Cargo Cult Read online

  Clutching the big steering wheel with white-knuckled intensity, Marcus felt the sweat trickling down his face. “I’m not really a bus driver,” he wailed. “I don’t know where this place is. Perhaps if I could stop and look at the map, or ask someone.” He had a sudden mental image of himself making a wild dash from the bus, the weird women shooting their ray guns at him, the Kanaka Downs Garden Club watching with their faces pressed against the windows as he scuttled into the bush. “I only know Brisbane and a couple of towns on the regular routes,” he complained.

  They were well off the main roads by then, barrelling along little country roads never intended for gigantic luxury coaches. The police cars had started appearing behind them while they were still in the city. At first they had just followed, keeping their distance. Then, as they reached the motorway, the sirens had started and they had begun shouting through megaphones for the bus to pull over and let everybody off. Marcus, of course, would happily have complied had the woman in the wedding dress not stuck her ray gun in his face and told him to keep on driving.

  It was as if he had been kidnapped by a bunch of identical, beautiful idiots. They didn’t understand the simplest things.

  “Why are those vehicles following us?” the woman in white wanted to know.

  “Er, it could be because you shot up half of Brisbane and kidnapped a coachload of old age pensioners,” he replied. “Just a wild guess.”

  “What do they want?”

  “I think they’d like to ask you why a small army of sex-goddess fashion victims has hijacked a garden club outing and ordered it to drive out into the boondocks.”

  “We don’t have time for their questions. We are on an important mission. Keep driving. Wait! What in the name of all that’s holy is that?” Braxx was pointing out the side of the bus across the fields to where a mob of twenty or so kangaroos were grazing.

  “Just a few roos,” said Marcus.

  “Look everybody!” shouted Braxx, pointing and beaming. The other Vinggans looked out the side window.

  “What is it?” asked Carol’s friend Gail, in a whisper.

  “Just some roos, dear. You know what tourists are like.”

  Then a couple of the roos took off, heading across the field in long, lazy bounces. The Vinggans whooped with laughter, shouting, “Look at that!” and “Have you ever seen anything so ridiculous?” The other kangaroos joined the first two and soon the whole mob was bouncing across the field. The Vinggans were screaming with laughter, hanging onto each other as they fell about, weakly wiping at their eyes and pointing out the antics of the bouncing marsupials to one another. One of them shouted “Boing! Boing!” and the hysteria rose to wild heights.

  Sitting at the front, with Braxx hanging onto him for support, Marcus ground his teeth and drove on in silence.

  -oOo-

  Detective Sergeant Michael Barraclough trailed along after the squad cars, only glimpsing the bus from time to time through the dust. No-one could work out where they were heading. An incident room had already been established back at HQ and the Commissioner himself had been on the radio asking Barraclough for his opinions “as the senior officer on the scene,” as he’d put it.

  Everyone was in a panic. The Mayor and the State Premier had both already appeared on TV to reassure the public. This operation was going to get a lot of attention from on high. Probably that was why the Commissioner wasn’t very happy when Barraclough suggested that the hijack was somehow connected to a break-in at Steiner’s department store last night which also seemed to involve a mob of Loosi Beecham lookalikes. The Commissioner had passed him immediately to Chief Inspector Sullivan who had apparently lost the toss and was now heading the operation.

  “What’s all this shit about Loosi Beecham robbing a department store last night, Barraclough?” the Chief Inspector growled. “And what the hell are you doing chasing buses when you’re not even supposed to be on duty?” Barraclough liked Sheila Sullivan but she didn’t sound like she would be much fun to work with that day. So he explained as best he could as his car bumped along through the dust at high speed and listened patiently to the long string of profanity it evoked.

  He noticed a Channel Nine helicopter appear in the sky above him and, looking around, spotted another chopper, probably Channel Seven coming in from the East. Hopefully, the two other helicopters, far away, were the police and not more reporters.

  Sullivan informed him that a SWAT team was on its way along with fire tenders and ambulances and a team of negotiators. She also gave him the good news that it was his job to keep everyone calm and to make sure no-one else got shot.

  “Has anyone spoken to the driver, yet?” he asked.

  “What? Shit! There’d have to be a radio in the cab right enough.” He heard some shouting in the background. “OK. Someone’s on it.” There was a pause. When the Chief Inspector spoke again, her voice was a little gentler. “Look, mate, when the siege starts, it could get messy and we don’t want any heroes, right?”

  “Too bloody true, Sheila,” he agreed.

  “Good on ya, mate. I’ll catch you later.”

  -oOo-

  “Hello, Marcus. Can you hear me?”

  Marcus almost drove them off the road in his surprise. Bloody hell! he thought. It’s the radio.

  “Mr Grogan, can you hear me. This is Chief Inspector Sullivan.”

  “Yes! Yes! Oh thank God! Get me out of here! I’ve been kidnapped by a bloody madwoman in a wedding dress and she’s going to shoot me with a ray gun!”

  “Marcus. Marcus. Listen to me. Now I want you to stay calm. Can you do that for me Marcus? Just stay calm and answer a few questions? Are you able to talk, Marcus?”

  “Who are you speaking to?” demanded Braxx, moving forward to stand beside the driver.

  “Marcus? Are you still there?” said the radio. “Marcus, can you hear me?”

  “Er, nobody,” said Marcus, trying to act casual.

  “Marcus,” said the radio. “We need you to tell us what the situation is.”

  “What was that?” demanded Braxx, pointing at the speaker grille in the dashboard.

  “Nothing,” said Marcus, shaking his head and trying to smile in a relaxed and casual manner.

  “Your vehicle is speaking,” Braxx insisted. “Why is your vehicle speaking?”

  Marcus cast about frantically for a reason. “It... it’s the on-board computer. It needs a status report so that it can, er, tune the engine appropriately for the length of the journey.”

  “I will speak to it,” said Braxx.

  “But... but...”

  “Marcus? Come in, Marcus. Can you hear me?”

  “I am Braxx, what do you wish to know?”

  “Hang on,” said Marcus and moved the microphone closer to his captor. “You have to press that button when you want to speak.”

  Braxx looked down at the control. “So primitive,” he said with smug contempt. He pressed the button. “Machine!”

  “Now let go so the, er, computer can speak.”

  “Who’s this?” the radio asked.

  “I am Braxx. What do you want?”

  “Braxx? My name is Sheila. All I want is for everybody to get off that bus safely. I’m sure you want the same thing, too.”

  Braxx smiled at Marcus. “It is admirable that you have programmed your machine with such concern for its occupants.” Marcus smiled back, weakly.

  “Braxx?” said the radio. “Braxx, how can I help you? I only want to help you and to make sure nobody gets hurt. Tell me what it is you want, Braxx, and I’ll see what I can do.”

  Braxx leaned over and pushed the button again. “You are doing just fine,” he told the Chief Inspector. “Keep up the good work.”

  He straightened up again, pleased with his little conversation. Being in a good mood, he decided to give the human what it had been wanting for so long. “Very well, human, you may stop the vehicle and ask for directions to our destination.”

  Almost speechless with
relief, Marcus tentatively asked if it would be all right to ask the people in those cars following them.

  Braxx didn’t hesitate. “Of course, you poor simple-minded creature. Who else could you ask in this remote place?” And, with a rustle of silk, he went back to his seat.

  -oOo-

  Barraclough settled down to the non-trivial job of keeping his car on the road and immediately had to slam on his brakes as the whole convoy ahead screeched to a halt. Even before his car had stopped rocking, he threw open the door and raced out into the dust, running towards the bus. He reached the front police cars to find them slewed across the road to create a barrier behind which police with rifles and handguns had positioned themselves. More police were moving forward to take up firing positions. The bus was sitting quietly on the road in front of them. As the dust settled, he stood between the two front cars and called for attention.

  “I am Detective Sergeant Barraclough and I’m in charge here. Right?” Silence. “Right?” Mutters of Yes, Sarge. “All right. We have a very exciting situation here and I know it’s traditional for the police to shoot people when they get excited, but today we’re not going to do that. Today, nobody is going to shoot anybody. Do you hear me? Anybody who shoots anybody is going to get their arse kicked from here to Hobart. Is that clear?”

  “Can’t we even shoot the crims?” someone asked.

  “No. Nobody.” He glared around at the sulky faces of the uniformed officers. Then he heard the pneumatic hiss of the bus door opening and he spun around to face it.

  A scrawny young man in a bus driver’s uniform climbed shakily down the steps followed by a blonde woman in a white wedding dress and then two more blondes one in a green bikini and one in a pink negligée. Barraclough heard the various exclamations from the police ranks. “Steady!” he growled. The four from the bus walked towards him. Although the man was clearly wetting himself with fear, the women seemed completely nonchalant. There was no sign of any weapons but, with a bus full of hostages, the kidnappers probably felt they didn't need them. Swallowing hard, Barraclough stepped forward to meet them.

  As the women came closer, it was clear that they were, all three of them, Loosi Beecham. Behind him, Barraclough heard one of his men give a loud wolf-whistle. Grinding his teeth, he kept walking forwards. Two metres from the women and their hostage, Barraclough stopped. The kidnappers stopped too.

  The Loosi Beecham in the wedding dress spoke up. “I am Braxx. I wear the white clothes.”

  Slightly taken aback, Barraclough announced his own name and credentials. “What do you want with these people?” he demanded. Around their heads the two helicopters clattered, making it hard to hear what they were saying.

  “Nothing,” shouted Braxx. “We simply seek directions to this place.” He looked at Marcus and the parish newsletter he was clutching in his trembling hands. “Show this creature.”

  Marcus came forward, holding out the crumpled magazine.

  “They’re mad!” he told Barraclough in hushed tones as soon as he was close enough. “They think they’re aliens from the planet Vingg and they want me to take them to this farm to meet a UFO cult.”

  Barraclough calmly took the magazine and looked at the article. “How many of them are there?” he asked, sotto voce. “What weapons do they have?”

  Marcus came closer. “Don’t let them take me back,” he pleaded. “I’m not really a bus driver. It’s just something I do for money. I shouldn’t really be here.”

  “Get a grip, mate,” Barraclough hissed. Then he turned and pointed to a policeman. “You. I want a map of this area right now.” He turned back to Marcus. “Listen, Marcus, you’re going to get back on that bus and you’re going to drive these bloody women wherever they want to go. There are more lives than just yours at stake here. Now, how many of them are there and what are their weapons?”

  “I dunno. About a dozen I suppose. I didn’t think to count the buggers!”

  “Easy, mate, easy. And their weapons?”

  A policeman ran up with a map and Barraclough took it off him, sending him back with a tilt of his head. He studied the map.

  “That’s the weird thing,” said Marcus. “They’ve got ray guns. And they all look just the same! What’s going on?”

  “What do you mean they’ve got ray guns?” He’d heard that hostages could go a bit crazy during sieges, that they’d sympathise with their kidnappers, or even help them, but he’d never heard of a hostage sharing his kidnappers’ delusions before, especially only a couple of hours into the siege.

  “I mean they’ve got bloody ray guns! Phasers, blasters, lasers, particle weapons, disrupters, disintegrators, you know, bloody ray guns! They blew up half of bloody Elizabeth Street, for God’s sake. They didn’t do that with their bare hands.”

  The women had been conferring as Marcus spoke and now stepped up behind him. “Can you direct us?” asked Braxx. “We must be on our way.”

  “Why don’t you let your hostages go and I’ll give you an escort all the way,” suggested Barraclough.

  “Why can’t they just answer a simple question?” complained the Loosi Beecham in the pink negligée. “Why is it barking about hostages? What a planet!”

  “Encourage it to answer us,” said Braxx.

  As the two Vinggans raised their weapons, Marcus became apoplectic with terror. “No, no! Don’t shoot them. He’ll tell you the way to go. Won’t you Sergeant?” He clutched at Barraclough. “For God’s sake just tell me the route. I’ll drive them. Just tell me. Tell me!”

  “All right, all right!” Barraclough was shaken by the man’s uncontrolled fear. “I’ll tell you. All right?”

  Braxx, hearing this, raised a hand and his companions reluctantly lowered their weapons. Barraclough pointed to a spot on the map not twenty kilometres from where they were. “That’s the farm,” he said. “We’re here. Think you can find it?”

  “Yes, yes. Oh thank you,” blubbered Marcus. He grabbed the map and turned to his captors. “I know the way now. Come on. We can go now.” He scuttled a little way towards the bus, looking for them to follow him instead of blowing everybody up.

  Totally bemused by the humans’ odd behaviour, Braxx turned and followed. The other two did likewise.

  Barraclough watched them go, noticing for the first time the row of wrinkled faces watching him from the back window of the bus. One of the old ladies waved to him and he reflexively waved back.

  Ray guns? The bus driver disappeared into the bus and the three identically gorgeous women followed behind him. Was it plastic surgery?

  He shook himself. Time to saddle up and get on with it. Turning away, he stomped back to his car, shouting orders at the police around him to get back in their cars and not to lose that bus or he’d have their livers served up in the staff canteen.

  And why had they not made any demands? He got in his car and started the engine. Nothing about this whole thing was right. Nothing.

  Chapter 14: Kidnapped

  The Agent was all patience. Although it was impossible to know from up here what the Vinggan machine was doing down on the surface, the Agent could wait. Sooner or later the machine would ascend into space again and then the Agent would take it. Meanwhile, it was scanning the surface around the Vinggan ship for humans. There were plenty, scattered everywhere throughout the region, their density increasing towards the great teeming anthill of a city where the river met the coast. Perhaps two million of them within a fifty kilometre radius of the ship. It was like looking at bacteria under a microscope. How would the Agent pick just one?

  But wait. There, within a short distance of where the ship lay, a group of vehicles racing along the narrow roadway, other vehicles flying above them. What was this? The Agent narrowed its focus. All the vehicles, including the aircraft, had two or more humans in them. Only one, the ground vehicle at the back of the group, had a single occupant. The Agent smiled. Excellent. It set energies in motion with its mind and, by processes unimaginable to anyone in a
ll the seething millions of humans below, the material of the lone human’s body was dematerialised, reduced to its pure information content, information that was imprinted on the beam of energy that bathed him and which then was read by instruments which rematerialised it as flesh and bone and blood in the teleport chamber of the Agent’s starship. Down below, the car in which Detective Sergeant Michael Barraclough had been sitting, now with a neat, perfectly circular hole in its roof and another in its floor, swerved off the road and into the ditch. None of the occupants of the other cars or helicopters even noticed.

  -oOo-

  Between blinking his eyes shut and opening them again, Barraclough found he had left his car and was now in a small, dimly-lit room. His car seat, still anchored to a perfectly circular piece of the car, fell fifteen centimetres to the floor of the little room. A perfectly circular piece of the car roof fell from above him, landing on his head and a piece of dashboard fell on his legs. Shocked beyond rational thought, he yelled incoherently, dropped the steering wheel he was holding, and threw himself across the room, fell over something he couldn't see, and fetched up against a smooth, damp wall. He huddled there looking wildly around him.

  Barely aware of it, he drew his gun and waved it at the empty room, shouting wordlessly at whatever the hell might be there with him. He seemed to be in a cave, a very regular cave, with a level floor and lighting panels in the roof. The floor was wet and the walls were wet, as if water was seeping through them. He seemed to be alone, although the lighting was so dim, he couldn’t be sure. There was a barely audible hum that seemed to be all around him.

  After a long, long time, he climbed, shakily to his feet and, keeping his back to the wall, moved around the perimeter of the little cave, reassuring himself he was alone. Feeling a little better, he went over to the middle of the room to examine his car seat and other debris. It took him a little while to realise that he had been cut out of his car as if some gigantic apple corer had sliced cleanly through it from top to bottom. It made no sense at all but that was what had happened.