Blood & Dust Read Online Free PDF

maybe calling the
cops wasn't the best idea.
    'No, Kev, just that he'd be straight out,' Meg said.
    'What about Hunter? He tell you about that bikie? About what happened to Dad and me?'
    'Just what I told you already,' his mother said, plucking at the fallen sheet. 'But I don't think
Hunter was his name.'
    'And I'm okay?' He examined his stomach, his chest, his throat. 'I haven't been, like, shot or
cut or nothing?'
    'No, nothing.' Her brows wrinkled with concern as she touched his forehead, her hand like a
branding iron against his skin. 'A touch of fever, maybe.' She dabbed him with a wet cloth. He was
so thirsty! He could suck that towel dry. He reached for it, but his mother had moved away.
    'Take it easy.' Meg patted his arm. 'It's okay.'
    He caught her hand and pulled her in, her scent wrapping around him, but she extricated herself
from his desperate pawing and stood up.
    'Rest now, Kev. When you're better, you can tell me what happened with your clothes, eh?'
    A kiss on his forehead and she was gone, they were both gone, leaving him alone in the dark, a
vague hunger gnawing at his insides, fevered exhaustion smothering him.
    As the weariness claimed him, the loneliness swept in; swept him up and threw him, litter in a
willy-willy, and dropped him on a different bed, in another house, in another time.
     
    A white woman straddles him in a room smelling of violets and the heavy, sweet
aroma of sugar cane. It's him, but it's not him; his skin is black, and yet it is him. Sweat
beads on her lip and dangling breasts as she gasps above him. Then her teeth grow, mesmerising in
the candlelight, four fangs gleaming. Nails, clear and sharp, slice into his chest where, in another
age, he might have worn the charcoal-filled scars of manhood. His mind screams at the wrongness as
she bends over him, breasts pointed and firm, stomach flat, hips wide. She pins him, then latches
onto his throat. He flows into her. He is in her and she is in him and it is rapture, rapture that
tears his soul as a cockatoo's scream slices across their panting. She bleeds for him, binding him
to her - for now but not forever.
    A flash of white by the bed. A girl - Willa - in bleached blouse and skirt, a ghostly presence in
the fluttering candlelight.
    'Welcome, Chris,' she says, and places a hand on the woman's sweaty shoulder where her hair
sticks like weed on rocks. 'Welcome to the family.'
    He screams in fury. In shame. In hate. Then he is free. Free to run. Free, too late.
     
    Kevin jerked awake, fighting the bedclothes, his chest heaving. What the hell was
that about? He grabbed the bedhead for support as he levered himself up. Still a bit weak around the
knees. And very, very thirsty. Running a fever, maybe, like his mum said. Is this what having
concussion meant - weird dreams and a cold sweat? It was so quiet: midnight quiet. He cracked the
curtain - just gone sundown. He shook his head - hadn't been out that long, then - and dug jocks and
jeans and a shirt out of the drawers. A crow's call rasped like a rusty hacksaw as he left the room.
The hallway light was on, making him squint against the brightness. The house was still, like a
museum. It felt as if they were leaving, as if everything was just waiting for the removalists to
come. It was not a happy move. Tea. He could smell tea. Hear the chinking of china; murmured
conversation interspersed with sobs. Voices: his mother and Meg.
    He walked faster, bare feet making barely a sound on the threadbare runner, its burgundy faded to
brown. To his left, the familiar sofa and armchairs and television, the front door; straight ahead,
the breakfast bar with the kitchen beyond; and to his right, the dining room, just big enough for a
cabinet and table. The women were at the table, his mother facing him at the kitchen end, Meg on the
far side from him near the back door. His father's .243 leaned in the corner behind his mother with
a box of bullets nearby on the bench. Strange, to see the rifle there