Trent Jamieson

The Prosperity Act needed good people. Not everyone could handle the work. Not everyone could kill children.

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May 30

“God, what a beautiful sound.”  She drives, and the engine is purring.

The Driver and her assistant are following the highway, out of Toowoomba: the road switching back, coiled and steep until it hits the dusty plain. They don’t pass another car all the way down. But the Driver’s assistant is wary, rifle always at the ready. Diary out. He records, in neat shorthand, the minutes of their day, and the possibilities of their future.

“You’re good,” she says. “I heard you were good. I just want you to know I understand that now.”

The Driver’s assistant smiles hesitantly: they’ve been two weeks together now, long enough to know he doesn’t understand her at all.

There is traffic all at once: four tankers, coming out of the dust, blowing it before them. Moving detonations, all four, and they are hauling water. Her assistant is not looking at the diary any more, his rifle’s ready. The Driver waves, no-one waves back, and the trucks are already heading up the mountain.

Still, it doesn’t ruin her good mood. It is a gorgeous day. The papers in Toowoomba, the Chronicle and the Times, were trumpeting the end of the war. Water supplies were once again assured. She asks her assistant to write down the numberplates of the trucks. He already has.

Another day, another dozen observances of the Act.

This circuit or the next, definitely the one after that would be her last: if she could just convince him.

He’s quiet, but efficient. Perfect for the job. He knows the back roads as well as her, the places where you have to go real slow, the places where you have to get out of the truck.
She’s working on him. And he’s just working. “There’s been sightings in the north,” he says.

She grunts, accelerates. It’s his job to worry.

June 1

There’s some beautiful country here—ruins of old prosperities rising round the hills – and it shifts more emphatically with the seasons than it does further into the city. And, just like the changing hills, there are always people coming through. The pair never knew what kind of folk they’d find around the bend, hoping to get to the city, fleeing the drought, wanting the one bit of neon-lit hope left in this part of the world.

The roads the Driver and her assistant travel bring them to the edge of the Western urban Precincts; their circuit swinging on from the Gold Coast, west to Warwick, and North to Montville. The fat dry western lip of the city where, when the winds blew up, the dust started spindling to the sky from earth as cracked and lifeless as old bone. The Driver found it remarkable that people still came from those western regions; a real show of human endurance. Battlers, yeah they were battlers alright; in their stained t’s dragging whatever they could carry out of the desert. She’d seen one old bastard with nothing more than a few rags and his mobile phone, a relic of a time before the eighty year drought. She didn’t blame them their flight. Regardless, there were formalities that had to be seen to.

Out here the Driver is the law. She oversaw the various legislatures, and declarations the city council saw fit to extend to her circuit, and her arrival in a town was greeted as something of an event.

Parents are always anxious to show their licences, kids always kept behind locked doors.

June 5

They set the traps at the rest stops, the hidden places, that aren’t so hidden if you knew where to look, and kids always know where to look. The truck is laden with all manner of detonating devices, poisons, and contaminants. The doll’s house, the teddy bear with one eye—it generally seemed to work better than the bear with two. Children, especially children, have a caring nature in the main. They want to look after things.

Of course, there are times they cannot be so subtle, when a rifle is the perfect solution.

The Act covered only children: rough, mewling children, running around, not born to licenses. The adults, the Driver didn’t care whether they lived or died, but they usually survived, even the poisons, these people were good at surviving.  She’d not understood at first, she would have never let the death of her own go so passively, but it made sense. In the main people fought for what they had not what they had lost. You took the children away and the parents tend to lose the will to fight. And the more labile a worker the better.
They had enough children in the city.

These ones were unlicensed. The law was clear, the punishment written up on every Border Town and every power line still standing. And yet there were always those who thought the rules didn’t apply to them: as though the city was an endless bounty. Who would have children out in the west anyway? Why would you be so irresponsible? But they did, and they were always the ones coming in out of the rising dirt and the dry. The adults, ten years and above, were welcome and they could work hard, but those kids, they were just mouths to feed, and illegal, unless you had the license, and you couldn’t get the licence unless you had worked in the city for eight years and four months.

June 8

She can be charming, can even play the ingénue, but it’s just an act. She has a limit, a short fuse, yes. She doesn’t dress ostentatiously but she likes her scarves, has a whole collection, a couple of which her older children knitted. She adores poetry, has a cat, and one grandchild.

They stopped once in a pub, near Plainland, and a fella called her a murderer. The Driver shot him dead without even getting up from her chair.

“Murder’s whatever the state wants to call it,” the Driver said to her assistant, as he dragged the body out to one of the reeking presentation cages, it’s not enough to enforce the law, you have to be seen doing it. He pulled out a key and opened the one marked Seditionist. The Driver had cleverly shot him through the mouth. “Those children are murderers, our city has limited resources.”

June 12

She knows she does good work, the poisons in the water, the children eliminated. There have been few Drivers like her, and none as effective.

They spend a lot of time alone, out in the woods, between the townships.

She sits down one night, just them and the scrubby hills. They’re off the road a bit, truck locked up. The air has a real chill, and the odours of dinner linger. They’d shot a roo, there’s still good eating here if you know where to look. He has his rifle cross his knees. Sky is clear, though there’s a wind, he can hear it working its way up the valley like some monstrous beast sliding its belly over the trees. She starts pointing out satellites, a series of Murdochs, a couple of old Telstras. “Not so many of them as there used to be.”

The gas lamp burns, bright enough to read by. She reads some poetry aloud, old world foreign stuff, about forests and walking in beauty. When she is finished she smiles.

“See this is what we’re fighting for.”

Out here is the real foreign country: the dry, bare patches of earth. Rain still caught in the hills, which was why the city extended so far. Pipes ran into the city, guarded by humourless men with rifles, gathered round their posts, cigarettes hanging limply from cracked lips.

Roads wind here, to places quickly forgotten, mining towns stripped of everything, and they are here to strip them of hope. There are smouldering remnants of long ago histories. You can find packets of chewy; you can find plastic guns, mp3s, skulls in rough piles. They drive, and the Driver’s assistant, leans forward in his chair, like he is holding onto something, but the Driver isn’t watching, isn’t asking what secrets he might possess in the long bones of his arms, in the tap of his fingers against the dashboard. He holds a hesitation within him but his flesh hides it, like a thick piece of glass obscuring a secret. Sometimes he rings like a bell in her skull.

But she is always open with him.

On the road, talking about her own kids, the husband, long ago dead, a small illness that had somehow fattened to fatal. Well, everybody knows about death. Most folks have fought in the lake wars, or, if a little older, the secessionist revolts; sometimes the North or the South flexes its muscles. But Brisbane holds its own when it comes to killing.
They pass a group of children, gathered in circles around something, and a kid playing with a dog. The Driver expertly runs them down in the truck. None of them get up, the dog howls, its back is broken, it is howling and rolling, howling and rolling. The Driver stops and ends its distress with a bullet. She is visibly disturbed. The Act doesn’t cover dogs, and she hates to think of creatures suffering.

They leave the bodies on the road: a narrative of the Act for the family to piece together. The laws of the city are serious this story goes.
It’s easier to kill the children out here.

There is less of an outcry, when it is out of sight of the bulk of the population, and most of the city’s folk never leave it. The Driver understands this. The parents are more likely to come to the city after their children are gone; more prepared to submit themselves to the Legislature. It is all about the correct indoctrination.

The children are just too much work. Adults don’t grow up bitter.

June 14

There are signs of kids. Spoor not as subtle as those left by grownups. Underbrush bent at this campsite. Small footprints carelessly scuffed over at another. Even a small mechanism, the silent ruined guts of an old toy car: discarded as adults once discarded things when there was more than enough to discard.

It’s a whole family near enough to the edge of the city that they might bribe their way in.

They find them, near the bridge. Tatty old caravans, parked in a circle. The Driver and her assistant drive to higher ground, park where they have a better view.
The children are coming across the bridge: a couple of boys and a little girl.

The Driver’s assistant sees them, watches the girl bend down to pick up a flower. He has a clear shot, the sort of thing you might see on a birthday card. She is holding a teddy bear in the other arm.

The Driver’s assistant fires the rifle. It cracks across the perfect Autumn sky. The kids are running, not fast enough, never fast enough, but he doesn’t shoot again.
“Sorry,” he says.

The Driver is breathing her last breaths, the wound is deep, raw as this betrayal. She shudders, moves her lips. “Well, you never can tell, burn in hell, eh.”

She’s sliding down the side of the car; sinking into her death. She’s thinking of him. What a tragedy it is. But she always saw the best in people and now. And now.

“Sorry,” he whispers, but she doesn’t meet his gaze.

He slides his hands over her unseeing eyes, closing the lids of justice.

The children are running, and the Driver’s assistant wants to go down there, and warn them, but he knows better than that. They are children after all, blown here on the winds, clever enough if given a chance.

He thinks of the tiny bawling girl that he’d lost, a decade ago, its brains bashed out, by a Driver. His wife shot in a riot, his daughter lost to the Act, and then there were all the things that have come since, the cruel work  has led to this moment. The bribe money, meant to buy his licence, used instead to train him as a Driver’s assistant. And then the waiting.

He thinks about all the dolls, their detonation units disarmed: when he could get away with it. But it was never enough. Not even this is enough. There are still weapons scattered all over the low dark mountains, cheerful, shiny bits of death.

There isn’t a lot of time. He has his diary. He has his maps. He will find the ones he left armed, well, if he gets enough time, and he may well be too late for some of them.

The Driver’s assistant isn’t stupid; he knows that all he has done is create a window. There is no such thing as atonement, but a window’s better than nothing.

He gets back into the car and drives.

—/—

Copyright © Trent Jamieson 2010

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About the story: Water’s always been an issue in Brisbane – it is in just about every capital city in Australia – and, in the last few years as the rains seemed to do everything but fall in the Brisbane’s dams things were starting to look scary. One of the things that impressed me was how the city took a long hard look at its water useage. People cut back, gardens weren’t watered; cars were not washed. There was an upsurge in the sales of water tanks; and a water grid was constructed. Still there’s only so much you can do.

Fortunately, due to some rather massive downpours, the dams are in a pretty good state, but as the world heats up and Australia dries: water is going to dominate the headlines.

Of course I can’t imagine it ever really getting as bad as this….

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Trent Jamieson lives in Brisbane with his wife Diana. He is currently working on a series of novels called Death Works for Orbit. The first of which, Death Most Definite, is due out in August 2010. His novella Iron Temple was published in Coeur de Lion’s anthology X6 in November 2009.

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