Читать книгу Billy. Going where darkness fears to tread… - Colin David Palmer - Страница 3

Her tortured squeals of terror and pitiful grunts of desperation echoed across the pre-dawn mist as the sun began its inexorable rise, its red stain across the horizon a prelude to another steamy day. The many species of bird life had been active for some time. Noisy parakeets screeched across the sky and camouflaged the footfalls of many ground dwellers out searching for their morning meal, or having eaten, returning to their nighttime lairs. Food remained abundant here with fruits and vegetables both wild and cultivated supplementing the animal meat.

Today would see them feasting on a sow, almost wild after being loose in the forest. She had been suckling three young ones that made her a relatively easy target – catching the piglets had been more difficult. If some fool didn’t steal them from the pen they now occupied, it would see their group sustained for weeks. Their actions were necessary but not needed… as they would find out.

They hadn’t meant to kill her. She was more value to them alive and an obvious sign a male pig was out there somewhere. She could have been the beginning for some or at least one of the group to return to their former Life. But a group led by panic is a group without leadership, and the sticks and rocks they held for self-defence became instruments of death. Some shouldered others out of the way just so they could get in their own pleasurable stab or bash, and when the sows’ skull fractured (exploded really), others turned away and puked, but their hands did not leave their sharpened sticks imbedded in her eyes, neck or guts. The realisation that she was dead raised a cheer and they set onto her again, this time with teeth and bare hands clawing and ripping at her raw flesh. One of them even ran from the mob with the sows’ intestines trailing from his teeth spilling blood, gore and the stinking contents of the organ over everything he passed. These people may not have forgotten their Life yet, but common decency had certainly disappeared from their memories.

Life. It was a word that none of them had use for anymore. Life. They recalled fairytales told long ago by their mothers or indeed, spoken from their own mouths to their own children. Fairytales or prayers? Who could remember anymore? Who cared anymore? Some of them did. But that was another time, another place. Here they were among their own kind, no fairytales to comfort them, no Mothers to hug them.

New arrivals were always difficult. Most refused to believe the facts, refused to believe their destiny, refused reality, and clung strongly to their beliefs. Some of them made it but they were a minority – a very small minority. The old cliché about the strongest and fittest surviving was crap! Here, the strongest and fittest, the fastest, the smartest, meant nothing. Zip, zilch… unless it was applied to acceptance. He who adapted and accepted quickest, survived. Most didn’t, understandably.

You go through Life with all the best intentions, selfish as most of them may be. Life; that anomaly of being alive. You live Life by striving to do better, earn more money, screw as many girls as you can, buy that flash sports car, go on that debauched holiday, living Life to its fullest.

Sometimes they can tell straight away if someone is going to make it or not. It doesn’t take long to figure out who has it and who doesn’t. They’d seen mothers, fathers, teenagers, toddlers, grandparents, politicians, council workers, real estate salesmen, all and sundry come through here. Some stay mere seconds, some for a couple of hours, but by the end of their first day most, if not all, have gone. And it’s not that they all arrive together either, like on a tour bus or something, no; it’s more like they are coming and going, and going and coming at all hours of the day or night.

You had to feel sorry for the ones that arrived at night – they have no chance, no chance at all. Of those that watched over them, there stood one that knew better than any other individual, because there had only ever been one that survived a night arrival – and it was he.

It isn’t night now. The sun has risen, striking his piece of dirt before any other on the Australian mainland. Once again there had only ever been one that knew what was going to happen, and that, as you may have guessed this time, was he again.