2.

The skid-steer loader jolted down the ramp, its shovel striking the gutter with a burst of sparks. I pulled on the toggles, albeit not in time to save Babefemi’s mailbox. No great loss, it was purely ornamental, the postal drones having never rung once up here, let alone twice. I tried ordering by air just the once. The delivery drone was blasted out of the sky by the bootlickers, my Reebok socks and new smartglasses up in flames. Never even got a refund. All three of us homeowners were forced to shell out for boxes at the post office in town.

Unlike a full-sized bulldozer, the lift arms for this miniaturized rustbucket were located alongside the driver. Pushing only the right stick pivoted the machine quite suddenly to the left. Push the left lever and the machine turned sluggishly to the right. Apparently this was one of the kinks Ivan had warned me about.

I drove and spun around on the road with growing confidence, gleefully pulling at those levers and yep, you guessed it, imaging myself in a cargo-loader exoskeleton doing battle against the alien hordes while some 90s chick caresses my chest hair.

By now the sun was low and swollen, casting an orange veneer over our dead neighbourhood, streaking it in slenderman shadows. The first cicadas were warming up in their own little exoskeletons, bless their souls, while the cockatoos were screeching up a storm in their favoured trees over by the Chapel, cursing all of humanity.

I switched off the engine, my ears detecting another sound, a low steady hum in the distance. My only other neighbours, the Stanfords, were arriving home in their electric hatchback. Sonia would no doubt get a kick out of seeing me twirling round in this rustbucket. But if I was going to get some more practice in before dark then I’d better take this carny show out back because, oh boy, Sonia’s mother could talk the house down.

I didn’t have council approval yet and somewhere at the back of my mind I suspected you were supposed to mark out the perimeter of your pool with laser surveying equipment, or string and stakes at the very least. Yet there was no harm in clearing the surface, now was there? Didn’t Ivan say just have some fun to begin with?

With my dad’s secret love of Girls Just Wanna Have Fun jangling through my head, I navigated the machine alongside my house and down the slope of my rear garden to begin scraping off the overgrown grass and topsoil. Child’s play really. Pretty soon I was raising the bucket to a safe height, backing away, pirouetting, and dumping this dirt over the rear wire fence. Onto military bushland. That’s right, private military property. Who was around to say I couldn’t?

Those drone-killing missiles, that’s who.

I’d barely broken ground and yet I was already imagining how my swimming pool would look, where the Steelmaster would go and the expressions of absolute rapture on all those hot chicks when they got a load of me diving and twisting against the skies like some Leni Riefenstahl wet dream. Unlike most other sports, competitive diving had endowed me with a skillset that I could still pull out of my ass on occasion. Okay, in attempting certain dives I did run the slight risk of shattering my vertebrae, but I could still twist alright, trust me.

In any event, Dillon and Tyler were going to go apeshit when they heard their old man had a pool and diving board. That was just the beginning too. I already had a kickass video games system waiting for them, and once I sold off my next spec script I was going to install a monstrous trampoline on the front lawn and fill my garage with flying skateboards and robotic sex dolls and anything else that would work them up into such a frenzy that their ballbreaker of a mother would have no choice but to let them return to Australia to stay with dear old dad for a few weeks.

That was the plan anyway. That, and establishing a chlorinated moat around my castle that might or might not prevent the next firenado from leaping out of that military bushland and incinerating me and my kids.

By this time the horizon in the south-west was transforming into a tableau of red and black striations with just a hint of fiery orange off to one side. The bushfires were still burning beyond the great mountain range out yonder, turning these sunsets into Javanese shadow plays about to go up in flames. Nothing to worry about here, my fire-emergency app assured me. Then again, the designers of this app didn’t have to live atop a plateau encircled by dense, dry rainforest.

On the heels of these sunsets it got dark awfully fast around here, what with no functioning street lamps to speak of. It was perhaps time to call it a day. Go fix myself some dinner, a glass of wine or three, so I was thinking as I dumped a final payload; and caught sight of something falling from the bucket along with the dirt.

A raggedy object, that, for a split second in that russet light, looked like a snouted visage; a humanoid face.

I turned off the engine with a shudder, and climbed out of the skiddy.

Spilling from next door was a mashup of DJ Doggystyle and Ride of the Valkyries, together with screams of teenage frustration and motherly vexation. No one could quarrel more forcefully than a single mum and her teenaged daughter living alone under the same roof in an abandoned neighbourhood atop a mountain that was menaced by fires each summer, let me tell you.

From Babefemi’s side wafted the garlicky odours of his infamous cooking, not to mention the keening of his German Shepherd. From the surrounding forest, the dry sizzle of the cicadas and a soft meowling growl of what might have been an orphaned koala.

And that was the extent of my evening neighbourhood sounds and smells, apart from the vaguest of tones rising up from the town below. Wonga unspooled from the foot of our mountain like a series of disorderly circuit boards crisscrossed by rows of twinkling lights and Lego-like buildings that gradually gave way to vast rolling plains of darkness, alleviated only by the pinpricks of solitary homesteads and pearl-strings of highway connecting Wonga with other hillbilly hamlets.

Stepping over the rear wire fence of my yard, I got down on my knees and prayed; that I wouldn’t inadvertently grab hold of a snake or something worse as I foraged through that dirt with my bare hands. Taipans and tiger snakes had been migrating into the region in plague proportions in recent years, joining the spiders already breeding out of control, not forgetting all those baby crocs turning up unannounced in our river and those freaking magpies pecking people’s skulls.

Yeah, I was so glad I moved back to Australia.

The hairs on my neck suddenly stiffened. I stopped what I was doing to quickly gaze about. I had the uncanny feeling I was being watched. Living next door to a top-secret military base and flocks of belligerent birds could make you paranoid like that. But it was just me and the trees and the invisible taipans.

What I found in that fresh dirt were pieces of tiling and shards of glass, twinkling in the borrowed light from my neighbours’ homes.

Before deciding to do this swimming pool thing all on my own, like when I still had a fully functioning brain, I asked around for quotes amongst the pool contractors. Either they flatly refused me on account of the size of my Steelmaster and the associated insurance wrangles; or they were simply mind-blowingly expensive, none more so than the pool cowboy mafia.

The mumbling words of that cowboy who visited my house suddenly came floating back to me. “Your soil is rubbish, son,” he had said. “It’s just like landfill.” When I thought about it, my robo-mower did always seem to strike a shard of cement or shred of plastic whenever I set it loose on this sloping lawn.

In any case, my hand had finally pulled loose from the dirt that raggedy object I’d glimpsed from the skiddy. Holding it up to the wan light of the moon presently emerging from the night, a spooky chill ran through me.

The kind of chill you might get while holding by the hair the chopped-off face of your dead and decomposing clone.

But it was nothing so dramatic, just an old military gasmask.

A face of rotted cloth fitted with two broken eyepieces and a long tubular snout ending in a small rusted metal box. Obviously the lost property of a serial killer.