Death Chill

By Stuart Parker

Josie McMullan, a young, up-and-coming journalist, was certain she had found the story that could be her big break. Two brothers and an uncle had all died in unexplained circumstances on the same stretch of notorious mountain road. That the uncle had been a suspected serial killer only added further to the intrigue. Ignoring the warnings of her world-weary literary agent and the unscrupulous locals attempting to thwart her investigations, Josie found herself freefalling through the half-truths and obfuscations within which answers were somewhere lurking. With a duplicitous police officer, a mysterious widow and a twisted cult member as guides, Josie slowly started to realise that no matter how far she ventured into the murky depths, there was no comfort to be drawn, just the icy chill of unnatural death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stuart Parker
• Release date: Oct 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005218485

Book preview

Death Chill

Also by Stuart Parker

Death of the Extremophile

Directive RIP

Weeds in the Jungle

Hurt World One and the Zombie Rats

Penycher Pit

Heartwreck Highway

President Kills President

Death Chill

Stuart Parker

Copyright © 2021 by Stuart Parker

Chapter 1

The roads scratched into Australia’s timeless landscape had a propensity for the extreme. Among them was Highway 1, the world’s longest highway, snaking around the entire country. There was the Stuart Highway, dissecting the red-sand deserts at the country’s heart as it traversed a 2,800 kilometre passage north to south. There was the Great Ocean Road, hugging precipitous cliffs as it bore witness to the wild fury of Bass Strait and the windswept cemeteries its storms had seeded. And nestled at the southern tip of the Great Dividing Range was thirty kilometres of mountainous road known as the Black Spur.

With writhing bends and undulations, the Black Spur followed a sliver of the Aboriginal trails that had been cultivated over thousands of years and that crisscrossed the country in ancient wanderings. In more recent times, the Black Spur had become a route of choice for weekend tourists venturing out of Melbourne in search of clear mountain air and scenic views. It had been featured in many a car commercial in which ideal moments of driving hedonism were seductively encapsulated – a road that could somehow combine luxury and fast living with a reconnection to nature.

But at 2am on this particular bleak Tuesday night in midwinter, the Black Spur was desolate and dormant, as though it had subsided back into deep history. The air was cold and damp, and the swathes of forest strangling the mountainside betrayed no indications of civilisation.

A roar of engine broke the silence. A car was tearing recklessly along the Black Spur, its powerful headlights slicing deep incisions into the darkness ahead. It was a black BMW high-performance sports car and clutching its steering wheel was a young woman named Georgie Mikakos. Georgie was aggressively pushing the car to the very edges of the road on both sides and, despite the plunging descents and towering trees, she was barely registering the danger. Her head was fizzing more from emotional shock than the car’s precarious grip on the road. Her engagement had just come to a sudden, bitter end and with it the realisation that the happiness of the past five years had been irreversibly corrupted. She was struggling to work out how it could have taken so long to realise her fiancé was a duplicitous piece of shit. Truth and lies must have been so intimately entwined, like two spiders weaving the one web.

Georgie was on a hands-free call to one of her friends and her voice was fraying as she laid her thoughts bare. ‘I swear,’ she exclaimed, ‘if something sharp had been nearby, I would have carved his head into a fucking hand-puppet.’ Tears began streaking down her cheeks as she heard what she was saying and realised the depth of the anger in her heart. She just couldn’t believe it had come to this. She was a recent graduate in fashion design at a prestigious college in Melbourne and had already won an industry award for her blending of colours in garments and accessories. How could she of all people have descended into such darkness as this?

The world had felt so very different earlier that day. Cruising along on a sunny afternoon with music playing and a bottle of wine open, Georgie had been content to marvel at the forest of immense mountain ash trees and ancient ferns and feel certain their beauty would inspire designs in her future work. But that was so very long ago. Now, in the grip of the freezing night, Georgie could see the grim foreboding at the mountain’s heart and the malevolence in its turns. The souls of the hapless many who had been lost upon this road were calling out to her now – or was it she calling out to them?

‘So what happened?’ questioned her friend hungrily over the car-speaker. ‘How did you find out he was cheating on you?’

Mary Malone was not a particularly close friend. Georgie had met her in the first year of an aborted psychology degree. They had conducted a presentation on emotional dependence together and had stayed in contact ever since. Now, thanks to her relocation to Germany, Mary was the one person Georgie could call up in the middle of the night without having to apologise out of hand. Mary had continued on with her psychology degree to become a practising clinical psychologist and was only too happy to involve herself in revelations of human crises, either to inform her clinical practice or to draw on at dinner parties. Her keen interest now gave Georgie the distinct impression she was seeing plenty of potential for both. On any other occasion Georgie might have resented it, but right now she wasn’t particularly fussed about the outlet for the pain she was feeling.

‘I caught him red-handed in our hotel suite,’ she said. ‘I snuck out of the bathroom wearing a spicy piece of lingerie I had brought along especially for the occasion, and there he was, curled up in bed salivating over another woman’s selfie on his tablet. And what she was wearing made me look like a cloistered temperance league member.’

‘The asshole. Who was the girl? Do you know her?’

Georgie could tell Mary was willing her to say yes. It would have given her so much more territory to delve into. Georgie almost felt sorry to disappoint her. ‘I don’t know her, but he sure as hell does. You should have seen his reaction when he realised I was there. His body almost tore itself apart in ten different directions.’

‘And was he blushing?’

‘I don’t know. I guess so.’

‘If he was, that settles it. Blushing can’t be faked or repressed. It’s the truest indication of shame and guilt there is.’

‘Is that so?’ Georgie had moved on to her fashion degree before that particular titbit had come up in the psych course. ‘That fits then. And he didn’t even try to deny it. He just stared at me with a dumb, vapid look on his face.’

‘Was he at least man enough to tell you who she is?’

‘I don’t care and I didn’t bother to ask. I took his car keys and here I am. He can ride the bus home.’

Mary laughed. ‘You showed him, alright.’

With grim satisfaction, Georgie supposed she had shown him. She had held her composure and given him the slap down he deserved. And, more to the point, she was showing him still. She pressed her foot harder on the accelerator and smirked cruelly. I n the scant few months since she had obtained her driver’s licence, she had accrued three parking tickets and inflicted half a dozen dents and scratches into her elder sister’s hand-me-down car, but what she was doing now with the BMW was on a whole different level. She had all but stolen it for one thing, and was only barely resisting the temptation to send it tumbling into oblivion down the mountain. She couldn’t tell for sure if it were a suicidal urge or merely the lengths she was willing to go to smash up her ex’s beloved automobile. All she really knew for certain was that her blood was up and that this felt like therapy. She took a hard right, grazing the speed sign warning drivers to slow down, and she noticed the engagement ring still on her finger. A sense of revulsion overcame her and she immediately tried to pull it off. Unlike the relationship it was supposed to symbolise, however, it was holding tight. It was a pink diamond set in a yellow gold solitaire band and was so beautiful it was easy to see how it could have been mistaken for love. That was what Georgie had been doing for the past eighteen months and in the meantime the ring had fused to her skin. She wrapped her teeth around the gold band and pulled hard. She was of a mind to take her finger off if she had to.

The ring was starting to relent when another hard right appeared in the headlights ahead. But, with only one hand on the steering wheel, Georgie knew instantly she wasn’t going to make it. She slammed on the brakes and yanked the steering wheel hard. The BMW was already starting to spit through the gravel on the shoulder of the road, the abyss looming just metres away, when the power steering kicked in. To Georgie, it was miraculous how precisely the vehicle responded to her panicked touch. For a split second she thought she might even avoid an impact altogether. The tree line, however, came a fraction too soon and the BMW sideswiped a mountain ash tree with a force that bent the rear passenger door inward and sent the car spinning a hundred and eighty degrees into the dense undergrowth of bracken fern where it became lodged.

‘What the fuck was that?’ cried Mary loudly over the car speaker.

Georgie was too shaken to immediately reply. She looked around the car for any signs of smoke. She wouldn’t be too fazed if this moment proved to be her last just as long as it didn’t involve being roasted alive. Sniffing the air for smoke and leaking fuel, she became distracted when she realised the engagement ring was no longer on her finger.

‘I’ve got to go,’ she told Mary, grabbing her phone and cutting the call.

She felt around her seat, finding the ring lying almost tauntingly on her lap. She opened the driver’s side window and flung it out as far into the forest as she could. She filled her lungs with the cold, crisp mountain air and screamed with all her might. She deflated against the steering wheel and willed more tears to come, wanting to feel their warm, comforting tracks down her cheeks. A bright light pressing against her eyelids snapped her out of her self-pity. She looked into the rear-view mirror to see the blaring headlights of a vehicle pulling in behind the BMW. ‘Fuck it,’ she muttered and just waited for the police lights to start flashing on the roof. That’s how this shitty world worked: Michael would have reported his car stolen and presented himself as such a nice guy that the police would be rushing to help. At least, Josie had managed to wrap his car around a tree before having to return it. Anyway, if she got pushed too far, she could tell a few stories of her own. Something along the lines of having to flee for her life in the face of domestic abuse and terrifying threats of violence. It would be her word against his, but the pictures on his phone would be helpful in supporting her version. She had uncovered his affair and he had become threatening. Such things happened all the time. Tear-reddened eyes and a distraught demeanour would help make it convincing. The skills had been honed as a little girl getting her brothers into trouble. She would give Michael the adult version.

As these thoughts ran through her head, she noticed that rather than flashing lights appearing on the vehicle behind her, the headlights switched off and it went eerily dark. This was no police car. Josie craned her neck for a better view out the smashed-in rear window. A tall dark figure stepped out of the car. Even in this light, it was clearly a man. He was powerfully built with his face concealed by a hoodie. He approached the car in a slow, prowling fashion. Georgie grabbed onto the door handle, not sure whether she wanted to get out and run or to hold herself in. She realised that in not caring if she lived or died, she had forgotten that the world was full of sickos only too happy to make the decision theirs.

The shadowy figure moved up to her window and peered in. Georgie couldn’t bring herself to look directly at the man in case she was confronted with the twisted stare of a deranged killer. The man tapped on the window with something metallic. Maybe a key or a ring, or maybe a knife dripping blood. Whatever, there would be little point resisting now. She was a city girl alone on a deserted mountain road five long hours before dawn. She couldn’t do much more than hope this was a better way to meet nice guys than the average dating app where scumbags like her ex were lurking. She took in a deep breath and buzzed down the window.

The man propped his arms against the doorframe as he looked her over for a long, disconcerting moment. ‘Are you alright?’ he asked in a slow, nasal drawl.

‘I think so,’ Georgie replied.

‘That’s nice. The same can’t be said about the car.’

Georgie instinctively resented the judgemental tone. ‘Yeah, I get that impression.’

The man leaned closer, his head almost coming into the car. He had long, black hair tied back in a ponytail, probing eyes and a sharp jawline. He appeared to be in his early twenties and was very sure of himself. He didn’t look as psycho-crazy as Georgie had initially feared. She might even have found him attractive. ‘Thanks for stopping, though,’ she added, her voice softening.

‘Is there someone who can come get you?’

Georgie shrugged indifferently. ‘I doubt it but I’ll be alright.’

‘You’d better not assume that. You’ve crashed in the middle of nowhere. And there isn’t a tow-truck within fifty kilometres of here.’ He chuckled gruffly. ‘Even then, I can tell you the driver will be too drunk to come out before morning.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because I’ve been drinking with him.’

‘I see.’ Georgie suddenly felt tired and flat. ‘Good for him.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Georgie.’

‘I’m Jason. So, what are you going to do, Georgie?’

Georgie pondered the situation. She might have known a casual acquaintance or two she could call to revel in her misery but not a friend real enough to get out of bed in the middle of the night to come get her. And her parents would have been even worse: her mother would have seized on this as another opportunity to lecture her about wasting her life, and her father would simply have screened the call and not picked up.

‘I’ll be fine here,’ she muttered after a time.

‘I wouldn’t advise that,’ said Jason adamantly. ‘It’s more than the cold you have to worry about out here. I’ll take you into town. There’s a twenty four hour hotel you can check into and in the morning I’ll have my mate bring his tow-truck out to pick you up.’

‘I couldn’t ask you to do that.’

‘You’re not asking, I’m offering. And I’m not leaving you here. You’ve done a great job of parking your car off-road, so we’ll be able to leave it just as it is. Grab your things and let’s go.’

Georgie was still not sure she could trust him, but then she had been completely sure about Michael, so what did she really know about men? She picked up her phone and purse and the toiletries bag in the backseat. Outside the car, she found herself swaying unsteadily on her feet. Jason stepped quickly across to support her. ‘Are you alright?’

‘Yeah, it’s just cold.’ Georgie headed for his car. It was a black Pontiac GTO. Georgie recognised the model from her high school days when she liked guys who liked cars. It gave her