Chapter 1

Rubbish Disposal

The lights of the fancy four-wheel-drive four door truck flash along the far fence and farm house when the truck turns into the low lying field and heads across it. It stops a hundred metres into the field. The motor is still running when the passenger and driver get out and shut the doors. They splash through the ankle high water while they walk down the sides of the truck to the end. Reaching the back of the vehicle both boys grab hold of the truck’s side and the tailgate. The passenger stretches out, and levers up the catch. Both lower the tailgate until it’s flat, held up by the side struts. When the gate is lowered the rainwater collected in the back during their drive from the city starts to drain out of the tray. Both boys hold onto the side of the high-sided truck bed with one hand when they reach in with the other hand to grab the sheet in the back. They start to pull the sheet and its burden toward them. Despite the fifty-six kilo load on the sheet it slides down the tray with ease, since the truck is stopped in a dip and is facing up a slight incline. The front is only ten centimetres higher than the back, but it’s enough to make it easy for them to slide the load off by pulling on the sheet.

Neither wants to look at the load, so both are looking at the back of the truck cab, and the stainless steel roll bar with driving lights and steel flag pole mounted on it. Both boys open their mouths to scream while the field lights up when they see a large bolt of lightning hit the pole. Neither boy makes a sound while the huge electrical charge goes through the vehicle, their bodies, and into the ground. Every nerve in their bodies is on fire for the short time it takes for them to die.

Storm Troopers

John Harris is having a nice quiet rest. He’s sitting in the old arm chair on the front porch of his farm house while he watches the storm as he thinks about the work he can do tomorrow, depending upon how the fields are after this rainstorm. He sits up when he sees the lights of a vehicle turn into the driveway, and stands up when they turn off to head out across the stubble of the field he harvested two days ago.

He calls to his wife, Martha, while he watches the vehicle drive almost to the middle of the field, and stop. In the dim light he can just see the shapes of two people get out and go to the back of the vehicle. The shape of the vehicle’s back tells him it’s a large four door utility truck. They seem to be getting something out of the back. He’s starting to slip his heavy duty raincoat on when a large flash of lightning strikes the vehicle and lights up the field. He sees the two figures in the act of dumping something from the back of the truck, they go stiff as they and the truck are outlined in blue fire. The light ends, and all goes black.

John shouts, “Martha, call the ambulance, and tell them we’ve got two lightning strike victims out here.” He hears her acknowledgement while he races across to the open garage. Hopping onto his farm quad bike he takes off down the drive, and out into the field.

Nearing the truck he’s hit with an acrid smell. Stopping with his headlight shining on the back of the truck he can see the two figures beside the truck are beyond help. They’re still smoking, so are the truck tyres. While he walks over to see what they were trying to dump on his land John shakes his head when he wonders how big the charge must have been to half melt the truck tyres like that. A couple more paces, and he can see what’s in the tray of the truck. Swearing, he takes a running jump into the back of the truck. He’s very careful because he doesn’t want to create a bridging link between the truck and the water - in case there’s still any electrical charge left in the vehicle.

He kneels in the middle of the tray, and reaches down to check for a pulse on the boy lying in the truck. It’s there, but ragged and weak. The boy is cold and wet. He’s in a very bad way.

Making a snap decision, John pulls out his mobile phone, and calls a neighbour. When they answer he says, “Fred, get your med kit and get to the field in front of my house now!“

Fred Bell is a medic in the Army Reserve, he’s not supposed to treat the general public - except in an extreme emergency, and he knows John knows this, because John is his platoon commander. If John tells him to come and treat someone, he knows it’s an emergency, so he simply says, “Yes, Sir, be right there.” In seconds he’s racing out his front door with his medical kit in one hand and his heavy duty raincoat in the other while his wife holds the door open for him.

John disconnects from Fred to call Martha. He tells her to bring several blankets and filled hot water bottles to him in the field.

Fred arrives about two minutes after getting the call. When Fred gets out of his car John stands up, and calls out, “Toss me your bag, then take a running jump to get up. Major lightning strike, and the truck may still have a charge.” Fred nods to show he heard, and does it. In a moment he’s beside the boy in the back of the truck, and checking him over.

The boy seems to be OK, except for being very cold and the strong smell of alcohol. At one point Fred has him lifted a little while checking his back. The boy opens an eye, and says, “Got to throw up. The bastards forced drugs and booze down.” The two men glance at each other, and the boy passes out again.

John says, “The other two were trying to dump him like garbage when the lightning strike hit the truck. So they may have done that. Give him the ipecac and something to wake him up.”

Fred groans, “Shit. If I give him the wrong stuff he could die.”

“Whatever the hell brew they gave him is, it may kill him if we don’t get it out, and very soon.”

Fred nods agreement, prepares a strong stimulant, and injects it. He also readies a large syringe of syrup of ipecac to put into the boy’s mouth.

Within a minute the boy is stirring enough Fred feels safe to use the syringe (without a needle) to trickle the ipecac down the boy’s throat. A few minutes later they move the boy into the recovery position when he starts to vomit. What comes out is just liquid and tablets, a hell of a lot of tablets of several different types. Both have latex gloves on, as per the treatment safety rules, and they start grabbing the tablets so they can show them to the hospital doctor when they get him there. They have to be fast grabbing the tablets, due to the rain washing everything down the truck and off the end. They don’t get them all, but they do get most of them. They’re almost finished this when Martha arrives in the tractor. She wants to make sure she can drive out of the boggy field again.

John calls out instructions, and his reasons for them, so she tosses him the hot water bottles, then the blankets. He hands them to Fred, who stuffs the hot water bottles inside the boy’s tracksuit, and lays the blankets on him. The last item is a canvas to cover the boy with.

Another examination by Fred, and there isn’t much more they can do for him, at this time. Martha heads back to the driveway, and they wait for the ambulance to arrive. They’re concerned, since they’re only twenty minutes from town and the ambulance should be here by now.

While they’re waiting Martha goes back to the farm house, and gets a four metre length of electrical wire they’ve got left over from rewiring the shed. She strips both ends for about half a metre to expose the wires, and takes it to the truck. She tosses the wire to John. He wraps one end around the steel roll bar. Martha goes back onto the driveway while Fred and he are standing well away from the roll bar when he tosses the loose end of the wire over the side and into the water. They get one bright flash when it first touches the ground, but that’s all.

It’s about fifty minutes before the ambulance turns up. There’s only two of them in the town, and both had already been sent out to the other ends of the district before this call came in. Both crews aren’t happy: both calls turned out to be hoax calls, and they got delayed getting to the only real call they have. They’re quick to have the boy in the ambulance and off to hospital. Fred goes along to explain what he did, and why. He takes the collected tablets with him in a plastic bag from his kit.

Hospital

In the Emergency Room Fred tells the doctor what the boy said, and what he did. A nurse starts to pump out his stomach contents. A lot more tablets and fluid are pumped out, but no food. One of the nurses is put to work identifying what she can of the tablets, and organising for the other tablets to go to pathology for identification. They also send samples of the fluids, and a series of progressive blood samples. Often a drug can be identified by the way it breaks down in the blood over a period of time.

The doctor is very careful about how she treats the boy, until after she gets the details of the drugs in his system. All three pathology staff are called in out of hours, and are busy working on the drugs. While they wait the doctor treats the boy for exposure and extreme cold. She sends him for a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scan of his insides too.

The nurse strips him, and dries him before taking him to the MRI. When she gets the clothes off the boy she calls the doctor over. the doctor has a close look at the many bruises that’d been hidden under the clothes, and she writes them up while the nurse photographs them. They’re of a grave concern because some look like hand prints. They do a much closer physical examination, and find a needle mark where the boy couldn’t have given it to himself, so it’s clear someone else gave him the injection.

Ninety minutes after his arrival the pathology lab has their initial report. They still have some unfinished tests, but now know enough to allow the doctors to get to work. Most of the drugs in his stomach hadn’t entered his blood stream, yet, but some had. The contents are four families of sedatives, cocaine, heroin, alcohol, plus enough Viagra and Cialis to cause a fatal heart attack in a man of any age. His blood stream also has two different anaesthetics, both are only given as an intravenous injection, a muscle relaxant, some opiates (still working on refining the identification and exact levels, but are low), plus a lethal amount of tadalafil (the active ingredient in Cialis) - enough to cause the doctors to have real concerns about side effects; as well as the stimulant Fred used. The treating doctors check out their reference books to work out how all these chemicals are likely to interact. But there’s nothing available, because this mix is so crazy it’s not there.

With no better guidance than a wild arse guess the doctor starts her treatment based on the best treatments for the individual drugs in his system. She uses the known counter agents to fight the effects of each of the drugs, and hopes for the best. After pumping him full of another lot of drugs she puts him to bed in the intensive care unit.

Other major concerns are his Electroencephalography (EEG, brain activity) and Electrocardiography (ECG, heart activity) readings, they don’t match any known profiles - normal or otherwise. His heart rate is very slow; a resting heart rate for someone his age should be around sixty beats per minute, but his is twenty-five beats a minute. Blood pressure is high, but not too high - probably due to the low beat rate. All his EEG readings are much faster in frequency with larger peaks and troughs. There are some odd spikes at times, as well. Copies of all the readings are sent off to the top specialists around the world for comment, and, if possible, an explanation. The boy is left hooked up and monitored all night.

While the nurses keep a close check on his medical condition the night clerk sets about identifying the boy. Since none of the five staff treating him know him, they’re pretty sure he isn’t from the town itself. His photo will be shown to the reception staff of the town’s sole medical centre in the morning, all six of the town’s doctors work out of there. His details and photo have already been given to the local police, and also the police in the nearby city - which is where they think he may be from. This is needed, because he has no identification documents on him: nothing in his pockets, no papers, no wallet, no money, no phone - not a thing on him. It’s as if they’ve been removed to stop identification.

About half an hour after the boy is put to bed the second ambulance arrives with the bodies of the two dead at the truck. They had to wait until the doctor who attended as coroner, and the police, released them to be brought in to the morgue. An autopsy on them will be done in the morning.

Police

The duty constable attends the scene at the farm when he gets word a death has occurred. Upon seeing what he has to deal with he calls in his sergeant and the scene of crime people from the nearby city. He takes great care to see the scene is undisturbed, except by medical staff doing what they have to for the living injured.

The rain stops about fifteen minutes after the constable arrives.

For about an hour he sits in his car in the driveway while he waits for his sergeant and the forensic specialists. But things move fast when they do arrive. Everyone soon realises the field is too boggy for their vehicles, so all of their gear is carried from the driveway. Photos are taken of everything in and around the truck. Then the truck cabin is opened and searched. They also run a search on the registration plates. The truck is registered to a trust no one recognises the name of. Its offices are in Sydney, so that’ll have to wait for Monday morning. Nothing in the vehicle allows them to identify who owns it, and no one recognises it. While all this is going on the doctor arrives, and certifies the two people as dead during his initial observations at the scene. Then he has the bodies removed to the town morgue.

Two hours after he arrived the duty constable is again sitting alone in his car while he waits for a tow-truck to arrive to take the truck to the police station. It’s another thirty minutes before the tow truck is there. The driver takes one look at the situation, then he goes up to speak to the farm owners. Ten minutes later their tractor is dragging the truck across the field to the road. Five minutes after that the truck is sitting on the tow-truck’s load bed as the tow-truck drives away with the truck. He’s followed out by the constable after he does a quick check of the ground where the truck was to look for any more evidence.

While he follows the truck back to town Senior Constable Bills hopes he can get warm again. He also hopes something will turn up tomorrow to help them identify the three boys they have. What a mess, two dead, one almost dead, and they don’t know any of them. Oh well, that’s now the sergeant’s concern, not his.

Saturday

Late morning at the Sandy Creek Hospital a boy wakes up. He’s got a huge headache, and everyone is yelling. He complains, and they tell him the hospital is quiet. The doctors come in and check up on him. They give him pain killers and a light meal. A little later the voices he hears are drowned out by a loud buzzing. When the buzz gets louder his headache grows. When it’s almost too much for him the noise and headache start to reduce, and so do the voices he hears.

A little later the boy is lying there with his eyes closed and thinking. A young nurse walks in, and he hears her say, “What a nice looking boy, I wonder who he is, and what happened to him?”

He opens his eyes, and says, “So do I, so do I.”

She looks at him, and replies, “You do what?”

He turns to her, “I was just agreeing with what you were saying as you walked in.”

She gives him an odd look, “But I wasn’t talking when I came in.”

He’s surprised, but he thinks quick, “Oh, I must’ve been daydreaming. I could’ve sworn you said you wished we were on a nice sunny beach.”

She laughs, “You must have been daydreaming. But thanks for taking me with you. I’d enjoy a nice tropical beach right now.”

They both laugh while she checks his vital signs. She enters them in the records, while he thinks hard on what he’s sure he heard her say. Then she says, “Your comment so suited what I was thinking when I came in I thought you must’ve been reading my mind.” He gives her an odd look. “I was wondering about who you are, that’s all.”

He nods, “Oh, yes, I can see how my comment fits both. Funny how things like that happen, at times. And my sentiment applies to both.”

After she leaves he wonders about having heard what she was thinking. While she walks away he tries to stay with her to listen in on her mind again. He hears what he thinks are her thoughts for a few paces, but her ‘voice’ soon fades out. So he tries to listen in on those around him by expanding his range. He can hear a few thoughts from those in the next rooms, but not beyond them.

He lies there, and wonders what is going on. It makes him angry to be able to hear what others near him are thinking while he can’t get his own mind to tell him who he is. He’s very frustrated when he falls asleep.

Since the boy is now in a natural sleep the staff let him sleep until the end of the normal lunch period before they wake him for a late lunch. After the meal he lies there while he tries to listen to people. He notices he no longer has the headache or the buzzing. With a little practice he can hear some thoughts of the people in the next couple of rooms and in the hall, but not those further away. He lies there thinking on all this while he wonders who he is and how long he’s had this ability to read minds. For some reason he doesn’t understand the boy knows mind reading isn’t supposed to happen to anyone, and it’s something new to him.

Grumpy Gymnast

Just after three in the afternoon of the next day, Saturday, Elizabeth Tudor is on the phone to her mother, “Mum, can you pick me up from the gym. The meet’s over, and Hal isn’t in sight.” Mrs Tudor agrees to pick her daughter up on her way home from shopping. While she’s waiting Liz wonders where her brother is, because he’s usually very reliable; too reliable, in her mind. About ten minutes later she’s in her mother’s car and heading home.

It’s four o’clock when Liz races in the front door at home while yelling, “Hal, you lazy bastard, why didn’t you pick me up?” She knows he has to be home: his car is in the driveway. She races upstairs to burst into Hal’s bedroom. She comes to a screeching halt in the doorway. His bed doesn’t look like it’s been slept in, his unopened school bag is beside the bed, he always opens his bag and does his homework when he gets back from his after school jog, always. She looks around the room. His wallet is by his bed, he only leaves that there when he goes jogging. His school clothes are on the chair beside the bed, just like he places them when he gets changed to go jogging, and his jogging gear isn’t in sight. He always puts his jogging gear and school clothes in the wash after he has his post jogging shower. This doesn’t look good, not good at all.

She turns, and races downstairs to call Paul, the brother of her best friend, Mary; they live two blocks up the street. Paul is Hal’s best friend. Mary answers the phone, and she wants to chat, Liz is very curt with her, “Mary, I don’t have time to chat. Put Paul on the line.” In a few more seconds she shouts, “Get me Paul now, you idiot!”

A moment later Paul says, “Liz, what the hell have you done to Mary, she’s one pissed off girl?”

“Paul, tell her I’m sorry, but she wanted to chat, and this is urgent. When did you last see Hal?”

“Yesterday at about this time when he jogged by while I was getting the lawn mower out of the garage. I didn’t see him pass back by, why?”

“He didn’t pick me up from gym today, his bed hasn’t been slept in, and his room looks exactly like it does when he goes out jogging.”

“Shit! I’ll ring around, hang tight.”

Fifteen minutes later Paul calls back, “Liz, it seems, out of everyone I know I’m the last to have seen him. I know his route, I’ll take my bike and go around it to see if I can see anything. Have a chat to Mary while I’m gone.” He hands the phone over, and Liz spends a worried twenty minutes talking to Mary while they both try to apologise for the earlier issue. Paul returns, “No sign of him anywhere, Liz. But I did find the cap he was wearing yesterday. It was near the bushes in the park.” Liz is now very, very worried. Hal is worried about sun cancer, so he always covers up well, and he always wears head gear while out. He never takes his cap off while outside during the day, never.