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Author Profile Bill was born in the A schoolteacher himself for twenty‑five years, specialising in
Foreign Languages and Classics, Bill decided in 1984 that someone else could do
the next quarter of a century. He changed careers and worked for eighteen years
as a probation and parole officer, although, as it turned out, there was little
difference between being a schoolteacher and being a probation officer. Still
the same challenge of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, only
this time without textbooks and a syllabus. In the mid‑1990s Bill decided to turn seriously to writing. He
attended a creative writer’s course under the inspiring tutelage of Paulette
Gee where he received an excellent grounding in the elements of the craft. Several of his short stories have appeared in collections published in
recent years by Paulette Gee’s own Debut Publishing Company. Nowadays Bill is a member of CrimeWriters 1
The
Darling Downs, Southeast Queensland, One
day in 2023. ‘Obstinate bloody Rim farmers,’ I grumbled. ‘Why can’t they look
after their own security a bit better?’ I pulled up to let Pete and the
messenger jump down onto the dusty roadway. ‘If they insist on living this far
out instead of shifting into Toowoomba where it’s still relatively safe, then
they should accept the fucking consequences.’ There was a grinding noise from somewhere inside the clapped-out jeep as
I shoved it into gear again and drove over to a big pool of shade under some fig
trees. Hopefully the shit of a gearbox would hold together till we got back
home. Now, that was an uncomfortable thought...Snipers in the bushes off
the main road. More snipers up in the gum trees. Things like that. We’d had it
all before. I shuddered. This wasn’t going to be one of my better days. Next to the fig trees were the skeletal remains of the general store.
Johnsonvale was a scattered farming community of about twenty modest houses and
properties. A peaceful, happy place to live and work, you reckon? A bit sleepy,
perhaps? Not now. Those days were all well and truly over. Nowadays it was
Frontier territory, with all that went with it. Watchfulness and fear. It was
all around me. In the air. You could almost reach out and touch it. A pile of charred timbers and some smashed fibro sheeting was all that
was left of the store. Anything useable had long since been carted off. Only
things still there were stuff no one could make use of. Odds and ends of broken
steel lay in the shrivelled weeds. Two faded Shell petrol pumps were slowly
rusting away on the cracked concrete of the old driveway. The hoses had gone, of
course, and the glass. The pump on the right had a big dent in one end and
leaned at a forty-five degree angle. The other pump was disappearing under a
tangle of some sort of vine. The local Good Neighbour Council had already roped off the scene of the
killings and a knot of people had gathered in the roadway in the warm sunshine,
swiping irritably at the sticky flies that hovered round their faces. The good
old Aussie salute. At least that hadn’t changed, except that nowadays there
seemed to be more flies to swipe at. Fat and greasy, looking as if they were
about to pop. Turned your stomach if you stopped to think about it. What those
flies must have fed on. I looked across at the locals. Outwardly they seemed like a passive
bunch, but these days you never could tell. The grown-ups, dressed in patched
and threadbare clothing, stood muttering among themselves, squinting in our
direction and sizing us up as they talked. In our light-blue uniform shirts,
yellow neckerchiefs and dark-blue pants we stood out like tits on a bull.
Conspicuous. Like a pair of TV aliens from the days when we still had TV. Half-a-dozen ragged-looking kids had their beady eyes glued on the
dark-blue jeep. Most things mechanical in our part of the world had worn out
years ago so motor vehicles were a rare sight. The little blighters would
probably have clambered all over it except that I’d already given the
messenger my rifle. I wondered about the rifle. Perhaps I should have come out here with a
bit more firepower. Still, we wouldn’t shoot at them unless things started to
get really menacing. We needed to keep the ammo for the road back, after this
bloody lot was over. The Outer Rim unnerved me for some reason. I’d never got used to it.
It made me edgy and bad-tempered. It was like being in a kind of parallel world,
where everything looked sort of familiar, but different rules applied. A bit
like doing guard duty at Isolation, the big prison out on what used to be the I opened the bonnet of the jeep, and with about forty eyes watching my
every move took out the rotor-arm and handed it to the messenger. ‘You stay with the jeep, Craig,’ I said quietly so that the locals
couldn’t hear. ‘Don’t want anyone pinching the wheels or any other bits
that might be useful.’ You couldn’t be too careful with your vehicles. In some parts it was
dangerous even to come to a stop. It would be my arse on the line back at
Headquarters if anything went missing. A balding, heavy-set guy of about forty broke from the group and walked
over to Pete and me. He wore work-stained overalls and a yellow and blue checked
shirt. A vee of coarse grey hair showed at the neck. ‘G’day, mate,’ Pete said, in his usual breezy way. He held out his
broad hand. That was Pete. Ready to see the best in everyone. I liked Pete. He
was close to my age. I was thirty-seven and he was only about three years
younger. Big and beefy, with a rough honesty, he was dependable. A good mate at
a time when good mates were getting harder to find. ‘I’m Pete. This is Tom.
What’ve we got here?’ ‘Ian Mitchell,’ said the man, shaking Pete’s hand. ‘Council
foreman. We’ve got two dead in the kitchen over there.’ He nodded back to
where he had come from. ‘That’s Angelo and Maria Torrisi. And the
daughter’s missing. Cathy. She’s ten.’ I looked past the huddle of people beside the front gate. Set back five
metres or so from the front fence-line, the one-storey house was perched on
timber stumps which raised it a couple of metres off the ground to let cool air
circulate underneath, particularly in the baking months of summer. It was built
of wood, with flaking, off-white paint and a weathered red-oxide roof made of
corrugated iron. A covered verandah ran round two sides of it and halfway along
the third where it was stopped by the kitchen. You could see lots of these
houses, more or less of the same design, in all the Outer Rim settlements. The place was neat and clean. No rubbish lying around. A small patch of
lawn looked as if it had only recently been scythed. A few rose bushes, a
stunted red hibiscus and some other plants struggled to grow in the front yard.
A huge Norfolk Island pine, not yet felled for fuel, towered over the whole
place. Washing still stirred in the hot breeze, pegged to a line at the side of
the house. Some checked shirts, a pair of men’s jeans, a few bits of women’s
underwear, towels and a pillowcase. You’d have thought the Torrisis had just
gone out somewhere for a while, visiting. ‘They were doing OK, I guess, Angelo and his wife, all things
considered,’ said Mitchell. ‘If you look out the back, you can see they’ve
got a good crop of passionfruit, capsicums and pumpkins coming on. You get good
prices in Toowoomba for stuff like that, what with the rationing and all. It’s
getting harder to grow them now, but. With the drought and all that. Everyone
round here’s the same.’ I looked at the surrounding countryside. It stretched to where the low
hills were silhouetted against a pale apricot sky. The Long Winter that had
followed the last and biggest of the Asian-Middle East wars had changed our
climate for good. Apart from brief but violent thunderstorms that you could now
expect at any time of year, the good rains had failed three summers in a row.
Nowadays the flat landscape of the Downs was always the tired dry-season colour
of dusty straw. Darker, slow-moving shapes were the shadows thrown by the
clouds. The only patches of green I could see were scattered smallholdings like
the Torrisis’, ten, fifteen hectares or so, clinging on because they had bore
water and a windmill. ‘You people still got water, then?’ I asked, drawing out the
conversation. I knew full well what I was doing. I wasn’t interested in cosy
neighbourhood chitchat. I was deliberately putting off going into the house
where the bodies were. Corpses were not my strong point. Especially ones that
were starting to get a bit ripe. ‘Bores, yeah. But even the bores are starting to dry out, the further
you head out towards the Empty Zone.’ ‘What about the little girl?’ Pete asked. ‘What d’you think has
happened to her?’ ‘Cathy? I don’t like to think about that,’ Mitchell muttered,
scuffing the ground angrily with his boot. ‘Ten years old. I’ve got a
daughter her age. They’re in the same class.’ ‘You’ve still got a school here, then?’ Pete asked in surprise.
‘Must be one of the last, eh?’ ‘School, yes. No teacher now, though. Last one left two years ago. Too
scared to stay, I guess. The families round here all pitch in to teach the kids
what we can. The building’s still OK, but it’s not school like we used to
know it. Poor bloody kids. It’s a fucking sick world we’re bringing them up
in. And there’s a lot worse to come, if you ask me. Young Cathy’s probably
better off out of it.’ His voice wavered as he said it. I knew just how he felt. My own
daughter Jessica wasn’t much younger. I worried about her future as well. Pete
and I just looked at each other. Neither of us could find anything appropriate
to say. ‘So, you guys going in, or what?’ Mitchell asked. He sounded a bit
pissed off. ‘Come on, Tom,’ Pete said with a shrug. ‘Can’t put off the evil
moment, I guess. We’d better go and take a look inside.’ ‘Kitchen’s at the back. Hope you guys have got strong stomachs.’ That didn’t sound too bloody inviting. I untied my neckerchief so that
I could clamp it round my nose and mouth if I had to. There was the rustling of whispered words from the people at the gate as
I shoved it aside. Pete and I went inside the property. On the verandah, large blowflies were already swarming on the corpses of
two big Rottweilers, crawling in squadrons in their dead eyes and open jaws,
laying eggs for the maggots to come later. The family had probably kept the
Rotties as guard-dogs. You’d need them out here, especially at night. The dogs
had been poisoned. Chunks of meat lay in pools of vomit beside them. More flies
were moving through the foul mess. I lost my balance for a second and brought one foot down on the edge of
the sicked-up meat. Feeling cold and clammy I scraped my boot on the wooden
planking. I looked across at Pete and he wrinkled his nose in disgust. ‘That’s a fucking good start,’ I said. A sweetish sort of spit flooded my mouth and I had to swallow hard. I
knew that even worse things than dog vomit waited for us inside the house,
especially after what Mitchell had said about having strong stomachs. I tell you, I wasn’t bloody wrong. The fly-screen door squeaked as we pushed it open. We stepped inside the
main part of the house. ‘You go ahead of me,’ I said to Pete. ‘Jeez, mate, that’s fucking big of you,’ he replied grimly. My insides started a slow churning and my bladder filled up. It always
does that when I’m not in control of things. ‘Christ, what a God-awful smell in here!’ muttered Pete as we
trudged warily down the narrow hallway. We stopped and peered into the two bedrooms. No nasty surprises in them
at any rate. Only more flies humming and circling in the stuffy air. I flailed
my arms wildly at them, remembering where they were all coming from. The stench
got stronger and I clamped my neckerchief more tightly to my face. They lay in the kitchen-cum-living-room. Alf and Maria Torrisi. Face
down on the wooden planking of the floor. The way their clothes were lying
showed that some sick bastard had made them undress before they died. Then
afterwards he had arranged the corpses very carefully, side by side and head to
toe, in a filthy sexual position. You could tell from the look of the room that they’d been cut down in
different parts of it. They must have put up a stiff fight against their
attackers. Blood was spattered down the timber walls. Brain matter looked as if
it had been thrown against the furniture. The wife was missing most of one arm.
The man was minus one foot. ‘Christ Almighty, they used axes on them,’ I whispered. ‘Just like
they did to that poor stupid bastard Baumann last year. These people haven’t
been killed. They’ve been fucking butchered.’ Pete had started to move the woman’s body, but it was the wrong thing
to do. One side of her head was sliced away and the whole head gaped open like a
pig on a slab as he tried to turn her over. Big as he was, Pete made a gargling
sound, rushed to the open back door and vomited long and painfully down the
steps. I fought against it, but I might have felt better in the long run if I
hadn’t. Pete’s efforts had been the last straw. There wasn’t anything we could do. I made a rough sketch of what
we’d found and then got out of the room as quickly as I could. Shoving my way past poor old Pete who was retching up the last of his
stomach contents, I took a much-needed leak off the side of the back steps,
supporting myself against one of the wooden uprights of the doorway. I took my
time, mainly to steady my nerves, watching as the stream of pee made zigzag
rivulets in the dry ground below. After a while I zipped up my pants and walked
round the side of the house, into the front yard again. Pete followed me some
way behind. He still looked a nasty colour. The bigger they are, the harder they fall,
I thought stupidly. ‘Hey, what was the name of the little girl, Pete?’ I
asked. ‘Cathy, wasn’t it?’ Pete said thickly, wiping his mouth on his
sleeve. ‘No
sign of her, eh?’ ‘Nope. Poor little kid. Just think of what she must have seen, Tom.
Doesn’t bear thinking about.’ ‘I guess whoever did this took her out into the scrub somewhere and
raped her before they killed her. Perhaps Mitchell was right. She’d probably
be better off out of it.’ Again a brief image of Jessica flashed into my mind, spreadeagled in the
dirt with her panties down around her feet and her legs open, sightless eyes
looking up at the buzzards circling overhead. I blinked hard to get rid of the
image. Nevertheless it kept coming back at me during the rest of that day and at
odd intervals for some time afterwards. Nighttime was the worst. Mitchell and four other farmers were waiting in the neat little garden.
One tall young bloke was standing right in the centre of a patch of herbs -
mint, sage and thyme - squashing the greenery with hefty, wooden-soled boots. ‘Get your bloody feet off her garden, you unfeeling bastard!’ I
yelled at him, more as a way of relieving my own anger at what had become of the
world. After all, it wasn’t as if Maria Torrisi was ever going to be able to pick
the herbs again. ‘Haven’t you got any fucking respect?’ The man muttered something under his breath and shuffled onto the gravel
path. Bits of mint still stuck to the toe of one boot. I sat down wearily on one of the verandah steps, well away from the dead
dogs. Pete sat down beside me and put his head in his hands. He was trying not
to start retching again. I reached into my shirt pocket and brought out a packet
of fags and some matches. Probably not the wisest thing to do, given the way I
was feeling - all churned up like that - but it gave me something to take my
mind off things a bit. The first draw on the rough ‘State’ tobacco made my
head swim even worse. I waved my hand weakly at the house behind me. ‘OK,’ I said to
Mitchell. ‘Your guys can clean up in there now. We’ve got all we need. Axes?’
I added, looking straight at Mitchell. ‘How fucking brutal is that?’ ‘Sign of the times,’ said Mitchell, pushing past Pete and me and
leading his crew into the house. Dead bodies had to be buried quickly. There was no way you could get
them into Toowoomba in the heat, let alone keep them fresh enough to do an
autopsy on. Autopsy? That was a word from the past. The old policing methods had
disappeared along with the old police themselves. There wasn’t even a morgue
anymore. Now it was just blokes like us, from the City Militia, trying to keep
order in a world that was slowly devouring itself. After a while Mitchell returned from burying the Torrisis among their
pumpkins. He sat down beside Pete and me on the verandah steps. I gave him a
‘State’. He looked as if he needed it. ‘So what are we looking at?’ I asked, passing my cigarette over to
him so that he could light his. ‘Bevan raiders, d’you reckon?’ ‘Doubt if it’s them,’ Mitchell replied. ‘We haven’t had Bevans
infiltrate this far out for a couple of years. We’re better armed these days.
You have to be. And the Bevans don’t use axes. Least, I don’t think they
do.’ ‘So, who then?’ ‘If you ask me, it’s typical Giardini,’ Mitchell replied. That made sense. ‘Why Giardini and not Wong?’ Pete asked. Mitchell coughed as the sharp smoke from the harsh cigarette caught in
the back of his throat. He aimed a gob of phlegm at the lawn. ‘Christ, these things’ll fucking kill you, even if the Bevan’s
don’t,’ he said, but he didn’t throw the cigarette away. Even ‘States’
were hard to come by out here. ‘See, Angelo and Maria,’ he went on, ‘their people came from ‘Do you pay protection?’ I asked. ‘Don’t be fuckin’ stupid. We all do,’ Mitchell continued.
‘What else do you expect us to bloody do? You blokes from Town might think you
keep order out here, but in fact you don’t. You only come out here once in a
blue moon. That means somebody else has got to stop the Bevans and the raiders
from the Empty Zone from nipping across the fence and stealing our stuff at
night. We pay protection to the reffo gangs so that they’ll take some of the
pressure off us. We work bloody hard to grow stuff out here. No one’s going to
rip us off that easy. But it’s dog eat fuckin’ dog out here, mate, I tell
you.’ ‘What do you mean - the Zone?’ Pete asked. ‘I thought we
were supposed to have cleared it out. I didn’t think there were any people
living that far out these days.’ ‘Well, don’t you believe all they tell you,’ said Mitchell. ‘You
haven’t got rid of all of ’em, not by a long chalk. There’s still a few
strays. Some real crazy bastards live out there, believe me.’ ‘Wasn’t this guy Angelo paying his money, then?’ I asked. ‘I reckon if Angelo was behind in his protection payments, he
couldn’t have missed many,’ Mitchell replied. ‘They were good people, you
know? Just minded their own business and got on with things. Didn’t draw
attention to themselves. Good folk. Shouldn’t have happened to them the way it
did. No poor bugger deserves that.’ Thank Christ no one had pinched the jeep. Young Craig was sitting on the
bonnet. He held my rifle prominently across his knees and was chatting up one of
the girls from the settlement with all the cocky, self-importance of a
seventeen-year-old. An unremarkable girl with blonde hair tied back in a
ponytail. She wore a blouse and well-patched jeans. In fact, everything about
Johnsonvale looked unremarkable or, at least, as unremarkable as anything could
be in times like these. Except for what we’d seen in the Torrisis’ kitchen. I walked over to Craig and the girl, feeling a bit brighter with each
step. ‘Did you know their daughter?’ I asked. ‘Cathy, wasn’t she?’ ‘She went to the school-teaching with my little brother,’ the girl replied. ‘She was OK, I guess.’ The girl’s remark sounded very offhand. Bloody Outer Rim people,
I thought, cursing them again, all their feelings are fucking dulled. You
could see it in their faces. Part of their survival technique, I suppose. It
didn’t do to get too concerned about things though, otherwise you’d go mad.
Mind you, it took guts to hang on out here, so close to the Empty Zone, and with
the heat and the water problems and the flies and the raiders. Compared to this,
life in Toowoomba, with all its problems and the endless bloody shortages, was a
breeze. I resolved to tell Mind you, being stuck in a dismal dump like Johnsonvale wouldn’t suit
me for a moment either. I was keen to get away, as soon as I had got a few more
bits of information for my report. The report. Hah! That was a joke! No bugger
back at HQ would lose any sleep over it. Why should they? What had happened to
the Torrisis wasn’t an isolated incident by any means. Not any more. And there
wasn’t anything that could be done. We just didn’t have the resources to do
any kind of follow-up. No, I’d type the thing out, hand it in at the
commander’s office and someone would just write ‘Noted’ on it. Then
they’d file it away somewhere in Archives and that would be the end of it. As we drove up the track leading back to the main road, the jeep bucked
and struggled to find traction in the drifts of fine sand alternating with hard,
rutted clay. None of us was game to look back. I knew one or two of the kids
were probably waving, but I had only one thing on my mind: to forget the whole
bloody lot of them and get back to my own two kids. Finally we reached the deserted frame of an abandoned petrol station,
marking the intersection with the old western highway. By now, the highway was
getting almost impossible to navigate. Light vehicles couldn’t manage it at
all much beyond Johnsonvale. The road would probably have closed altogether if
it weren’t for the kerosene convoys keeping the scrub from closing over
completely. Although it was only twenty-two k’s from Johnsonvale to the edge of
Town, it still took us over an hour. It had been years - eight, ten or more -
since the last road crews had packed up and gone, and in the meantime rain and
sun had made the bitumen surface crumble away. One or two halfway decent
stretches still remained but they were potholed and narrow where the scrub had
invaded. Tangles of lantana and blue morning glory spread out their creeping
fingers as if to strangle the highway altogether. Every few hundred metres I had to drop down into first gear to negotiate
empty, rocky creeks where bridges and culverts had collapsed. The cheaply-made
jeep - an import from Except when he and the messenger had to get out and push and curse and
swear, Pete sat slumped in the passenger seat, his hands over his eyes. It
wasn’t like him to be like that. He was usually a lot more thick-skinned than
I was. Young Craig sat stiffly, almost at attention, in the rear of the jeep,
keeping a sharp eye out for snipers. At least he was enjoying himself. Riding
shotgun in the true sense of the term. He looked like a character from a Mad Max
movie - not that he would ever have seen a Mad Max movie, of course. Movies had
faded from the scene a long time ago. Gone the same way as the TV. When the last
of the electricity blinked out, so did many of the things my generation thought
would last forever. Mitchell had said there hadn’t been any infiltrators from below the
Range for a while, but it still paid to be careful, even in daylight, especially
at the creek crossings. I couldn’t have felt more conspicuous if I’d had a
big red X painted between my shoulder blades. We were targets for every sniper
for kilometres around. Finally we came within sight of Toowoomba. On the way in I drove
deliberately close to the Wong refugee camp at the old Airport in a pathetic
attempt to show them that the Militia was still active. I didn’t really have
to go that close, but it was a bit like showing the flag. Let the buggers see we
weren’t going to be intimidated by their kind of riff-raff. One shot was fired
half-heartedly from inside the perimeter and it missed us by a good fifty
metres. I’d promised young Craig earlier that he could have at least one shot
before we got back to HQ, so I said, ‘Give ’em one back, mate.’ He fired off one round. Made his day. Once we were back among the outlying suburbs of Toowoomba, it became
easier to talk. ‘You know, Pete, it really shits me what little we can do to protect
people like the Torrisis and the rest of them,’ I said. ‘No wonder hoons
like the Bevans and the VPs get away with things like they do, and the Wongs and
the Giardinis show us the finger.’ ‘Well, what do you expect us to do, Tom?’ Pete asked, irritably. ‘That bloke Mitchell back there was right, I reckon. We only go to the
Outer Rim once in a blue moon, and then we’re limited to what we can do. The
Rim’s far too big for us to keep an eye on all of it anymore. You’d need
half a fuckin’ army to do that. I feel bad about those folks, same as you do,
but I try to do the job I’ve been given, and if it falls short, it ain’t my
problem.’ I knew, though, that Pete wasn’t anywhere near as hard-nosed as he
sounded. He’d be agonising over the fate of Cathy Torrisi just as much as I
was. All I wanted to do at that moment was get back to Town all in one piece,
type up my report and do the rest of my shift. Fucking double shift, too,
because I’d promised But before that, I would start off a chain of events whose final outcome
would turn out to be far worse than Johnsonvale or a whole string of
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