rockets.

The Yu variant had leaked to the mainland from the island state of Southern Arcadia and steadily encroached north, and here we were.

Federation at war. Eternal nightsticks. Infinite lockdown.

Vaccine supplies were decimated, meth labs requisitioned as last resorts.

Water supplies were looking average.

Food at a premium.

Thanks, hill-people.

A torn ember of sunrise, the horizon a smouldering rip of fire, briefly blinded the Wasp.

Brad recalibrated again, dropping a couple of spectrums.

Refocused.

There they were, glowing infra-red in leafy Yerwoong, average house price a lazy $2.4m.

First, the Garbo, swinging his truck’s arse-end into the bend as the pigs accelerated into a sharp left, maw gaping.

Then, a gleaming lethal filament licking across the screen, neck height.

A thick black tube, concertinaed, guzzled human fat from an expensive hotel’s trap on a monitor. A face, bloated and fatally aerated, gurned up from another. A hedge-trimmer bore down on exposed genitals, making blunt, bloody work. A beer keg full of fresh viscera briefly winked by on yet another.

Brad popped a No-Doze, chewed, tasting earthy upper.

His jaw locked as the peloton accelerated into their decapitations.

Six heads cascaded, thunkity thunk thunk thunk (thunk thunk), quick, clean and satisfying.

The Garbo made short work of it all – bodies into the crusher, bikes requisitioned.

A street sweeper, bringing up the rear, sorted the heads-errant situation.

Here’s what was happening.

The Revolt was on.

It was Brad’s day off – he was a delivery driver – which meant he worked a shift manning the drones.

The Yu variant – that’s Greek, by the way – had cast the Class diaspora into even more extreme relief. The haves had their Outriders protecting their largesse, the have-nots were merely fucked. Essential servitude was the order of the day, probably a death sentence, while the non-essentials wallowed.

Brad had a plan, though.

He could broadcast the Truth.

The Wasp just needed carbon fibre.

More antennae to throw the signal.

More Outriders, more pelotons.

The fat-trappers, the keg-haulers, the arborists and all of the other invisible laborers were out there, collecting.

Getting it done.

Doing the work.

Boosting the signal.

Brad tapped at the keyboard, offering coordinates to another Wasp, another cohort of workers in the Capital.

Parliament House.

He popped another No-Doze, tasted dirt, and hit send.

Time to do some actual work.

BATTEN, DOWN - short fiction

Batten: 26.3645° S, 152.9677° E.

The Mayor, Jimbo Paddock, had annexed the surf beach and area surrounding his wellness cafe at sunset.

He was a boiled-pink, barrel-chested, lats-flared, fluoro dick-stickered, self-funded retiree Spartan with an iron-streaked braid.

Murdered the fuck out of a bunch of families and resort staff, right up in our faces, as the light dimmed.

Jimbo was into exotic food and carried a spear he’d made from his decommissioned Cool Cabana. He’d slung the shade sail’s bloodied polyester sleeve over his shoulder, filling it with gory trophies of his innumerable kills.

A real mean Boomer survivalist motherfucker.

An apexagenarian predator.

The resort sauna’s toilet had been full of blood.

That’s when we’d decided to make a break for it, obviously.

It was our first actual family holiday in, well, ever. We’d burnt all our financial bridges for this solitary 72 hours of scheduled familial bliss: me, him, bub.

Saved like fuckers for a weekend on the white sand.
Aspired.

Gone hard.

Sweated, scrimped, saved.

Sacrificed.
Argued.

Saved again.

Remortgaged.

Gotten a loan.

Argued.

Gotten a loan from the parents.

We needed the break.

It really was that dire.

Of course we were at each other’s throats.

So it was sort of a relief when the end of the world kicked in…

Read the full story in Yarns From the Fuck-You-Ni-Verse.