Hurtling to Oblivion is a work of fiction. As such, it’s intended to entertain, hopefully engross, the reader. Many of the places described in this story exist. Some don’t. None of the people mentioned in this story exist—perhaps some should.

There are no characters depicted intended to resemble any person who lives or has lived. The positions of people in public life—for example, political appointments—have been used; however, the personal qualities of the characters in the story are not intended to represent those of real-world politicians holding similar positions.

Similarly, government departments and industries mentioned do not exist, though there are obviously parallels to be drawn with the real world.

The events described in the story didn’t happen, though in some cases, fairly similar events did—or could—take place.

The story is set in the Northern Territory of Australia. There are three reasons for this: It’s where I live. It’s where I learned a lot of the things about which I write. And it’s a place with a largely pristine environment, which should be protected. Yes, there’s an underlying message in the story. It is, if we don’t stop destroying our world, we’ll end up destroying ourselves.

The scenarios for Hurtling to Oblivion could be transplanted to almost any coastal venue in Australia, or in many places in the world for that matter.

The followers of Wicca appear in the story. If I was going to have a ‘religion’, Wicca would be my first choice. Actually, Wicca seems more a way of life than a religion. The paranormal attributes suggested in the story are my fancies, not drawn from any investigations of Wicca.

There’s a bitter truth to the tale. It’s a fact that, despite an infinity of advice and warnings from people who are paid to give us heed when we are doing something wrong, we, in our typically arrogant and indifferent human manner, are fouling and killing the only place where we know for a fact that we and all other earth life-forms can exist.

Hurtling to Oblivion is dedicated to the thousands of scientists and technicians who work assiduously to provide good information intended to allow proper environmental management practice.

It’s also dedicated to Margi, my partner. Finally, Hurtling to Oblivion is dedicated to, and was written in a vainglorious attempt to help our planet.

DFF, Darwin, NT

 

Prologue

Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia
July 1986

“I’d seen him around before. He asked me out, and he was beautiful, like a film star. The eyes and everything.”

The girl shuddered at the memory, sinking back against the starched white hospital pillow. Her face was pinched, faded, and she seemed far older than the seventeen years indicated on the clipboard at the base of her bed. She lay still for a moment, then took a deep breath and spoke again. The words came out slowly, forced. She didn’t want to think about it, yet couldn’t stop.

“It was about an hour after sunset when he came around to pick me up. His car was a bit ragged round the edges—you know—paint flaking and noisy. Smell of mould inside. We were supposed to be going to Jessie’s for the disco, but he dithered off into Malak. He smoked the wheels as he swerved around the corner from Matthews
Crescent and nearly lost it. He was sort of laid back into his seat, grinning like an idiot, with his foot planted.

“We flew up by the bus stop, and just as we passed Adrian Street, he slipped his hand up my skirt, all the way between my legs. Then he turned his head and leered at me. He looked...sort of...animal…evil. And he was squeezing, digging with his fingers. I was terrified.”

The girl reached for a cigarette, hand shaking, then drew it back when she remembered where she was, that she couldn’t smoke in the hospital.

“There was a hot, alive feel in his hand, almost as if he wasn’t controlling it at all. It could have been a different, separate creature altogether. After a minute, I couldn’t help it, I just spread my thighs apart for him, pushed my feet up against the dash and closed my eyes. He made me feel like a slave, but I didn’t want him to stop. He kept watching me, worming his fingers into me—and then he looked ahead and saw the old truck parked up ahead, loaded with scaffolding. He slammed the brakes on, but even though we’d nearly stopped before we hit the truck, a pipe ran through the windscreen and pierced all the way through his head. He was just hanging there, like a piece of meat. Still grinning.”

Tears streamed down the girl’s face. She turned her head away and started to pick at the faded green hospital coverlet. Her fingernails were bitten to the quick.

No one had any idea she’d overdose with the tranquilizers she’d been given less than a month later. When her body was found, curled up like a baby in her father’s garden shed, it didn’t even make the headlines, because by then there was too much other bad stuff happening.

Chapter 1
Shaun Spencer

Dalwood Crescent could never be called a quiet road. Broad, winding up through the outskirts of one of the newer suburbs, it lies ready to carry most any kind of fleeting vehicle on its back for the few seconds necessary to shift from one place to another. Vehicles fly up and down the road constantly, especially at night—throaty, growling transport often driven by young hoons eager to please some underage soon-to-be-ex-virgin. Typically, she’ll be writhing in the passenger seat, quivering in an ecstasy of fear and anticipation as the hoon screams the car through the curves.

The houses lining the street are absolutely normal—simple living places. There’s not a vastly expensive mansion to be seen; they’re exactly the sort of place where you or I would live. I did live there for a while, and I first became conscious of the problem looming for Darwin when I decided I needed to live somewhere else.

It all came together as a warning for me way back in 1986, around the time of the Northern Territory election, in June.

Apart from what was to happen, it wasn’t a good time for me, my family or the Territory. There’d been several years of Australia-wide depression; and even though things were picking up nationally, the Territory lagged, as it usually did. Someone once said northern Australia did better than the rest of the country when it came to being lucky. They were wrong—what happens is that trouble takes longer to reach that part of the world. By the time it starts to bite in the Territory, the rest of the country’s starting to pick up again. Ho-hum, anyway—who cares about economics?

I was driving a ’dozer on a big construction site, one of the Gold Coast-style canal estate developments investors were trying to bring into Darwin. Not a very auspicious kind of work, but it was a living and I didn’t have to think about it much.

I wasn’t thinking about anything much. My only kid had died of leukemia five months before, after reaching the astonishing age of six. Two months after that my wife decided to freshen up her miserable existence by swapping me for a new man, one who wasn’t climbing into a bottle to try and get his daughter back from the grave. We’d been a happy family until a year before, when Jody was diagnosed. Her real name was Justine, after my wife’s mother, but she’ll always be…always was Jody to me.

Yeah, we were happy. We had everything going for us. I was making a big success playing the markets, building on a lump of dough my old man willed me. We had our modest house on Dalwood Crescent, and a block at Howard Springs we were planning to build on—we’d even talked to architects about it.

Mirielle, who was my beautiful French wife a million years ago, was working for an advertising company part-time, and she had them by the balls, she was so good. Then the rogue cell sank its teeth into Jody, and we turned from the get-ahead family into a brittle travesty of the famed Australian Good Life. Sure, we kept up appearances for a few months, especially when Jody had a remission. But soon, when she’d lost all her hair and most of her teeth, when she was bleeding from her gums and when she threw up any food we could force down her, it wasn’t a fun game anymore.

The Lord, such as he is, took Jody at three o’clock one Thursday morning. I can still hear the emptiness when she stopped breathing. The nurse—there was no reason for a doctor to be there, there was nothing he could do—simply looked up from the book she was reading, then stood and placed a hand on Jody’s neck for a moment.

“She’s gone,” she whispered.

Mirielle was sitting next to me in one of those arse-numbing, bone-hard, shit-brindle-coloured hospital chairs. She stood and walked over to Jody, touched her hand to my child’s dead face, then turned to me. Her face was hard, sunken with shadows from the worry and the frustration of being unable to help the kid.

“Take me to the house.”

That was when our home officially stopped being a home and became simply a house.
Since we’re going to be talking for a while, I’ll introduce myself. My name’s Shaun Spencer. I used to be a bulldozer driver—hell, I used to be a Leopard tank driver for a while in the Australian Army, which is how I eventually got to drive ’dozers. I used to be a moderately wealthy man. I used to be a husband. And a father. Now I’m just someone with a story to tell.