The Head on the Pole

"Nobody had to tell me what was out there. They'd staked it at the gate."

The shapes I'd watched firm up out of the haze went on firming until they were the truth of the place, and the truth was less than I'd let myself hope for over the last stretch of ground. From a way off my eye had made structures of them — walls, a roofline, the grey smudge of a cooking fire, the ordinary marks of somewhere people lived. Up close there was none of that. There were tents. That was the whole of what Bixbus was. Tents.

Big ones, I'll grant them that — not the flimsy two-man tent I'd pitch by the river of a weekend, but proper canvas, the ten-man army sort, high enough to stand up in, made to take weather and take a beating. A handful of them, no more, pitched in a rough curve on the red ground. And that was the settlement. That was the camp Paul led, the one with a name and a leader and an order to it. Six tents and a dead fire in the middle of a desert — and my whole trade went and made a sick kind of sense to me right then, because canvas is canvas, however good the canvas, and there is nothing in a tent wall that stops whatever has made up its mind to come in.

The fire I'd taken for smoke was cold. A ring of blackened stones and a heap of grey ash gone to nothing, no one tending it, no one near it. No one anywhere. I'd braced myself, coming in, for faces — for a crowd of the lost turning to look at whatever the ute had dragged in. There was no crowd. There was no one at all. Whatever this place held it was holding almost none of it just then, and that emptiness — all that canvas and not a soul moving between it — sat colder in me than any crowd could have. A handful of tents for a handful of people. And even the handful gone.

And then I saw what waited at the mouth of the camp, and the tents and the emptiness and the cold fire all went clean out of my head.

It was staked on a pole driven into the red ground, standing about chest-high — a head. An animal's head, black, and big, and wrong, and my body knew what it was looking at a long moment before my mind would take delivery of it. Cold went through me, fast, scalp to boots, and I heard myself make a sound I hadn't chosen to make, a short hard catch of breath, and my hands had found the seatbelt across my chest and taken hold of it, gripping like it could keep me in the world.

The nearest my mind could get to it was a panther — one of the big black ones — and even that fell miles short, because there was no panther on God's earth built to the size of this. It was a killing head and nothing else: bigger than a full-grown dog entire, the fur on it black — not a shining black but a black that swallowed the sun that fell on it — matted and stiff with what it had bled. The jaws had been hauled wide in a snarl and fixed there, whatever it had been roaring in its last second frozen onto its face for good. And the teeth — the long front ones as long as my own fingers, curved, yellow-white against all that black, still dark at the root with old blood. The tongue had lolled out over them and dried there, thick as my wrist. The eyes were open. Filmed over, gone to glass, looking at nothing, and somehow looking straight at me.

And the mind catches up in the end, whether you'll have it or not. Somebody had killed that. Somebody in this place had stood in front of it while it was alive and full of that snarl, and killed it, and it would not have been quick and it would not have been clean, because you don't take the head off a beast that size without it costing you something first. And then they'd cut it free, and sharpened a pole, and driven it into the dirt at the way into their camp for the next arrival to see. Not for show. As a word. The plainest word there is. This is what's out here. This is what we do to it, when we can. Stay back.

I'm not a soft man about death. I grew up gutting fish on my father's boat with my hands gone numb in the cold of them; I've wrung the necks of things and thought no more about it; I know what the inside of a living thing looks like. This was not that. This was built to open a man from throat to belt, killed and staked and left grinning at the road in — and somewhere on the far side of a wall I couldn't get back through were the two people I loved best in the world. My wife. And my little boy, who was frightened of the dark in his own bedroom with a nightlight burning. They were on the safe side of it. I was on this side. The side with this.

"What... what is that?" I got out. My voice didn't sound like mine — too high, too thin, coming apart on the second word.

Paul didn't tell me what it was. I marked that, even through the fog of it — that he let the question go past him and answered a different one, the one he'd sooner I was asking.

"That's why we need you, Nial." His voice had gone careful and level, every word set down with its footing tested first. "We need you to help us build security fences around the camp's perimeter to keep us safe from the shadow panthers and any other dangers that may lurk in this new world."

Shadow panthers. So the black head on the pole had a name, and the name had a plural on the end of it — which meant it wasn't the last of its kind, which meant there were more of them out in that dark Paul spoke of, and one of them had done what it had done to Kain's leg, and one day one of them would come at whatever I put up to keep it out.

I pressed the heels of my hands hard into my eyes, hard enough to see colours, as if I could push it back out of my head, scrub it off the inside of my skull. It was still there when I took them away.

"I can't believe this is real." And then, before I'd decided to say it, louder, for Paul and for Kain and for whatever God might be listening on either side of that wall: "I have a wife and young toddler to get home to. I can't stay here."

"I understand how difficult this is for you, Nial," Paul said, and turned in his seat to say it to my face.

It was the wrong thing to say and the only thing to say, and what got me was that he meant it. Not sympathy — sympathy I could have shoved off. This was worse: he knew the exact shape of it, because he'd stood where I was standing and felt what I was feeling, and had come out the far side of it still upright. There was no arguing with that. It just sat there between us, true.

"We've all got loved ones we've left behind." Kain, from the front, and his voice had come apart at the edges — the hard young front he'd held since I fell out of the sky onto him gone thin at last. He didn't look at me. He didn't have to. The three of us sat there a moment in the hot shut cab, strangers, bound together by the people on the far side of that wall that not one of us could reach.

"But the fact is, we are here now," Paul said, and I heard the note in his voice change, the softness going out of it, an iron coming in that plainly cost him to pick up. His eyes went to Kain's leg, to the dark soaked bandage, and rested there a beat, and let it do the arguing for him. "And we need to work together, or none of us are going to survive this place."

It wasn't a speech. It was a sum. Work together and maybe live; don't and die. The black head on the pole had already done the working-out. Paul was only reading the answer back.

"I don't know if I can do this," I said. Barely aloud. It was the truest thing I'd said since I got here.

"You don't have to do this alone," Paul said. "We're here for you."

I heard the kindness in it, and I heard the other thing under the kindness — that there was a this, that staying alive here was a job, one I'd been signed onto without a soul asking me first. But I hadn't the fight left to say so.

The passenger door tore open with a shriek of its hinge, and the heat and the white light came pouring in, and Kain was already hauling himself out into it.

"I'm going to the lagoon," he said. Heavy, and final, and I understood that he needed to be gone from this — from the cab, from the talk, from whatever was pressing on him that he'd carried further than it could be carried.

He got down out of the seat the hard way, both hands and a locked jaw, the bad leg folding under him as it took his weight and holding when he made it hold. He didn't look back at us. He set off across the red ground toward the dunes with that heavy list to the one side, the dust kicking up small around his feet, and then he was over the first rise and gone.

And then it was just Paul and me.

The cab felt bigger with Kain out of it, and quieter, and the quiet was worse than any of the noise had been. The engine was dead. The dust settled. Out through the windscreen the little cluster of empty tents sat baking in the sun, and the black head kept its watch on the way in, and somewhere off past the dunes stood a wall I couldn't walk back through, and on the other side of that was a Saturday I was already late getting home from. I sat in my own ute, in a place called Bixbus, with a stranger beside me, and I had never once in my life been so far from everything I knew.