Delivery Girl

“There’s nothing quite like vomiting into a saltbush to make you reassess your involvement in a possible felony.”

"Oh, just keep moving, would you!" Beatrix's voice sliced through the fog of my thoughts, snapping me out of the daze I’d slipped into. Her words were sharp, laced with exasperation, and accompanied by a none-too-gentle prod in the back—less encouragement and more a physical shove of urgency.

"I am moving!" I snapped, the irritation bubbling out before I could temper it. Truthfully, I was moving—my legs carried me towards the truck with a clumsy eagerness—but it felt mechanical, detached. As if each step was just another line in the script of this absurd play we were trapped in. Delivery girls. That’s what we were now, apparently. A ridiculous label, considering the corpse we’d just rolled like a sack of potatoes.

The front passenger door groaned open with a squeal that set my teeth on edge, a too-loud protest that mirrored my mood. I climbed up into the cab, my hands fumbling for the door handle, and slammed it shut behind me. The sound echoed—sharp, final. A punctuation mark on everything we’d just been through. I winced at the volume. It was louder than I’d meant, and louder than I could bear.

Beatrix turned her head, her hand midway through adjusting the rearview mirror. She fixed me with one of her classic stares—cool, unimpressed, silently seething.

"Sorry," I mumbled, shrinking under her gaze like a scolded child. The word hung in the air between us, too feeble to mean much but offered anyway, a token.

She rolled her eyes and faced forward again, the gesture practised, dismissive. With a flick of her wrist, she turned the key. The engine coughed and grumbled to life, rattling like a reluctant accomplice. The whole vehicle seemed to shudder in protest, as if it too wanted no part in our next move.

"Do you really think we should?" I asked, my voice small, hopeful. I wasn’t sure what I wanted her to say—yes, let’s go home and forget any of this happened? That Luke could manage the cover-up on his own and we'd be free to scrub the blood from our hands and conscience? Something in me desperately hoped Beatrix might feel the same way.

"We have to," she said, firm, flat. No room for discussion.

The weight of her response settled in the cabin like fog. Thick, unrelenting. I turned my face toward the window, watching the scenery blur past as we pulled away. Everything looked the same, deceptively normal. But inside the truck, in my chest, the world had tilted irrevocably. We were still moving forward, but the road no longer promised safety or purpose. Only the next step in a journey I hadn’t agreed to.

My hands were slick with sweat as I unfolded the manifest, the paper damp and slightly wrinkled from the pressure of my grip. I stared down at the list—short, simple, unassuming—and yet each line felt like a loaded trigger. Joel must have started at the top and worked his way down. That meant only three deliveries remained. Three more facades to maintain. Three more lies to tell if anyone asked the wrong questions.

I glanced up just as we neared a T-junction. Without signalling, Beatrix turned the wheel and veered to the right.

"Beatrix!" I shrieked, panic lacing my voice. "Where are you going? You're going the wrong way."

"Huh?" She threw me a quick glance, confusion flitting across her face. "Wasn't Claremont on the list?"

"Yeah, but we should be going to New Norfolk first," I shot back, waving the manifest like it was a flag of common sense. My voice sharpened as I added, "If we go the back way to New Norfolk now, we can loop around along the river. It's more efficient. We do Claremont next and then continue down for the Moonah delivery."

She hesitated. I could see her processing, gears shifting behind her eyes as she weighed the logic.

With a faint sigh, she conceded. Her hands gripped the steering wheel tighter as she swung us into the next roundabout, taking a full circle and exiting back the way we came. No fuss, no gloating. Just a subtle course correction.

But for me, it was a minor triumph. A tiny, flickering ember of control in a wildfire of unpredictability.

A small smile curved at the corners of my mouth. In the eye of the storm, I had managed to make one right call. It wasn’t much, but in the wreckage of the morning, it was something. A moment of clarity. A moment of power.

Even if only fleeting.

"Hey, look!" I yelled, my voice rising with surprise, startling even myself. My hand shot out, pressing against the window as I leaned forward in my seat. The movement sloshed what was left of my adrenaline-soaked fatigue into a new surge of alertness. My eyes scanned the familiar curve of the street as Luke’s house came into view. “The truck is gone. Luke must have taken it through the Portal.” The words spilled from my mouth in a rush, each syllable laced with disbelief. It was one thing to talk about that swirling wall of colour, another entirely to see the consequences of it—one moment, a blood-soaked vehicle in his driveway, and now, nothing but empty asphalt.

Beatrix instinctively leaned forward, her body tensing as she followed my gaze. Her attention was yanked from the road without hesitation, as if the act of seeing it for herself would make the absurdity less absurd.

"Beatrix!" I screeched as the truck veered sharply to the left. My heart leapt into my throat. In that instant, I saw us flipping into a ditch or sideswiping a fence, and I gripped the edge of my seat with white-knuckled desperation.

Beatrix swore and jerked the steering wheel hard to the right. The sudden correction came with an awful screech and a gut-wrenching crunch. I twisted in my seat just in time to see a side mirror snap clean off a parked car, spinning through the air before skittering across the road like a severed limb.

"Shit," she muttered, her jaw clenched, fingers still tight on the wheel.

I stared, wide-eyed, as the mirror clattered into the ditch with a final, metallic rattle. The image of it rolling away seemed so out of sync with everything else that had happened today—somehow more absurd, more real. A detail that didn't belong in this dreamlike chaos, and yet there it was.

"No. Don’t stop," I said quickly, my voice brittle with urgency as I saw Beatrix instinctively easing her foot onto the brake. “I don’t think anybody saw us.” I twisted around, scanning the quiet street, hoping, pleading, that no neighbours had peeked through their blinds. But my gut twisted all the same.

"I really think—" Beatrix began, but I cut across her with a force I hadn’t meant to summon.

"Beatrix!" I hissed, eyes wild. “You have blood on your clothes. We can’t stop!” The words hung there, sharp and undeniable. It wasn't just about the mirror anymore; it was about the whole day. The body. The Portal. The silence. The secrets.

Beatrix glanced down at her bloodied jeans, her face tightening with the realisation. The vivid blotches on the denim had started to darken, dried at the edges, but unmistakable all the same.

"Watch the road!" I yelled, my panic breaking through again as the truck began to drift. A horn blared from the opposite lane, and I was thrown sideways as she overcorrected once more. The tyres thudded against the edge of the bitumen before settling.

My pulse was racing now, hot and erratic beneath my skin. I couldn’t take much more of this.

"Gee, you're such a terrible driver," I muttered, half to myself, trying to disguise the tremble in my voice with mockery. It didn’t land.

"Me? A terrible driver?" Beatrix shot back, sharp as a whip. “I'm not the one who knocked down a dozen motorcycles,” she added, her tone rising in mock outrage, like we were bickering over spilled tea instead of surviving a waking nightmare.

I frowned, cheeks flushing. "I did that once," I said, my voice low and wounded. "And that was a long time ago."

"It was last year," she shot back, unable to hide her smirk. A small, absurd spark of amusement passed between us, like a match flaring in the dark.

"Just keep going," I sighed, turning my face toward the window, unwilling to let her see the mess behind my forced calm. I couldn’t afford to fall apart again. Not yet. Not in front of her.

"Okay," Beatrix said quietly. Her voice had softened, some of the fight ebbing away. “We’ll keep going.”

And so we did.

The truck rumbled beneath us, a low, vibrating groan that echoed through the cabin and into my bones. Each bump in the road sent a small jolt through my spine, a rhythmic reminder that the world was still turning, indifferent to our chaos. The silence between Beatrix and me wasn’t peaceful—it hung there like a fog, dense with everything we didn’t dare say. But it was bearable, and right now, that was the best we could hope for.

Outside, the world had the audacity to look normal. Rolling hills, dry grass, old wire fences—Tasmania in its usual winter slumber. My eyes drifted to the manifest resting in my lap. I clutched it like it might ground me, like it might tether me to some version of reality I could understand. Every stop on that list felt like a step further into this absurd, dreadful day. Like we were travelling not through towns, but deeper into a hole we'd never climb out of.

We continued along the back road, the tyres crunching over patches of loose gravel. The truck bounced gently over the uneven surface, lulling me into a sort of dissociative haze. I stared out the window, not really seeing—just watching the blur of eucalypts and gums flicker past, interrupted occasionally by the skeletal remnants of old fencing or the bleached skull of some long-dead animal nestled in the underbrush.

But I wasn’t really seeing any of it. Not truly.

What I saw was blood.

Blood on the truck walls. Blood soaking Joel’s jeans. Blood sprayed across the concrete.

Two bodies. One I knew. One I didn’t. But both had branded themselves into my memory with horrifying clarity. My stomach twisted, writhing with a visceral kind of dread. I rubbed at my cheek, aggressively, like I could scrub away the memory. My fingers moved to my eyes, pressing knuckles deep into their sockets. As if pressure alone could erase the mental slideshow playing behind my lids.

But it didn’t work.

It never works.

The blood wasn’t just on them. It was on us now—on me.

Suddenly, a loud gurgle erupted from my stomach, violent and protesting. It twisted into a knot so tight I could hardly breathe. Acid surged in my throat.

"Beatrix, pull over," I managed, the words strained and tight, like they were being forced through a too-narrow pipe.

The truck jolted slightly as Beatrix brought it to an abrupt halt on the shoulder of the road. Gravel crunched beneath us. Before the vehicle had even fully stopped, I flung open the door and stumbled out, dropping to my knees on the rocky verge.

The impact was sharp—knees slamming hard onto gravel and uneven earth—but I barely noticed. My hands dug into the dirt as my body heaved. A sickening surge of bile and wine erupted from me, splattering the base of a saltbush with a sound that made my stomach churn again.

"You okay out there?" Beatrix’s voice called from inside the cab. Her tone was light, but I could hear the edge beneath it—concern hidden beneath her usual flippancy.

"Yeah," I managed hoarsely, waving her off without looking back. I didn’t want her to see me like this—didn’t want anyone to see this mess I'd become. "Just give me a minute."

I stared at the dark red stain in the gravel, the splash of vomit like some kind of grisly punctuation. My vision blurred. The wine. The blood. The manifest in my hand. It all swirled together until I couldn’t tell what had come from inside me and what had come from the day.

Now, there are two bodies, I thought bitterly. Joel and Brody. Will they ever disappear from my mind? Will anything ever feel clean again?

I wiped my mouth with the back of my sleeve, the fabric rough and cold against my flushed skin. My arm trembled slightly as I pushed myself upright. My body ached in all the ways trauma liked to settle—in the joints, in the gut, in the silent spots behind your eyes.

I climbed back into the truck without a word, closing the door with a quiet, reluctant thud. The sound wasn’t loud, but it felt final, like closing a door on the person I’d been just a few days ago.

"Just go," I said softly. I kept my gaze fixed out the windscreen, not daring to meet Beatrix’s eyes. If I looked at her, I might shatter again.

Beatrix didn’t say a word. She started the truck and pulled us back onto the road with a gentle lurch. The engine grumbled, the tyres crunched, and we rolled on—two women with no map, no plan, and a manifest that might as well have been a suicide note.

We didn’t speak again for some time. The road stretched out before us, and I could feel the weight of it—the day, the fear, the blood—all pressing down with every rumble of the tyres. We were driving forward, yes. But toward what, I wasn’t sure.