Cloaked in shadow, I sprinted on the balls of my feet down Mahony Road. I zigzagged, running under trees to keep the moonlight off my back. I wouldn't stop scurrying til I got to the manhole in Adam's compound. There was definitely something down there. I bet that that sewer was a passage to the outside world. Adam had to be meeting people in the tunnel each night and handing over cash for carbs. Either that or he had hoarded whatever food he could find down in the sewer-tunnels as soon as he got here. Unless he had a lifeline bringing him fresh supplies, Adam must've known about some secret underground supermarket –unless he'd taken a supermarket underground.
Adam never ran out of food because he had a supply, I'd decided – a HUGE supply. Enough to feed his cult. I was going to find proof. We, the people, would put the charges against him. There would be justice.
A silent real estate office was the first sign I was nearing Adam's compound. The small, sleepy library was next, with its Indian poster in the window watching me, then the silent white supermarket with its sign ripped off and receipts stickered all over the wheelchair ramp, then the blue night sky became blocked-out as Adam's canopy loomed. The rugs and carpet squares all over the road made it feel like I'd walked into a huge Turkish restaurant. At the centre was the service station. Its glow woke my stomach. I touched my baby belly and looked around.
Strewn across carpet after carpet, all over the dark blue road from kerb to kerb, Adam's court was a den of chocolate wrappers and milk bottles and chicken bones and half-chewed lollies and – seriously? – a laptop computer with this Napoleon movie playing on repeat, housed inside a fridge with the door removed. I watched the laptop's power cable snake into the darkness where it met with mounds of clothes pegs and thermoses and biros and chopsticks, crap just hoarded for the sake of power, then the extension cord disappeared into the black.
There was a jumble of boxes, boxes from appliances, potato chips, boxes of drinks, tampons, chewing gum, motor oil, car tail lights. They'd ransacked the gas station store and left their rubbish where they dropped it. But then there was rubbish from frozen pizzas, too, and big 3kg wholesale boxes of chicken nuggets, frozen cheesecake boxes, kilos of French fries. A hell of a lot of frozen stuff. More frozen stuff than a little service station could ever hold in its freezers. Unless the stuff was being marched in every night, they had to have a pantry here somewhere.
There wasn't a single leftover French fry, but one box had the bones of a hundred chicken drumsticks in it. I snapped one open, sucked the sour dark marrow out of the bone, felt salt and tanginess interact on my tongue. In an Easter egg wrapper I found some chocolate dust, licked my finger and dabbed it and let it soak into my gums.
'Save some for me.'
'JESUS.' A black shape came lowly through the darkness, waddling, crouching. 'Omar… Tell me that's you.'
'Whisper, babe, whisper,' he rasped. Artificial moonlight showed marks on his forearm. 'She squeezes hard.'
'Anya did this to you?'
'All over a pear, from a tree they weren't even using. And I hate pears.'
I punched my fist. 'I could kill that bitch! There's gonna be justice, Ome. I promise you. Oi, where d'you think these guys sleep? Over in the hardware store? In the broom closet? In– '
'KEEP YOUR VOICE DOWN, I SAID.'
Draped in shadow, thick and so black he disappeared at times, Omar stole up the road in brisk strides, like a cat, pausing to check out the moon and watch me and sniff the air. An escaped beam of moonlight scanned his head and shoulders. Dark and agile as a black panther, Omar crept back to me.
'I don't know where they are, the guards I mean. Or the fat boy. What's out there for them to do tonight?'
'They're – wait.'
There was a tonk sound, then the metallic scraaaaape of the manhole cover moving. A black gremlin hauled its body out of the middle of the road, turned around and dragged up a sack. It made a unique clonk sound as it touched the road surface. Cans. Then a second gremlin came out of the ground – taller, more angular – and pulled another sack up, a pillowcase stuffed with some kind of clanking cans of… Spraypaint? Spaghetti? The second gremlin scurried after Anya. I stepped out on the road and saw a male take his rattling sack into the BP and switch the light on and compare what he had with the rest of his crew, although I didn't spot Adam. Even from this many metres away, all the light in the galaxy was inside their little store. I stole a secret view as they emptied their sacks and stocked the fridges and shelves. Sweetened condensed milk, sugar, mint, syrup...
'Supermarket's gone underground,' Omar said, elbowing me, 'And into Eli's tummy. They're got a larder down there, a pantry. Bet you they took everything out of the supermarket.'
I checked that Anya and Eli had gone back inside the BP then dropped and crawled like a crocodile over to the manhole cover, my belly scraping, elbows curving outward as my boobs swayed. The thick biscuit of metal was snugly in the ground, firmly shut.
'Got a crowbar, Ome?'
Omar ignored me and crawled up to the supermarket, as low to the ground as he could be. 'Want to come in? Even if they've cleaned all the snacks out, they've probably knocked a packet of jelly crystals behind a freezer somewhere.'
Omar stroked a sign on the supermarket door. PRIVATE PROPERTY, it read. Someone had spraypainted HAIL 2 THA KING in orange. He opened the door, went inside without me. I touched the manhole cover, couldn't find any entrance, looked up to the BP. Eli was coming out with Maeve this time. I was exposed in the road. The canopy wasn't over me. The moon lit up my body.
Damn. They were coming, 30 metres away, now 25. I moved to the left, let shadow bury me – but they arrived. They were coming for more food from their private underground hamper.
Eli reached the manhole first, silently stuck a prying bar under the cover, hammered the crowbar in, levered the ground open. Eli and Maeve together lifted it, slid it away. Maeve turned around and went down butt-first. Eli followed.
I forced open the door of the supermarket and dipped a foot inside. 'OMAR?' I whispered to the gulf of black air populated with empty freezers. The supermarket stank of mildew. The floor was covered in a cold puddle large as a lake. 'IT'S NOT SAFE IN THERE.'
I hid in the shadow on the porch of the supermarket then watched Maeve climb back out of the manhole with a sack that was so full that a packet of biscuits dropped onto the road. I licked my lips.
Eli followed. He'd left his prying bar and keys beside the black hole but it was temporarily unguarded. I scuttled five metres and lowered myself inside the manhole briskly, silently.
Going down, the iron rungs were clammy under my fingers and got furry as I descended, damp and covered in moss. The sewer smelled like laundry left in the machine for too long, wet and forest-y. A tiny dank waterfall dribbled, plip-plip-plip.
I hit a ledge at the bottom of 15 rungs. I reached into the darkness.
Metal canisters.
They were stockpiling… ammunition?
I turned my organiser on for light. No: cans of soup, and corn, and tomatoes, and lentils, chili beans and baked beans. Spaghetti, asparagus, peas in brine and peaches. Cans of breakfast, cans of lunch – God, if this were shared we could go back to three meals a day. I felt sick with hunger and my baby kicked. She probably worried all the acid in my stomach would eat through her womb.
'Don't worry, honeykitten,' I whispered, 'Mama's got you.'
I followed a trickle of moonlight and found myself walled in by jars this time. Strawberry jam, marmalade, raspberry jam, boysenberry, mixed jam. Carrots in jars, pickles, Polish salami, chutney, anchovies, pilchards, tins of curry sauce. Saliva dripped from the top of my mouth onto my thirsty tongue. I opened the lid of a bottle of chocolate sauce – and dropped the lid.
CLANG-ALANG-ALANGalangalang.
'What's down there?' called a girl's voice. 'Hey, E – is his mutt still down there?'
'Er, think so,' Eli told Maeve, up on street-level. 'It can't get into the food. Don't worry.'
'That creature's seriously gross,' Maeve mumbled. Their voices seemed to near then fade then near again. I heard the fsssssss of one of the privileged people opening a sweet Fanta.
'Apple juice for our ruler, don't forget,' Eli told her. 'Don't bring him orange. You'll regret it. You pass 'em up, I'll haul 'em over.'
Eli dropped two pillowcases down, which settled onto the concrete ledge. Maeve came past him and descended the steps, landed on the concrete and began groping in the dark. I had my square metre to hide in.
I slid a bottle of caramel dessert inside my jeans. It pressed on the bone above my vag. I gasped silently, wincing. There was a stink that had to be dog and the stench of a dog blanket, salty and hairy and never washed… and the flap of a wagging tail, I was sure.
Or rats.
Rats on my shoes.
'I can't see shit,' Maeve complained.
Eli leaned his mouth over the manhole so his words would reach Maeve. 'Two apple juice, two orange, two lemonade, two grape, and that sweetened condensed milk stuff they make fudge out of.'
'I'm gonna put rat poison in one and give it to that skank.'
'What, Eden Shepherd? I'd run it past the boss first. Our king's got a bit of a soft spot for that harlot.'
With my smidge of light, I could see Maeve shaking a pillow case until its mouth opened. Her probing fingers touched my belly button, touched the hard lump of the bottle between my thighs. I stepped backward. My heel squelched into something that had to be dog poop.
'Huh?' She lifted her shirt and looked for the button to switch her organiser on. ���Hey, doggy? Where are you? Heeere, doggy doggy doggy. Come out, come out.'
Maeve's breaths felt like hurricanes buffeting my chin. She would discover me within five seconds and I would strangle her into silence. I raised my hands toward her thro–
'YO! We got a live one! Praise Jesus, get up here! BY GOD! IT'S THE WILD MAN! HE'S TRYING TO ESCAPE!'
Maeve dropped her sack of juice, began stepping up the ladder, then looked behind her, stared straight at me, her eyes saying I can't prove it – but I know you're up to something.
She clambered away. I heard a voice gasping and hissing, and a third sound, some kind of clanging of metal hitting the ground. Punches, kicks, the thud of smacked flesh, grunts in Anya's accent.
'I CAN'T FIND THE HOUND!' Maeve called up to the street. She emerged onto the street. I heard her fists whacking Omar's face. I heard Omar letting out little panicked shrieks. A hundred feet up there, ants overwhelming my man.
I had to flee before they came back – but I had to feed my baby. I picked up the pillowcase Maeve had dropped. My pillowcase stretched as I crammed it with preserves in glass bottles. I pulled my heavy pregnant body up the rungs. I wrapped the neck of the pillow case around my right hand, put my bodyweight on the rungs, feeling the metal dig into the soft flesh of my forearms. My elbows and knees and wrists helped take the burden of the sack.
My eyes rose above the street surface to see what was happening to my friend. Adam's people hauled Omar while he writhed like an anaconda. Maeve was carrying one leg; KT had the other leg, which had a giant metal set of teeth on it. Eli was holding Omar under the armpits. Omar's eyes were bulging so much he appeared to have no eyelids, although his mouth and cheeks were droopy, as if he'd had a sudden stroke. The angle of his knees showed his body was trying to put as little pressure on the trap as possible. They had crippled him.
My scalp was up on ground-level, out in the open for these monsters to spot me. Then my eyes were out, and my mouth. When I slung the pillowcase of stolen sauces and spices onto the street, I didn't think that the sound would startle the three who were carrying Omar's body.
I didn't think a bottle would fall out and crack on the road.
I let go of the rungs and dropped back down to the sewer, landing so hard I couldn't believe my ankles didn't shatter.
'…dropped your sack,' I heard Eli say.
'I don't member leaving that there,' Maeve said.
'FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK,' moaned Omar, 'Getitoffgetitoffgetitoff.'
'They are SO effective, these gin traps,' KT gushed, 'Have we got enough for everyone? There's more bad kids than just Omar Saleh.'
'You gonna shut the manhole or aren't you?'
Maeve's face appeared over the hole. I scrabbled up the rungs faster than I'd ever climbed any ladder. I put my fingers on the road as Maeve put the manhole cover down. I was sure I had been electrocuted. Fire surged from my knuckles up my veins and into my heart and head. My fingers had been crushed, all of them simultaneously whacked with a ten-headed hammer. Pinned by the manhole cover, my legs tried as hard as they could to hold onto the rungs.
'Where's the padlock?' she called.
''Sort it out later. That dog ain't gonna climb the stairs. C'mon. Prisoner to book in.'
I heard the CLINK of bottles as Maeve picked up the pillowcase. Her voice receded. She had to be ten metres away from the manhole by now, moving at five metres per second. The gas station was 90 metres away. I couldn't hold on. I was positive my fingers were being slowly cut off. The pain doubled and tripled and doubled again. Following the hot bang, a white, cold pain flushed my body. My bladder decided it had to piss then and there and I filled my knickers with hot, sticky pee. My feet moved by themselves and I lost my grip on the rungs, dangled in the air for a moment, hanging only by my trapped fingers. Droplets of piss fell off my toes and spattered on the ledge below.
Then my feet found the rungs, and my shoulders and arms found enough energy to inject into my thumbs to lift the whole 50 kilo steel disc above me. I thought I heard the clacking of toenails on concrete below, and just the faintest growl and lips peeling back from sharp white teeth. That made me push harder.
It had to have been 18 seconds.
I emerged and tried to run home. Nervous blood rose into my brain again.
I had time to look at my white fingers, count all ten, release a prayer of thanks that they hadn't been cut off by the manhole cover before the blood flooded my brain and I went to sleep on the asphalt.