Neville the Less

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  Further afield in the neighbourhood:

  - The Quiet Man and Mum, both of whom had barely stirred at the sound of the gunshot outside their walls, were both roused by the loudspeaker’s soundwave. She blinked bleary eyes from the depths of her pillow. He, in a daze of disorientation, raised his head off his arms. She, unable to fight off the fog of drugs and dreams, sank back. He, unable to ignore the threat of blood and guns, struggled to his feet.

  - Mrs Hughes, delving under the remnants of the philodendron, scrabbling to make sense of the damage done to her husband and the strangely buttressed and metal-clad Dennis Shoomba, was thrown hard on top of them by the sound wave. Her cries and her weight brought new moans of dismay from beneath her. All she could think was, guns? Even more guns? She settled herself atop the two men as best she could, to shield them, and wondered if there could possibly be a newer and fresher Hell than this.

  - Mohammed and Parisa Rahimi, on their panic-stricken way back to Home Country in search of their daughter and the source of the gunshot, were thrown by the wave against the wall of the animal shed. They shielded their ears but the initial blast, followed by the amplified baying of Ava had once again set off Latifeh and the brown pigs and the chooks and ducks, so that it seemed to them they’d suddenly been caught up in an Ark of horror. What should they do? Should they pause again and try to re-calm the animals? Or, with the threat of guns in the air, retreat to the relative safety of the house? Or should they race on, in search of their wayward daughter? The amplified shout that resolved the issue for them was, ‘The blood! The blood!’ A cry they’d heard so often, so terrifyingly often, before.

  - Afsoon, cast up now with Neville the Less on the veranda of Home Country, behind his barricade of chairs, had been driven half to her knees by the sonic wave. She’d dropped the classic Beretta Model 1934 semi-automatic pistol, choosing instead to clutch at the thin arms of Neville the Less, to bury her head against him. The barricade had rattled unhappily in the initial tsunami of sound. Then the barking had begun.

  “Ava!” they both cried.

  The Terrier-of-Death was still alive! And she was, at last, fighting back! And despite the death of Things in the yard, or perhaps because of it, a type of joy erupted in them and they stood to look beyond the barricade. Only to be met by the Duchess’s wail: “The blood! The blood!” And the Duke’s voice, shaky but determined, calling for the wolf and the gun. Immediately, as one, without a word being spoken between them, they came to the same conclusion: Ava had embarked on the final battle. She needed them. Behind the barricade was not where they needed to be.

  - In Shoomba Territory, Missus Shoomba was already half-way down the steps when the soundwave hit. And as the cries of the Duke and Duchess and the barking of Ava swept meaninglessly over her, she sent her own little cry out for her lost husband. “Dennis? Dennis, where are you? What’s going on?”

  She smelled Burnt Bill and saw, in the dim orange of her stair light, Neville the Less and Afsoon Rahimi racing across the deep grass to the back fence of the Duchy. Neville was carrying what looked to be an iron bar. She called to them but got no answer.

  - In the little boat on the pond on Rahimi Island, the Ragged Immigration Pastor Major Mann saw the last little duck turn finally toward him.

  “That’s the way, sweetheart,” he murmured. “Good girl. It’ll soon be over.”

  In the bow of the boat a pair of black scorpions angled glances at one another and back at the man. They hissed and clacked softly to one another, as though a tiny familiar joke had been told.

  12. Where it Ends

  In the command centre, the Duke was regaining control. The loud-speaker, at least, was off. And the antique shotgun that his father had bought years ago for snakes and never used, leaned, loaded, against the wall. (Strictly speaking it, like the classic Beretta Model 1934 automatic pistol, should have been surrendered in the government’s Great Gun Buy-back of '96. But the Duke’s ‘Lock and Load’ blog had always insisted that, the massacres at Strathfield and Port Arthur notwithstanding, any government that tried to disarm its citizens deserved to be shot.

  “Without guns,” he’d ranted, “we’re just oats for the Asians! Chaff in their wind! Next thing we know they’ll be selling our farms to the Jap’s!”)