The Hangman (Hell inc Series Book 8) by Dick Wybrow

Author:Dick Wybrow [Wybrow, Dick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-08-21T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

I called up to the cockpit of the jet, “Are we there, yet?”

Sitting across from me, Julius snickered. The guy had a real joie de vivre despite, you know, being all outta vivre.

He got in on the fun: “I gotta pee.”

Maybe because we needed to just be idiots for a few minutes—it had been a harrowing twenty-four hours—he and I thought this was the funniest thing in the world.

Uncle Jerry appeared to get a kick out of it and played along. “You ghost kids pipe down back there or I’m turning this plane around!”

We all laughed then.

You can’t make a habit out of being stupid—despite how many people make a vocation out of it—but now and then, there’s nothing wrong with it to blow off some steam.

After going wheels up yet again, we were headed due north to where Juanito had last spotted the machine being controlled by Ned Kelly, or rather, Elijah Underwood posing as Ned. Jayne had said Somerset was nestled right on the coast and that if you stood on the beach on your toes, you maybe could see across the water all the way to Papua New Guinea.

To pass the hours on board the flight, our pilot had been reading to us some mostly trustworthy internet facts about Australia, “the world’s largest island and smallest continent.”

Our destination was at the tippy-top of the state of Queensland. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I never knew Australia had states.

Much like the U.S., I suppose some chubby old white folks in powdered wigs decided that one big overseeing group of legislators wouldn’t be enough to thoroughly screw up a nation. To do that, you needed to have proper and ongoing conflict over which group of powerful assholes has the power to tell the everyday folks what they could do and what they couldn’t.

“Australia is divided into six states and two territories,” Uncle Jerry said.

That was a bit like America, but our numbers were a bit bigger. Fifty states and, from what I could remember, a dozen territories. The only ones that came to mind were Puerto Rico and Guam. Puerto Rico stuck out because somewhere in my very fuzzy memory, I knew they made killer rum and had beautiful women who could sing and dance, especially amid territorial gang disputes on the streets of 1950s New York.

I don’t entirely know why Guam was in my head, but the place sounded just badass. The name of it: Guam! To me, it sounded like the name of a planet of powerful warriors that would circle the sun, exactly on the opposite side from the Earth, always hidden from us. They probably rode dinosaurs or something.

Or, who knows, maybe our Guam was full of powerful dino-riding warriors and the rest of the states, scared shitless of them, peeled off the once-state and shoved it into the sea.

Not sure why Guam or Puerto Rico weren’t states already, but it probably had something to do with idiots worrying it might fuck up the flag.

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