Trucksong (17 page)

They were from Sinnerman.

Them brumbies had took what they wanted from me poor old truck and left the rest for the flapples that could digest all but the chassis.

Storm was leading the procession. It wasn’t obviously overjoyed to see its mate Sinnerman laid out for flapple meat and I felt sad at that. There was a droaning trucksong coming from their sound systems, deep long bass waves and a leaking high pitch keening wailing, sad with no beats except for the rhythm of sadness. I felt that sadness and I was sorry that Sinnerman sold me out for nothing in the end. Would of been a bit different if Storm had at least wanted the same thing. But as it was, it looked like the brumbies had got their hydraulics into Storm. I reckoned Sinner had tried to lure Storm away from the Brumby King but Storm wasn’t going to have a bar of it and Sinner wasn’t going to budge and become brumby neither so it were curtains for Sinnerman.

I watched me solid old truckmate that I had roaded through many adventures with as it was towed out to be buried in the sky of the mountains above the brumby lair and the trucks moved in slow patterns and dimmed their lights and sung their sad trucksong while a hungry bunch of flapples hissed and crunched over Sinner’s spent metal bones. Its plates and panels that it was once so proud of was picked to bits and carried off into the sky. I spose it was a fitting in the end and I wondered what Storm wanted with it. Storm stayed longer than the others, doing some of its own mournful sounds and lowing in a slow roll around Sinner’s carcass as it got carried away and up into the sky by the flapping carrion birds. Maybe Storm was remembering times past and working out if things could of been different. But who knows what went on inside them truckminds, they was as baffling as wild animals. Storm started humming a sad lonely groove which I thought were a bit strange since it were clearly responsible for Sinner’s demise. I watched too with a heavy heart.

It were after all the trucks had gone back down to their lair that I thought it were safe to start moving again. But just as I were getting going there was a rustling of wings and feathers and for a second I thought of Crow and the ark arking voice come to call me to another place, come to sing me hands to different actions to what I wanted them to. But a random freek through the link squawked in me head and through me bones and I realised it was one of the flappling droans. I turned to see it hopping towards me, its beady eyes and vicious beak glinting with metal shavings and shards of glass. I backed away. I’d never heard of a flapple going after flesh before but then I latched on to the number of the random freek. It was Sinnerman’s tag file sig. I lined up a hit of skull death for it and that flapple come easy and quiet as a lamb. There were some strange mechanics afoot, for it seemed what were left of Sinner’s truckmind, was now blipping on the inside of this flapple. I backed away but then I were made stronger by the thought as a plan grew on me that now maybe I would stand a chance of getting inside the lair by myself. The flapple weren’t a threat. It was tryin to make a mend for the trouble Sinner had caused me and I realised I could rig a fix in the camera eye holes of the flapple or I could send it down as a decoy while I climbed in from above. I was so close I may as well die as try so I risked it.

First up I needed to find another way in besides the main gate so I patched through the droan’s eyes and rigged its vision for infrared so I could see where the exhaust was coming from on the top of the mountain and you know that droan was not Sinnerman but it had parts of Sinner’s same smarts and it was fooled by the brumbies that welched on their deal. Or maybe it didn’t want to go with Sinner and Sinner didn’t want to stay slaved to the Brumby King, so it tried to make a run and it was caught and slaved anyway and then eaten for parts and throwed to the sky for flapple meat. And so now it was up in the sky where I sent it and it soared high on the currents of the clouds and the traffic flows of heated stacks of air rising from the hot ground of the valley below. Pretty soon I had me fix on that exhaust vent and it wasn’t too far away neither so next I climbed over to it and I sent the flapple down to the entrance, ready to trip some sensors in the main gate as I climbed down the funnel into the darkness of the lair.

Down that channel I went in to the heart of the Brumby King’s world. In to the heart of what would take me closer to Isa. The walls was covered in soot and ash and in the dark I felt me way down the narrow passageway thinking of them creatures that lived in the rocks and stones that came out of the cracks in the night. They are so skinny but they move as one with the world and so I moved closer and closer down, listening with me whole body as I went. Dark wings patterning the darkness with rustling sounds. Things moving far off down in the dark, creepy crawling things, but then I realised that I was a creepy crawling thing myself, and so I rested easier a bit then. I was one with the darkness, I was moving as one with the motions of the earth marked by the signs of the Wotcher. There was nothing to fear in that dark, there was nobody home except myself I thought, and down I crept, down down towards the centre of things, towards the secret centre where all questions would be answered. There was more movement down ahead, a scurrying scuttling sound and the spark of a match flared Crow’s face as he lit a durry and I saw he was young as me. We were getting more and more alike the closer we got together.

‘Fancy seein you down here,’ I said.

‘Ha ha. Don’t mind me, I’m just some old bloke who’s been followin you aroun. Or maybe its yer own self who’s been followin
me
all this time, waitin for the chance to come up on me like this.’

‘I ain’t followin you. You’re like me fucken shadow. I can’t shake you.’

‘I already told you, we is rollin on the same road. Who’s to say what side of the face casts the shadow?’

‘I’m not like you.’

‘Why don’t you try this coat and see how it fits?’

‘I’m not puttin that filthy thing on. I ain’t no crow. Besides, you’re nuthin, there’s nuthin to you.’

‘Well if there’s nuthin to me then what’s this coat hangin on then?’

He took off the coat. Underneath, he was just a skinny bloke in dirty rags.

‘Take it,’ he said.

Me mind skipped a track like a skittery Wotcher show cut in and out from the trancemission. It threw me off to see him like that, I couldn’t speak.

‘Ha ha, we are one and the same, boy. You’re just like me. We been tied together on the roadin and we’re gunna road some more yet,’ he said. ‘I got some more fine truckdream haze and cactusflower grog for you to get yer rocks off on.’

I looked down and I seen all along I already wore the coat what kept me warm through the nights and hidden on the road during the days. Gifted and passed on down the line. I’d been wearing it so long I forgot even how it come to me in the first place.

‘Nah, mate. I don’t wanna bar of it. You’re nuthin, you’re just in me imaginins, makin up suggestions for me,’ I said.

He was right there in front of me, the creases on his face gone smooth and then the next second there wasn’t nuthin there at all.

‘I know you, Crow,’ I said.

And I had the understanding. It were my coat, I owned it.

There were no more Crow but I could still hear his voice in me head.

‘Well I see you got me number all right. I guess I’ll just go quietly.’

‘Nah, Crow it’s not gunna be like that. I know you and I know yer tricks. You’re not a quiet one at all but I call you out now. I’m cawin you.’

I made a dry rattling cough in me throat and cawed him out. I knew him now, he was me, the I inside the eye. He was the thing down from the inside that moved me hand when I was too scared of Smoov to fight back. If I was ever gunna be free from him I had to start being smart enough to see the connexions between things so Crow didn’t have to put them together for me from what I already knew but were too dumb to see the truth.

‘You got no hold on me no more,’ I said.

There was no reply. Putting it out into words, the knowing of Crow sucked his cawing voice out of me head like poison from a snakebit arm. Because I knew Crow all right, it was just the same as a creature in the rock, it was nothing, it was songsmoke and haze dust so I pulled that trucktyre coat closer round me shoulders and I kept on going down. I wasn’t afraid of Crow no more and maybe he even left me some of his powers.

Into the lair of the Brumby King I crept. Down and down and down into the bloody heart of things, sitting in the chamber like a bullet in the breech. I reckoned facing the King inside, in a small space, would do away with its power, it would equalise us. Passage opened out to a bigger chamber. There were arc lights set up around the place, smell of fuel and solvents and grease and funky mechanic organics wafting through it all, thick rotted meats and sweet red mud. I found me way around the edges, sneaked like a shadow in me trucktyre coat through the wreckage of dead trucks and the bodies of spent droans and robos and the blood and the muck of slaughtered animals that had been pillaged for their bits as well. The brumbies so set on their pathway that they were feeding on meat now too, like a goanna droan would.

A tangly nest of wires rustled in the half light and it was like a dream where you look down at the ground and first you see one snake but then the whole place is crawling with them and you gotta make your way around them. Slinky snakes, all coiled around each other and writhing together in an oily mess of mating bodies. There were snake eggs and snakeshit white and glowing in the edges of the mangled tangles. And snakes were everywhere, all eating up the leftovers and eating the grease and bits of scavenged parts and robos, a dry scratching sound like fencing wires rasping together.

Then in the chamber I seen the brumby six, plus the one Left Tenant. Storm was there, also Silverfish with sparkling silver paints. Gelgoogle and Bauntaun and Little Cab. Ashsmash the last one, up on a hoist while a robo whined around and meched a fix. Piles of parts stacked in the corners. Jenny pumping out a throb, the whole place humming with power and movement squirming in the sides of me eyes. A show was beamed up on a screen, it was a Wotcher truck show. I reckonised bits of it but I’d not seen this part before and I watched for a minute. It was a fine show, and them trucks was also entranced. On the screen a line of wild indies were making a move up against the transcop thugs and smokies. The show was about being saved from slavery and I found it funny because them in the King’s mob was not exactly free and easy to do their own thing. They were slaved to the Brumby King, that was its whole point but maybe they didn’t care too much about the story and they just liked looking at pictures of trucks. They were all watching the show like a camp mob would, gathered around together. Up on the screen the big rigs blew their airhorns and ripped up the highways while smaller vehicles spun around them. I figured they must have been droans trying to get at the loads.

I beamed a message to Sinnerflapple up on the outside. It squawked through the link, last bits of Sinnerman chomped up by the flapple but still Sinnerman in there somewhere and it wanted revenge for the doublecross, even though it was gunna get torn to pieces in the end when the brumbies found it. The brumbies tweaked to the trancemission but they couldn’t tell the freek it come from, nor that I was so near. They just knew something was up and then the flapple tripped up a sensor. Ashsmash come down hard off the hoist and they all rolled out of there. The sound of their engines was deafening and the dust and fumes from their exhaust filled the air and filtered the lights into a dim yeller glow. Sinnerflapple would distract them all for a bit so I waited. The minutes passed slow. I was waiting for me chance to close. All I wanted was to run from there, but I knew that Isa was on the other side of it. And then in the darkness I heard a rumbling and at the back of the chamber come a deep note sound that shook me whole body.

Out from the shadows rolled the Brumby King. I’d never been so close to it standing on me own two feet. Now I was near I could see the fine network of scratches and cracked paintwork from years in the sun. It was covered in stains and dust. It wasn’t shining and bright like the other indies, so proud of their painted truckskin markings and incryptions. The King’s patternings were its scars and it wore them like badges. The chipped paint and oily stains and grease marks where the dirt gunked up in between the panels. Weld marks like ropey scars from a chest wound, mud and grass caked up under the wheel arches, paint worn down to steel where the riders came and went over years and years. Gouges and dints and buckled body work from ramming and fucking. Over the hood the black view screen empty as night, flat and dark, no light reflected in them eyes. There was no telling what was going on inside or behind that program. Me heart quivered to see it so close and nasty, humming with its brutal power, shaking the ground as it gunned its engine and moved forwards from the stall. Me instincts said keep far far away but I knew I had the best chances if I stuck real close to it.

I’d got the image of that fuel line from the manual shining bright inside me head, a trancemission with the pattern of drawings on the page making their shapes form in me mind’s eye. I zoned in on the armoured plating and found the spot. It was behind the cab, near where the trailer would join. Hunkered low, I shuffled in towards the Brumby King. I rolled and crossed as the King seen me and moved forwards, exhaust flange flaring wide in anger. Fear in me throat, every muscle aching and straining, every thought in me head screaming turn and run turn and run, but I stood me ground and faced down the Brumby King as it rolled slow towards me in the small space of its lair.

Its grill was silver grinning through the dust and dings and bullet holes, a nasty mouth with busted teeth filed to sharp edges. Headlights white inside their grey specked housings and then I saw the hood ornament for the first time: it was a feral stallion up on its hind legs. It fixed to run me down but as it came over the top of me, I slid in underneath. There was plenty of clearance except near the diff, it was built for working the mines. Near the join of the steerage I saw the line and if I could dislodge that I could disarm the King, but that thing was gummed up and jammed tight with the muck of ages and I cursed me foolishness for thinking it would be easy like it seemed from the manual. The King kept moving forwards and I got snagged on the underbelly and was pulled along underneath. I turned me head to see where it was going. There was a nest of slinky snakes the King wanted to drag me through. Me trucksuit tore and I was scraped by the rough ground but the coat saved me from the worst. Dragged forwards towards the snakes. I slunk me hand in down by me side to feel for me linkmaker. Maybe I could slot a patch and try to wrangle the King.