Read Online The War of Immensities by Barry Klemm - Free Book Online Page B

nothing
much else. But that was the way to go, no doubt about it.
    In Stanhope he
stopped and found only a milk bar open but he was able to get a
hamburger and coffee, trying to force himself to take an hour. It
wasn’t much of a town, and noted only for a recent outbreak of
anthrax. He regarded the hamburger ruefully but such dangers
weren’t what bothered him. His system hated the lack of motion. On
the one hand he was almost falling asleep, on the other he was
frantic to get back on the road. After just twenty minutes he was
back behind the wheel and moving on, following the road toward
Shepparton, which lay east, but he didn’t get far before he knew he
must turn north again. The new road led toward Kyabram and he
sensed that the corridor of contentment that guided him was growing
narrower.
    And then he was
slowing down and stopped. He was ten kilometres beyond Stanhope and
about eight short of Kyabram and had been on the road five hours.
At first he thought it was exhaustion and he contemplated taking a
non-doze but then he realised he had passed the spot. He turned
back, drove three kilometres and then pulled off the road. There
was a track of sorts and the gate through the barbed wire was not
locked. In the half-moonlight, he could see only that there was
nothing to see. He bounced along the track for about a kilometre
then swung off onto grassland and ploughed through. The terrain was
flat as a dinner table and there were only a few clumps of trees in
the distance here and there. He stopped and stepped down from the
truck, walking a few yards wide. He was way out in the middle of a
completely empty field—not even a sheep to be seen. He had arrived.
This was the place. But where was it?
    Right in the
bloody middle of nowhere.

*

    Andromeda awoke
with Jim Morrison pounding in her brain—it was the worst kind of
hangover.
    We gotta get
outa this place.
    If it’s the
last thing I ever do;
    Girl there’s a
better life for me and you.
    Yo! what a
shocker, and all the worse because it was entirely inside her
head—out there in the real world, insects hummed and only birds
sang. And there was sunlight—wicked and mean and incinerating her
eyeballs right out of their sockets. Her nose was hurting
unmercifully and had spotted blood on the pillow, she saw. That
last line she snorted near blew the sinuses right out the back of
her head and there was nothing after that. Wow, what a way to
go!
    There was a
dream too, a nightmare, stuck in the mire of her brain somewhere.
She had been standing naked, surrounded by a sea of little boys all
of whom were no taller than her mid-thighs. They were reaching with
their hands to touch her as high on her body as they could, and
although they could reach no higher than her buttocks and abdomen,
every one of the thousands of them seemed able to touch her with
grubby, pawing hands. There was nothing erotic in it—it was
menacing, those little boys were all evil gnomes…. What would the
shrinks make of that! Guilt, maybe, for cradle-snatching all those
young musicians… She squeezed her eyes closed, to try and force the
memory of the dream out of her brain.
    Have a damned
look at yourself, woman. Just have a goddamned look. Go on, turn
the light on and show yourself, you mantis. The fluorescent
flickered macabrely and she looked dead! Holy Shit. Only
thirty-seven and decomposing already. Sure, the body was in good
shape—the work-outs and diets took care of that—but the face! It
gave the game away completely.
    She dragged her
fingers on her cheeks, to make the wrinkles smooth, like Joan
Collins. Still looked god-damned awful. Those eyes, so hideously
bloodshot. Bags under that you could pack your entire wardrobe in
and go down home.
    Yeah, sure.
Home. But where’s home? For sure not hot and dusty barefoot days in
Trinidad—Ma and Pa were long since dead and no one was left to
remember her. Nor the even worse poverty of Soho and all those
fog-bound years of trying to break into