Young Writers Society

This story is a sequel to "Unclean" and takes place 10 years after the events of "Unclean". The protagonist is male.

   I sat there in the corner of the room, rocking back and forth gently, cradling myself, my arms around my knees, pulling them into my chest as I stared vacantly off into nothing. The psychiatrist approached me, quietly moving closer so as to talk to me. Nobody had gotten a response out of me for days and I haven’t eaten, so I surprised even myself when I reached out and silently accepted the plate of food he offered me. Up until this point I was sure they were trying to finish me off, to poison me or assassinate me. Either something about the man was different, or I was just resigned to my fate. I didn't care either way, I was hungry. I took the food and started eating slowly, unsure of the man’s intentions, or my own for that matter. After a while, he asked me nicely to recount the events of what had happened. All I wanted to do was rest, but he told me I would be left to sleep peacefully if I just told them the story once. Well, whatever that means. But nothing matters to me anymore, not since my whole world caved in. So, here goes...

I don’t know why it happened, but it did. It was all the NPA.

I was walking to work at McDonness, where the great golden arches reside, always protruding above the fog, shining and glistening as a beacon to all those either employees or those with loose change, usually coinciding. As I crossed the curb, I tripped and stumbled over an unseen and definitely unclean (due to the stench of fish and corn kernels) object in the gutter. Not wanting to check what the something could be, I recovered myself and prevented what could have been a nasty fall onto the pavement. These paths are getting increasingly dangerous. Last week one of my friends, Jason, tripped on a pavement and grazed his knee. He was rushed immediately to emergency at the base hospital by Tim.

I Hop-skip-jumped up the stairs to the top floors of this short stairway to what the Americans would surely call “heaven”. On cue as if the heavens had opened up and poured their wrath upon me, there was a head-splitting blast and my bowels would have consequently emptied themselves of their faecal matter, was I not ready and trained to stop the sudden, violent movement.

Stumbling up the remaining flight of stairs and crashing into a woman, I careered away and slumped against a table. I looked up and saw that the lady I had run into was none other than the Mayor of the city – Bamboo Dowel. My last thought at that moment was of disbelief at the fact that such a god would come as low as McDonness and walk among us. I would have started a more rational thought had another explosion not sent debris in the form of a small fatty fry flying directly into my head. Dammit debris!

As I regained consciousness I tried to push back the dark curtains that surrounded my vision, clouding my view as I fought to get back to my senses. Ears ringing from the explosion, I was surprised when the curtains moved. Go figure, turns out they were actually curtains! As I tossed the rack aside, a round of unpleasant yelling filled my ears to accompany the ringing noise that refused to go away.

“PICK UP THAT DAMN PHONE, CORPORAL!”, the voice said.

The ringing in my ears stopped abruptly. I sat up, and proceeded to fall off the bunk I was on. I hit the floor a second later and looked back up at the top of the bunk bed I had been on, thinking of as many unkind things as I could summon to insult the stupid thing. Stupid pancake snuffer! Crusted rope-tying, windpipe! Soggy… biscuit baker… Okay then, maybe not a verbal insult. It seems to be too early in the morning for that. I was about to raise my fist and shake it in anger at it instead when it dawned on me that the bed, in fact, was not alive; It would not appreciate my rage in the slightest. My train of thoughts were interrupted by the intrusion of a large face. It yelled at me and it wasn’t until the fourth or fifth question it screamed that I stopped sulking about my lost train set and realised where I was as I looked around. I was in a small (and what seemed temporary) military camp. Why was the military here? The last time the military showed up here was more than a decade ago, when the scam with the garbage trucks happened.

A bucket of ice-cold water cascaded down my face and my head suddenly cleared. The man squatting in front of me had removed his face from the 10cm proximity it had just shared with mine and brought me to my senses with water. He was pointing to a table. Cautiously, I raised my head from the ground and accepted the help of the man standing from his position squatting over me. Wobbling clumsily over to the table, I placed my arms a shoulder’s width apart on the table to brace myself. The man was halfway through explaining to me that he was a general in the army, pride of his mother and winner of the hearts of a thousand sea-turtles when he was rudely interrupted by a rude man wearing a rude t-shirt shouting rude things. I didn’t quite catch the first thing he said, as it was written on a piece of paper tied to a rock and hurled through the tent flap, narrowly missing a soldier holding a rake. The rest of the conversation continued as normal and I was able to make cents from what was said later when I sold my story to the newspapers. But that was before the NPA kicked me in the knee. Metaphorically, of course.

“Hey-up! What’s you people doing with soldiers in this here country, ay? This here’s ‘Stralia, if ya didn’t well realise!” The rude Aussie bloke flew into the tent on a pair or kangaroo-skin wings. “Crickey you guys are lost. You want a shot at me ay? You mates better-”

“Will you just SHUT UP?” The general yelled and in that moment I realised where I’d heard his accent before. Good old Barack’s Alarm, these guys are Americans! “This country is now a state of ‘Murica!”

“Oi but what about my dingy, bro? You can’t expect me to leave it up the creek?”

“Corporal get this man out of my tent, he’s not making any sense.”

The man with the rake swept the rude man out and with quick sweeps of the rake, started inching the Aussie out the tent flap slowly. Turns out that the general wasn’t impressed with this, because he lost his patients (me, a woman and a rather odd-looking sausage dog) when he threw us out of his tent. The medic protested, but the general threw him and his “Stop the violence” sign he was waving out the tent with us. Looking around I noticed that the sausage dog was indeed that: on the ground before me lay the hot-dog the general had thrown out. How careless! So distracted was I that I didn’t notice what had happened around me and where I was. The woman that had been thrown out with me was crying and yelling at the medic, calling him trash for turning our country into a mess. I wasn’t particularly interested in what she was saying, or the fact that the medic had promptly turned into a greasy burger wrapper. I was too busy looking around at my surroundings, trying to figure out where I was. There was broken glass, shattered stone and what looked like… No, it couldn’t be! The broken, twisted frames of tables and chairs, their legs stuck into the floor, preventing them from running away from the explosion that had rocked the building. I was still in the McDonness store. I wrenched my eyes away from the horror, running past the general’s tent, pitched into the concrete with bolts. Reaching the front of the store I looked out past the shards of glass stabbing out from the edge of the frame. As far as I could see, fleets of helicopters were carrying in buildings, dropping them in cleared areas. Planes strafed overhead, bombing the streets with bombs and various objects, some of which included portraits of Opera Winfrey, old carrot cakes and multiple kinds of soft drink crates. The shock of what was happening almost stopped my heart, but thankfully I had the common sense to remove my hand from the exposed wires protruding from the wall. Once I recovered from my electrical encounter, I returned my gaze to the scene before me before coming to the realisation that had been nagging at the back of my mind. America was invading Australia. Every building being dropped in was a take-out store. AFC, Burger Kingdom, McDonness and more where raining down from above. They were transforming the nation. Soon, the only businesses to be running would be take-away fast-food ‘restaurants’. Everyone would work there, eat there, sleep there. All of Australia’s people’s lives taken over. In as much time as it takes to ship buildings from America. Oh. Well that’s gonna be a while. I needed to escape, fast. The general would come out of his tent anytime soon and when he did, there was no hope for my escape.

   But alas, as I was thinking of gunning for freedom, I was clubbed in the back of the head. That’s when I woke up here, in this mental health clinic. I swear I’m telling the truth. The general must have brought me here to make you think I’d lost it! Nobody else has believed me, they just tell me it’s the stress of seeing my home burned. They say the whole thing is preposterous, that all of New South Sharks has been bombed into oblivion, that the state is too dangerous and concentrated with radiation to enter. I’m telling the truth! You believe me, don’t you?

“I would believe you, but I have it on record that your mental condition is lacking since you sustained a head injury in a bomb blast” The psychiatrist told me sadly. “In fact, you even failed to remember that you've seen me before. I've been your doctor the whole time, there were no others.”

“No, you’re wrong!” I pleaded. “You have to understand!”

Then the door to the room opened, and a woman entered. I recognised her, but from where? I sat there, looking like a fool, my mouth still hanging open from my started objection to the psychiatrist. Then it hit me. It hurt too, a point I made known by mustering all the manliness I possessed and roaring at the bottom of my lungs in a pathetically weak voice one word – “mum…” Yes, this was my mother. Trailing behind her was a shambling form, dressed in rags and what looks like old scavenged underwear from clothes bins.

“John?” My mother stepped forward tentatively.“John, this is your father, Johnny. Remember? You were named after him. We thought he was killed in the war ten years ago, but he’s come out of hiding now… He wants to speak to you.”

I’ll never forget that moment, the images, the sounds. The smell of fish and corn kernels.