Purdue came in hastily, looking sober and focused. He held up two stapled reports, one in each hand. “You are not going to believe this.”
“What is it?” Nina asked, reaching for the sheet in Purdue’s left hand. Amicably, he pulled it away from her and said, “Wait, allow me.”
Nina and Sam greeted the flustered Harris, who looked much as he did the last time they saw him after that all-nighter of examining the mummy tissue. Purdue looked serious, but at the same time relieved. “Finally there is some sort of correlation here,” he cried. “Now we have somewhere to start from to start making sense of all the shit we have been trying to figure out, people.”
“Purdue?” Sam urged.
“Okay, okay,” Purdue said. He held up his right hand. “The lab results of the mummified tissue is in my right hand.” He lifted the left. “In this hand, I have the lab results of the samples supplied to me by my esteemed opposition in the court case, Sam.”
He addressed Sam specifically, as he was involved with the same people for the expose on Purdue. “Alright, then, what is the big finish?” he asked Purdue.
“You will find the big finish, dare I say, of substantial value, Sam,” Purdue assured him. He placed both reports down on the bar counter and they all gathered around it as Purdue elucidated his sudden burst of enthusiasm. “Dr. Harris, would you please tell us what you found present in the dead Nazi sample?”
Uncomfortable with the soapbox he was offered, the reluctant scientist shared his findings. “Well, after several readjustments to the testing process to yield the most potent evaluation, I found that the men in the ship died of…,” he looked at Purdue, hesitant to sound like a fool in front of Sam and Nina. Purdue nodded to him to proceed. “They died of snakebites.”
“Jesus,” Nina responded instantly. She looked at Sam. “Bruich.”
“The day he scared the shit out of us, he was in one of the boxes, remember?” Sam declared eagerly. Glancing at Purdue, he nodded. “He must have mistaken the bones for a snack. A rotten, gross snack.”
“Ingesting the snake venom,” Nina concluded. Purdue began to smirk. He nudged at Harris like a zealous schoolboy, but his raging fervor had subsided somewhat. “Tell them about the poison I am being sued for.”
Harris obliged. “Oh yes, the chemical that is reputed to have been supplied by Scorpio Majorus Holdings to poison wildlife in Australia, is the identical strain, Phospholipase A2.”
Purdue repeated, “PLA2.”
“That is what Bruich had in his system,” Sam remarked.
“Neurotoxin,” Harris affirmed.
“Fuck me,” Sam whispered, shaking his head. “So Bruich got sick from the Nazi bodies. That is about all that makes true sense here. How could they still have venom in such deteriorated tissue?”
“That is what baffled me too, Mr. Cleave,” Harris admitted. “And to tell you the truth, it still does. It should be virtually impossible to detect such a minute amount of this compound, I think. Look, there have been exhumations of mummies as old as 700 years where poison could be detected in paleopathological and archaeological tests, but these specimens were in a completely different environment.”
“Here is the other thing,” Nina frowned. “Explain the presence of poisonous snakes on the ship.” She addressed Purdue and Sam. “Did you find any evidence of snakes on that ship?”
“None,” Purdue replied. “Although we did not exactly scour the vessel for snakeskins and cages, so we have no way of knowing.”
Harris shrugged and muttered to nobody in particular. “If only we could ask them.”
16 This is not Australia
What Cecil Harding saw inside the house was not what he had expected. He stormed in through the back door under cover of the enormous sycamore that had been uprooting that side of the veranda for years. Inside, he followed the mad din deeper into the farmhouse, and when he rounded the corner, he found his brother crouching in the corner.
“Gary?” Cecil shrieked. “Jesus, Gary! What is going on, bro?”
Gary said nothing. Upstairs gunshots rang. They could hear the sergeant barking orders at his sidekick and the whistling ricochet of bullets piercing glass and brick. Cecil crouched beside his brother.
“You okay, mate?” he whispered. “Mate!”
His brother did nothing in response. He stared into space, his lips chapped and his face covered in a week-old beard. Gary’s clear green eyes showed no clarity or even coherence. Dirty nails showed evidence of digging in the black sand and his filthy clothing smelled of sweat and old piss.
“Hey, Gary, hey. What happened, bro? Please j-j… just … tell me what happened and we’ll sort it out okay? I brought the cops to help, see?” He urged his brother while the torch in his hand threatened to char his hand. The burning fabric of his shirt had begun to peel off in embers and fell on his forearm as they parted from the broomstick, but he could break from the engagement with his brother right now. “Are you hurt? I don’t see any blood on you, mate,” Cecil kept talking.
On the second floor, the shots fired had ceased completely, and what sounded like a war zone was now reduced to the two police officers’ footsteps on the wooden floor above. “Put out that bloody fire, Dr. Harding!” the sergeant shouted as he came down the stairs. “You want to burn down the fucking place?”
“I was going to use it to help you fight them,” he explained as he doused the makeshift torch in the fireplace.
“You’d do better to burn your bloody hand off with thinners, mate,” the cop advised him. “Besides, we found nobody.”
“Then what was all the shooting about?” Cecil asked, scrutinizing his brother’s condition.
The constable looked totally frazzled. In a minor way, her demeanor almost reminded Cecil of his brother’s — shocked and frightened.
“Oh there was movement in the back room and the broken staircase up to what I think is one of the turret attics,” Sgt. Anaru said. “We just could not see them.”
Cecil stared at him in disbelief. Annoyed at his ineptitude at seizing and arresting the intruders, the sergeant snapped, “Oh, don’t look at me like that! I am not saying the bastards are invisible. They just moved really fast and we could not catch up quickly enough to plant them. When we got to the staircase they were just gone.”
“Even though the rusted padlock on the trapdoor at the top of the smashed stairs was still intact,” the constable muttered to herself. The men gawked at her confession. It was true. It was true and terrifying to think the attackers were still inside the house and knew it well enough to evacuate so smoothly.
“We have to get out of here,” Sgt. Anaru commanded. “Now, before they bring their friends. I will call back-up from the squad car and get a few extra men up here in a jiffy so we can smoke them out.”
As the police officers staggered out of the house, Cecil tried to help up his brother. “Gary, where is Dad?”
Suddenly Gary reacted for the first time. He looked at Cecil with the fear of God in his eyes. His dry lips quivered as he tried to speak for the first time in a week, but he could utter nothing but grunts. Tears drowned his eyes and trickled over his face before his face changed from terror to abject sadness. From outside the house, the sergeant yelled for the two brothers to join them.
“Come on, mate, let’s get somewhere safe. Then you can tell me all about it, alright?” Cecil reluctantly coaxed his brother. In truth, he was dying to know, right now, what had happened to their father. He wanted to know, right now, who the intruders were and what they had done to his brother. All these things had to wait, though, because the immediate threat was greater than information. With a struggle, he pulled his brother’s unwilling body up to his feet. Gary’s body felt like a sack of lead; dead weight in the arms of his desperate brother, but he made a small attempt at walking.