Ishtar Read online

  Ishtar hisses, hands clenched by her chest. “I do what I want. I control the oceans if I wish to. I control humans. I beat the other gods back to this earthly realm. I am the first.”

  Her face is contorted in a mask of joy as the wind whips her hair like a banner. Her hands are balled into fists at her sternum. She is a hideous, beautiful thing, this goddess made flesh.

  Nina takes her time lighting a cigarette, taking a long drag and puffing out smoke, which is whipped away instantly. She looks sick, but she keeps sucking on that cigarette, eyes on Chapel’s body.

  “Bullshit,” she says.

  Ishtar gives her a sneer of contempt.

  “I’m telling you,” Nina says, “she can’t do it. Go on, show us what a powerful goddess you are.”

  “I summoned them!”

  “But then what? You’re controlling this?” Nina chuckles, a dry, terrible sound.

  “Nina, stop,” Adrienne says.

  “Ain’t that the curse of motherhood?” Nina asks. “You raise them, bring them up right, and the little fuckers end up doing whatever the hell they want anyhow.”

  Ishtar turns, her face blank. “You’ll never know motherhood. None of you!”

  There’s a gasp from Grace. She curls her arms protectively around her swollen belly, pulling Adrienne’s hand across in front of her. She gives Adrienne a pleading look, but Adrienne has nothing left. She can’t think of anything to say or do to stop this monster. She would give up the fight right now if she knew how.

  “Will the water reach this high?” Grace whispers.

  Adrienne feels a pang of unreasonable anger. If Grace had left town when she’d asked — but it’s irrelevant. Irrelevant, too, whether the water will reach them or not. Ishtar is just getting started.

  “Nah, it can’t reach us,” Adrienne tells Grace.

  Nina catches her eye. There’s reproach there and Adrienne hopes it’s just for lying to her sister and not for something else, something Adrienne should’ve done.

  By now the wave created by the stillborn army is washing up the twenty metre wall towards where they stand. On the other side of the harbour the waves rock into the high density buildings of the CBD. Ferries sway like toy boats, smashing glass windows on the far side of the harbour, and scraping against the stone wall of the embankment on this side.

  And there are bodies. Dozens of bodies like broken dolls, batted by the massive hands of the horrendous army. None of them recognisable, but all of them familiar. Adrienne wants to make some comment about humanity and loss and hope, but she can think of nothing. She looks about for their own army, but they’re nowhere in sight. They probably just kept jogging in formation right past Milson’s Point, heading north. Heading for the hills.

  Nina takes the cigarette from her mouth and tosses it aside. She gives Adrienne a look she doesn’t understand.

  “Fuck this shit,” Nina says.

  And she leaps at Ishtar, leaps into the void because it’s impossible, impossible. Impossible to stop Ishtar, the first goddess, the only god to make it back here, to the soulless earth.

  The moment is frozen for Adrienne, Nina mid-air, arms flung forward, both feet off the ground, face caught in a rictus of fear and rage.

  And Ishtar cuts her down.

  What’s left of Nina falls, losing the graceful arc it commenced. Falling like a sack, a bloody, empty thing. She falls and what hits the earth isn’t recognisable as Nina.

  Sometime later, Adrienne realises the screams she’s been listening to are her own. She tries to clamp down on them, but there’s a series of whimpers instead. She pulls herself up and moves to the edge of the void. Her knees ache and one hip clicks painfully. She can’t breathe for the pain in her ribs. She is shaking all over, really hard, really shaking. But her sight is clear and she can see Nina’s crumpled body dissolving into grey, face down in the muck, one exquisite cheekbone hidden. Her eyes are blank and staring.

  It’s not good enough, she thinks. It’s not good enough for their lives life to end this way. Mere body count. She thinks of that line about how we’re all playthings for gods, but that’s not good enough either.

  This Ishtar bitch, she would kill her if she could.

  Adrienne offers up a string of barely coherent expletives to the goddess. She’s only dimly aware of Grace holding one of her arms and shushing her like she might shush a child, her child, perhaps, the unborn hope Grace carries in her belly. She wants Grace to run, but the words coming out of her mouth aren’t for Grace. She wants to say, I can’t bear to see my baby sister dead, but still all she hears is the rage.

  Ishtar reaches out and wraps her long, cold hands around Adrienne’s skull.

  “I’m going to drown the world,” she says. “You can watch with me, little human girl.”

  And she feeds Adrienne with such horrific images that she’s left screaming long after the ocean fills her up.

  THE SLEEPING AND THE DEAD

  BY CAT SPARKS

  It is, in most respects, an unremarkable morning, when a malfunctioning mechanical bull jerks its way into Truckstop’s goat compound. Gengis must be stoned again, thinks Doctor Anna. Old war machines don’t usually get this close. The thing is bucking and kicking in all directions, metal rivets glinting in the sun. Her spirits lift considerably at the diversion.

  Abandoning her Stoli and cactus juice martini, she climbs down from her balcony, brandishing the cricket bat she sleeps with just for luck. Best to smash its tiny mechanical brain before the nuns catch wind of it and freak.

  Those nuns freak at everything. Everything is a sign, from shooting stars to cloud formations — on days the desert’s cursed enough for clouds.

  The bull is nothing but a humble all-terrain load-bearing unit, wandering blind until its battery depletes. Might somebody be using it for decoy? If they are, they’re being mighty slow about it.

  Time was when she’d have used the thing for target practice. Not today. She’s not up for wasting bullets, so she smacks the bat down hard upon its hub casing. It shudders to a standstill, quivers, indecisive in the heat. The air chokes with radioactive dust.

  A dozen scrawny Nubian goats watch her sullenly from the sidelines. Beyond them, a cluster of hopeful mothers camp beside the wire. She swears at the goats. The mangy buggers will eat anything; even chipped ceramic shards of clapped-out war machines.

  Swinging the bat so the goats don’t get ideas, she peers up at the lookout tower. Gengis waves. No doubt he’s been watching the whole performance, but when she responds, he signals back in their private code, the sign that means there’s something interesting out there. She gestures to the goats and the smashed-up bull, but he signals back again. More urgent. Same message.

  Fuck the goats then, this must be important. Takes a lot for Gengis to give a damn.

  She runs to the tower, discards the bat and climbs the spindly rungs hand over fist. Tries not to get too excited. It’s probably nothing, but all the same, she feels her heartbeat quicken.

  Gengis is standing when she reaches the top, hash pipe abandoned on his sagging canvas chair. His eyes are wide and blue — the only lively feature in his craggy, toothless face. “Reckon some of them stories must be true.”

  “What stories?” Anna snatches the telescope from his arthritic fingers. No need to ask him where to point the thing. A metallic gleam in the middle distance. There it is again.

  She raises the scope and adjusts the lens, the battered bronze casing warm between her palms.

  “Fuck me,” she says, and she means it.

  In the lens, three men stagger across the baking flats, scrawny and sunburned, but men they are, with ragged vestiges of youth clinging to their tortured frames. Still men enough to potentially be of use, not like old Gengis here, withered and wasted twist of wire that he is.

  “Sister Daisy’s not getting her mitts on these ones,” she mutters underneath her breath.

  “Reckon they dug ’emselfs up from their graves?” says Gengis.


  When Anna finally lowers the scope, he’s sucking on the hash pipe, cheeks hollowed.

  “Now why’d you go and say a thing like that?”

  “Legions of the Underworld,” he croaks through plumes of blue.

  “I told you not to smoke that shit near me.”

  Gengis shrugs, settles back into his canvas chair, legs creaking beneath his feather weight. Angles an inch more into the shade of the battered beach umbrella poised above.

  Anna’s already climbing down the tower, revolver tucked into the back of her pants. In her excitement, she’s forgotten all about her cricket bat.

  Venus peers weakly through the glare, wasting her grace on the endless, dusty plain. In the distance, storm clouds sully the horizon. Vast, voluminous boiling things, cauldrons of corrosive isotopes and acid flashback. If it rains today, they’ll be in trouble. Rainy season isn’t due for weeks. Anna keeps an eye on them anyway, seasons being what they are. High on the list of events no longer to be trusted.

  It’s Doctor Anna’s lucky day. The nuns are in the ossuary chanting at their skulls. They’ll sniff the men out soon enough, but not before she’s had a chance to claim them. She takes up a position near the goats, doing her best to feign protracted nonchalance. Thomas won’t be one of them. Darling Thomas is long dead.

  It takes another hour for the men to cross the sand. Once they see the goats, nothing will stop them. She stands, revolver at the ready, but she doesn’t want to shoot. Not yet. Not before she’s heard their stories. Finds out where they’ve been hiding all these years.

  They were soldiers once, judging by the khaki rags still clinging to the ropey sinew of their limbs. Not just the green, thinks Anna, when she’s close enough to be sure the three aren’t apparitions after all. They carry themselves like enlisted men. Broken, beaten, battered, yet still possessed of a military mindset. She’d known it once. Even married it for a time.

  The nearest one stares her down with sunken eyes. His torso features a hideous scar. For a moment, it looks like he might drop to his knees and cry. She can’t assess their ages through the grime and deprivation — anywhere from twenty-five to fifty.

  Anna glances back up at the tower, makes the sign for water, clear, so Gengis sees. He takes his sweet, stoned time descending, ambling across the hard-packed sand, water skin slapping hard against his thigh.

  He tosses the ’skin across the stretch of sand between them. The men fall upon it like starving dogs, which they are, Anna reminds herself, regardless of apparent human forms. They shove, claw and elbow, but somehow each one gets to drink. That done, they fall back on the sand, exhausted.

  Mere moments earlier she’d been sure they’d kill the goats. Has their strength given out, or do they see her as a benefactor? Someone who’ll offer food and shelter?

  “Delirious,” says Gengis, his face deadpan as always. “The sunstroke’s on ’em. Surprised they ain’t sunblind.”

  “But where are they from?”

  “Hell,” says Gengis. “Like I already told ya.”

  She cajoles the three of them into the clinic’s waiting room with the promise of cold corn mush. They eat with their fingers, shovelling food in great greasy gulps like there’s no tomorrow. So far as these men know, there isn’t. Best to eat up while the eating’s good. Doctor Anna watches them at it, enjoying the greedy glistening of their fingers. The sounds they make are almost sexual.

  She wants to talk, but the food has made them docile. Damn! She should have made them sing for their supper.

  Soon they’re snoring loud enough to wake the dead. Anna watches them twitch for an hour or two, the unsteady rise and falling of their chests. Coughing and wheezing, farting in their slumber. Perhaps they’ve travelled further than the hopeful mothers? Not so much come here as escaped from somewhere else. Finally safe enough to snatch some fitful sleep. She pities them. They don’t know the truth. How much safer they’d have been in the crow-pecked wilderness.

  She shuts the door and goes outside to brood, leaving them dead to the world. Twelve good hours and they’ll be right to talk. Her mind’s already clocking possibilities. They’ve come from somewhere, which means somewhere exists. A place with men and law and ammunition. There’s a half-life to their current harmlessness; they’ll be crazy when they wake. Anna knows she must be on her guard.

  She has plans for the three of them, plans she doesn’t yet fully understand herself. They raise intriguing possibilities for the clinic. If their seed is fresh, there’ll be no more need for frozen embryos. But where have they come from? Those ragged military uniforms have piqued her interest. There are no bases within miles of this place. Just the bulls, clanking and creaking, shitting spent ammunition casing across the blasted wasteland.

  Scant breaths of tepid wind bear snatches of the nun’s familiar banter from the ossuary. Drumming and chanting. Singing — if you could call it that. An eighth year, a great year, so they’ve been claiming for weeks now. Cosmologically auspicious, astronomically advantageous; the planting cycle, the birthing circle, on and on and on, like a hammering headache.

  She watches nuns dancing in the dust, spinning and twirling as if the stuff’s not killing them. Necromaidens. Fallout wraiths. Praising absent gods for their blisters as well as their dreams. Like her, they have no formal training. Their cult has grown organically, exponentially as the years have dragged. Anna became conscious of the neatness of the skulls long before glimpsing the girls’ demented Tinkerbell antics around the gritty edges of Truckstop’s barbed perimeter. She might have dismissed the girls as ghosts — the barren landscape groans beneath the breathless, phantom weight of them, but no, the nuns are solid. As solid as forty-five kilos of half-starved girl can get.

  The men sleep on, oblivious to the danger. Anna chews her fingernail, revolver on her knee. You’re too late. The world’s already dead. That’s what she wants to scream at them all, the hopeful mothers and the mindless irritating nuns. Go home, all of you. Crawl back into the dust. But somehow, somehow, she never seems to say it. Not to the huddled masses, anyhow. She whispers to the corpses on the days she gets it wrong. When she botches an insemination or gets bored halfway through. When she wanders outside for a precious cigarette. But mostly, she keeps her feelings to herself, saving them for the windstorms or the open road or tomorrow and the thousand years of nothing left to come.

  ****

  The fertility clinic stands proud and lonely, ringed by clumps of withered palms. International style, with its brise soleil screens of patterned concrete blocks. A monument to forgotten vintage modernism, harnessing the desert’s stark vistas and light. The awnings are long gone, blasted to shreds by the elements.

  Doctor Anna’s work is in the basement. She loves the dark recesses of the earth. What coolant still exists is piped down to the lab. When the pumps fail, that’ll be the end of it.

  All her work will have been for nothing. It’s all for nothing anyway. There’s not much left to save.

  The clinic’s generator is on its last legs. Do frozen embryos have souls? The hopeful mothers think so, dragging their weary bones to Truckstop across a hundred miles of heat and dust.

  Women worship at her feet. The walking dead whose wombs still pulse with blood. They leave stones in place of flowers, as nothing grows. Lingering just long enough to ensure the baby sticks, then they leave to make the epic journey home.

  Some of them have walked so far just to die upon her doorstep. Others she will kill herself — the ones who can’t be saved. Still others arrive already pregnant, hosts to multi-limbed monstrosities. They’re the ones she tosses to the nuns. Doctor Anna has no time to spare for monsters. She’s not sure what the nuns want with them either. Do they dance and sing and sacrifice them on altars? They can’t possibly want more skulls.

  Days like these, in the pauses between moments, Anna thinks of Thomas and the world the way it was. Time and indifference have colluded to corrode detail. She fears imagination might be filling in the gaps. Anna remembers
shopping malls: vast, glorious, inviting. Celestial music softly piped and a thousand different types of bread. Landscapes littered with useless things.

  She hates the functionality of the present. Every tool exactly in its place. Nothing ever gets lost. The past is a phantasmagoria of single-use syringes and sweet, nutrient-free foods in shiny wrappers, make-up, swimsuits, and manicures for dogs. Pets you didn’t have to eat when times got tough. Or rather, tougher. Things haven’t been merely tough for years.

  When she pictures Thomas, he’s always smiling. Handsome, forever twenty-one. Always with his shirt off. That’s not wishful thinking on her part — he was like that. Half-naked, a glossy sheen to his taut, tanned hide. The kind of guy who could fix motorbikes and cars. Animal musk mixed with engine-oil cologne. Signed up because he wanted to jump out of planes, not because he had it in for Arabs.

  Army boys were her type back then. These days anything with a hard cock will do. Not so easy to come by. She prefers them with hair, but the atmosphere decides. She likes tattoos inked before the fall. Everything from hot rods to baby feet. Jesus, naked ladies, dragons.

  When Anna takes the three men breakfast, they trade their names through the window bars. The leader gives his as Rocco. The scarred one is Jimenez, the other, Skunk. Food has knocked the crazy from their eyes. A scrub and clean clothes might render them halfway human.

  A line of nuns snake past their holding cell, balancing baskets on their heads, white sheet robes flapping listlessly in the heat. Wide awake now, the men scrutinise the girls with military precision, eyes shining. When they glance back at Anna, everything has changed. She can smell the lust in them, feel them straining to focus on the salvation of corn-mush porridge and gritty bread.

  The nuns keep a wary distance, as if an invisible barrier holds them back. In their eyes, men destroyed the world and conspire still to pollute what little there is left of it. Their death cult or life cult, depending on your perspective, is a wholly female affair. Men are only good for certain things. They’re nasty about it too, with their shivs of sharpened human femur. The nuns keep well clear of Gengis, though. Gengis belongs to Anna. She’s told them he’s some kind of golem, hacked from living stone and sand. He looks as weatherworn as time itself, face crisscrossed with scars like Martian canals. Sunken eyes like tar pits. No, as far as they’re concerned, Doctor Anna can have that one.