Queermance Anthology, Volume 1 Read online

  QUEERMANCE VOLUME 1

  edited by

  LINDY CAMERON

  SEXY, EROTIC, ROMANTIC, AUSTRALIAN

  Queermance

  celebrates the best of queer Australian romance writing

  Commissioned to celebrate Melbourne’s inaugural Queermance Literary Festival this is an anthology of erotically-charged romances from famous, emerging and aspiring writers.

  Volume 1 features fabulous tales of love and lust by Kerry Greenwood, Matthew Lang, NM Harris, Julie A Pollard, Susan Beck, Alison Evans, Kristen Henry, Mary Borsellino, Anders and Nicole Field.

  THE FLOODED STREETS

  Julie A Pollard

  ‘And it’s going to be another hot one today. Toowoomba is looking at a high of forty-seven, while some areas closer to the inner sea will be reaching a whopping fifty two. If you have a working air-conditioning unit or know someone that does, then please stay inside. Northern New South Wales is expecting another king tide this afternoon with water expected to reach… far as…’

  The radio burst into static. Chase glanced back at the small machine and frowned. She turned the boat’s motor off, bringing it to a stop in the shadow of a sprawling sandstone building.

  She picked up the radio and fiddled with the tuner for a while, wondering what had happened. Sometimes the signal would drop out if she tried to venture further north, but here, in the middle of Brisbane city, it was usually fine.

  She caught a few moments of music, something with a female vocalist that sounded upbeat and pre-flood, before the radio burst into static, let out a loud high-pitched hum for a few seconds and went silent.

  The radio’s batteries had died. Well, that was just great. She knew for a fact that she didn’t have any spares. She’d traded the last of her AAs for some chocolate before she left. Maybe she’d find some replacements while she was scavenging. They were good for trading anyway, but this time she’d keep some for herself.

  She glanced up at the building next to her, appraising its potential worth. It wasn’t very tall, and half of it was completely submerged. Too easy, she decided. It would have been picked clean months ago.

  She turned her attention to the other side of the street. The building there was tall and covered in glassy panels that stretched all the way to its spired top. It had to be thirty storeys tall at least. That looked more worthwhile.

  Chase pushed herself off from the sandstone building, letting the boat drift silently over to the other side of the submerged road. She pulled out a rope as she grew closer and threw it around what had once been a street light, tying the boat in place with a series of knots that she knew would be difficult to untie.

  She readied her equipment, tightened the laces of her boots, hoisted her mostly empty pack over her shoulders, and tucked her machete into its proper place on her belt, before picking up the radio one last time and contemplating whether she should bring it. It wasn’t much use right at that moment, but she didn’t want any other scavengers stealing it while she was inside. She shrugged, shoved the radio in her pack and faced the building once more.

  Chase scanned the seemingly endless panels of reflective glass, trying to determine the best way in. She could always dive and try to find the doors, but she didn’t want to get too wet if she didn’t have to. Chase doubted she was the first scavenger to try this particular building, so she hoisted herself up onto a ledge and shimmied around the edge of the building. She smiled as she rounded a corner and found one of the windows already smashed in.

  ‘Bingo,’ she whispered, making her way towards the broken panel.

  As she entered the building, she pulled out her torch. It illuminated a room full of chairs and desks packed tightly into claustrophobic cubicles. Chase tried to imagine working here, but it seemed as strange and unimaginable to her as a Brisbane with dry streets. Water had lapped in through the hole in the glass, and the carpeted ground squelched beneath her feet as she made her way across the room.

  She headed straight for the stairs and the higher levels, knowing that the scavengers that had come before her would have already taken anything of value from the lowest floors.

  She climbed the stairs for several minutes, listening to the building creak and moan around her as she did. It felt eerie, and lonely, and Chase missed the chatter and the music from her radio.

  When she was about ten stories up, she started her search in earnest. She moved to the nearest desk, rummaging through its drawers. There wasn’t much there; just some stationery and lots of damp, mouldy paper, as well as an old calculator that didn’t look like it worked anymore. It wouldn’t be worth much, but Chase pocketed it anyway, in case someone would pay for the wiring inside.

  She had finished searching her fourth desk when she heard something. She turned in time to see a flash of light. One of her hands moved to the machete on her belt, while the other clamped down tightly on her torch.

  ‘Who’s there?’ she called. ‘Who are you?’

  The light grew stronger and soon a woman emerged from behind a nearby wall. The light came from a small torch. It was strapped to the end of a hunting rifle that she held with both hands, and which was now pointed directly at Chase.

  ‘None of your goddamn business,’ the woman told Chase.

  ‘Easy now,’ Chase said as she slowly raised her hands above her head. ‘I’m not looking for trouble.’

  The other woman was shorter than Chase, but looked a lot stronger. Her hair and skin were dark. It was impossible, especially with the lack of light, to tell what her racial heritage was, and Chase didn’t think it was really appropriate to ask. At that moment, she was more worried about the gun. Chase wondered where the other woman had found it and wished she had one of her own.

  ‘You’re a scavenger?’ the woman asked Chase. She nodded in reply.

  ‘I was here first,’ the newcomer told her.

  ‘It’s a big building,’ Chase reasoned. ‘There’ll be enough here for both of us.’

  The woman had yet to lower her gun, and Chase’s arms were beginning to tire.

  ‘We don’t need to fight,’ Chase told her.

  ‘Maybe,’ the woman said, ‘But I get first pick.’

  The other woman finally lowered her rifle, and Chase let out a breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding.

  Now that she didn’t have a light shining directly in her eyes, Chase could make out more of the newcomer. She was quite pretty, with full lips and a curvy body that made Chase feel very gangly in comparison. Her eyes were cold, though, and a little cruel, and Chase suddenly felt very fortunate that the woman hadn’t decided to shoot her on sight.

  ‘I’m Chase,’ she said, holding her hand out.

  The woman glanced down at her hand, back up to her face and then walked off, swinging her rifle over her shoulder as she went.

  Chase was tempted to give the woman the finger in exchange for her rudeness, but resisted the urge.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Chase asked, forcing herself to be pleasant as she followed the dark-skinned woman.

  ‘Amana,’ she muttered.

  Well, it wasn’t much of an improvement, but it was a start. Chase followed Amana up three more flights of stairs before the other stopped and indicated that this was where their search would begin.

  ‘You start at that side of the room,’ she told Chase.

  Chase was not in any hurry to disagree with Amana while she still had her rifle, and got to work rummaging through the nearest desk. Amana wandered over to the other side of the room. It was quiet as they worked, and Chase found herself once again missing the sound of her radio.

  They continued like this for
a while. Chase was tempted to strike up conversation with the other woman more than once, but she and Amana had settled into a peace that she did not really want to disrupt.

  Two floors later, they were faced with a locked door.

  Chase fiddled with the door handle for a few minutes before frowning at it.

  ‘Why are you wasting your time?’ Amana asked her.

  ‘There’s something good in here,’ Chase commented, ‘I just know it.’

  She tried using her machete to force the door open, but with no luck.

  Amana sighed. She gestured for Chase to move and pulled a hair pin from one of her pockets. Chase wondered why she had it. Amana’s hair was reasonably short and incredibly neat, unlike her own, which was always a mess.

  Amana dropped to her knees and inserted the pin into the lock. She worked with it for a few seconds before the door unlocked with a satisfying ‘click.’

  ‘I didn’t know you could do that,’ Chase muttered.

  Amana raised an eyebrow at her.

  ‘You have got to be kidding me,’ Amana muttered. ‘You’re a scavenger, you’re female, and you didn’t know the hairpin trick?’

  Chase crossed her arms and followed Amana into the freshly unlocked room. She was about to explain that her father hadn’t exactly been the type to carry bobby pins around with him when she saw the contents of the room and was stunned into silence.

  It had obviously been a storage room before the flood, and was filled from top to bottom with rows of shelves containing food, first aid supplies and office essentials, including enough batteries to keep Chase’s torch and radio going for years.

  ‘Well, you were right about this room,’ Amana muttered as she made her way over to the first aid supplies. She grabbed handfuls of painkillers and antiseptic and immediately stashed them in her bag, before doing the same with the batteries.

  ‘Hey!’ Chase objected, grabbing for a few packs before Amana could claim them as well. ‘Don’t take them all!’

  Chase had barely touched the batteries when she found Amana’s rifle pointed at her once more.

  ‘I get first pick, remember?’ she told Chase. ‘Besides, if I wasn’t here, then you wouldn’t have been able to get into this room in the first place.’

  ‘Okay,’ Chase conceded. ‘You’re right, but there’s piles of stuff in here and we’ve still got plenty of floors to go. You can’t need all of this.’

  Amana moved the rifle so that it pressed lightly against Chase’s cheek. Chase raised her hands in surrender. The other woman shook her head.

  ‘You really think I’m going to split this with you? This is a gold mine. I’m not losing half of it.’

  ‘I’m not asking for half,’ Chase muttered through clenched teeth. ‘Keep the medicine, the food, whatever. I don’t care. I just want a few packs of batteries, okay?’

  ‘And what do I get if I give you these batteries?’

  ‘I don’t know. You don’t have to waste a bullet on me?’

  Chase could still feel the press of the rifle on her cheek. She caught Amana’s eyes with her own. She didn’t believe in God but at that moment she prayed to anything that might be out there that Amana was not heartless enough to shoot her over a few packets of paracetamol tablets and a few AAs.

  ‘Please,’ she begged Amana. ‘I’m not asking for much; just enough to power my radio and torch for a little while. I don’t even want to trade them.’

  Chase held Amana’s gaze for a few more seconds, before Amana let out a loud sigh and lowered her gun.

  ‘All right,’ she told Chase, ‘You can have a few packs of batteries and some food, but that’s it.’

  Chase smiled at Amana - a gesture which went unreturned - and grabbed two packs of AAs and two packs of Cs. She then moved further into the room to investigate what appeared to be coffee. She hadn’t intended to get any of the food, but if Amana was feeling generous, she certainly wasn’t going to reject the offer.

  She opened a container of coffee, sniffed the contents, and quickly placed it back on the shelf. She had never been fond of coffee, but even she could tell that the containers in here were no longer good for consumption. Why couldn’t they have had instant coffee, like the normal cheap bastards that most pre-flood office workers seemed to be? Instant coffee never went bad in her experience, unless of course the water had got to it. Chase grabbed a small box of tea bags and a container of sweetener, knowing that someone would pay a decent amount for either, and a couple of tins of plain tuna for herself.

  She didn’t want to push her luck, so once she had gathered these items safely in her pack, she retreated outside the storage room. As she waited for Amana to finish, she pulled out her radio and replaced the batteries. When Amana finally emerged from the room, Chase was fiddling with the tuner.

  ‘Are you coming?’ Amana asked her.

  ‘One more second…’ Chase muttered, pursing her lips as she concentrated on the crackling sounds coming from the machine.

  Music burst from the speakers and Chase let out a cry of triumph.

  ‘Okay,’ Chase said as she hoisted the radio onto her shoulder. ‘We can go now.’

  Chase smiled at the other woman. Amana shook her head and continued on.

  Chase followed closely as they climbed to the next level. A song she liked came on the radio, and she began to sing along, until she realised that she didn’t know as many of the words as she had thought and hummed along instead.

  Amana frowned at Chase, who stopped humming immediately.

  ‘Sorry,’ Chase muttered. ‘Note to self: no singing or humming.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ Amana said. ‘Aren’t you afraid that people will hear the music?’

  ‘Not really,’ Chase replied with a shrug. ‘Who’s going to hear it; other scavengers? Besides, I’ve got my blade.’

  ‘Fat lot of good that does you.’

  ‘Hey, usually I don’t have to worry about guns. You’re the first scavenger I’ve met that carries one.’

  They continued up one level and then the next. Amana stayed silent, but with Chase’s radio playing it didn’t feel nearly as lonely.

  As they walked, the building creaked and moaned beneath their feet. It grew cooler as well, and soon Chase could feel the gentle kiss of a very welcome breeze on her face.

  When they turned a corner, Chase discovered exactly why that was. A chunk of the building had collapsed. Several floors had fallen on top of each other and now let fresh air from the outside flow into the rest of the building.

  The stairs were a mess. Chase picked her way carefully over the rubble, using a fallen cement pillar that had once been part of the building’s support structure as an alternate route to the next floor. Amana climbed up after her.

  As Chase set her feet down carefully on the surface of the next floor, the building let out another loud moan in protest. Several ceiling tiles and chunks of flooring fell away.

  ‘I’m not so sure this part of the building is safe,’ Chase muttered. ‘Maybe we should turn back.’

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ Amana assured her. ‘Although if you want to turn back and leave the rest of the building to me, I have no objections.’

  Chase pursed her lips. She had contemplated doing what Amana suggested, but Amana’s challenge quickly steeled her resolve to stay.

  She stormed ahead, nudged aside a few ceiling tiles with her foot and was about to get to work when she felt the floor shudder beneath her feet.

  She realised that she was standing only metres away from what had once been the side of the building, and what was now a twenty storey plummet into the watery streets below. She might survive such a fall, if she was lucky, landed in deep water and didn’t hit anything on the way down, but she definitely didn’t want to risk it. This high up she was more likely to break her neck or back, and if she did survive the fall, the odds of her being too injured to swim to safety were way too high for her to be comfortable.

  She shuffled back a little, and eyed off a des
k a few metres away from the drop.

  Meanwhile, something had caught Amana’s eye and led her to pick through the most damaged corner of the building. Chase wondered what it was when Amana let out a happy shout and emerged from a pile of rubble holding something. It was small and pale and glinted in the light.

  ‘What is it?’ Chase asked. ‘Is it jewellery?’

  ‘Not quite,’ Amana told her. The woman looked happier with her current find than she had all day. ‘It’s crystal. It’s a bear, I think. It’s not worth nearly as much as jewellery would be, but art as beautiful as this should not be left behind, regardless of its value.’

  Chase was about to agree with Amana when the whole floor let out another loud moan and lurched to the side. There was a rumbling, and then a crackle, and then several pieces of the floor broke from the side of the building and plummeted into the water below. The floor began to tilt and shake.

  Chase moved to the nearest standing support pillar and grabbed onto it with all of her strength. She glanced back at Amana in time to see the other woman lose her balance.

  Chase let out a cry of distress as Amana slid towards the drop. Chase was sure that Amana was going to fall, but before she reached the point of no return, the other woman managed to grab hold of an exposed beam.

  Amana would not be able to hold onto it for long though. The crystal bear had fallen from her hand and fell off the ledge beside her, plunging to the distant water.

  Amana’s brown eyes met Chase’s green ones, and for a second Chase cursed herself, knowing that there was no way she could stand by and watch Amana fall.

  She threw her pack and radio towards the more stable end of the floor, then dropped to the ground and crawled as slowly as she could towards Amana.

  The floor rumbled and Chase was sure that it would snap off from the rest of the building at any second, taking both her and Amana with it. She was close to Amana now; so close that she could almost reach out and touch her.

  She extended her hand towards the other woman.

  ‘What are you doing?!’ Amana screamed at her.