Steve Worland
Combustion
PROLOGUE
Boom.
Corey Purchase watches the football leave Pete Roland’s boot. He’s marked a thousand kicks from this guy over the years, but their speed always surprises him. Without exception the ball arrives earlier than Corey expects, even when he expects it to arrive early.
Bloody hell, it’s quick.
The football spirals through the night sky like a laser-guided missile and again Corey is surprised. It’s not only super fast but super accurate. The fifteen-year-old reaches out, extends his hands—
Bam. It lands right on his fingertips.
Whoa! Corey missteps and the football slides out of his grasp, hits the grass, bounces up. He drags it back to his chest and clamps it there.
What the hell was that?
It felt like the ground moved under him. He ignores it and swings towards the goalposts. He needs to come up with something and he needs to do it fast. There’s fifteen seconds left on the clock, if that. Only a goal and six points will win this game.
The goalposts are fifty metres to the left, at a sharp angle to his current position. None of his teammates are free so a kick to the goal square is too risky. Instead, he steps left and goes himself. The five-hundred-strong crowd who pack the old wooden grandstand at Burra High School rise as one.
He bounces the football, runs hard.
Fifty metres becomes thirty-five.
The crowd roars.
Out of the corner of his eye he sees a defender sprint across the field to cut him off. The guy trips, falls, crashes to the ground.
Too bad, so sad.
Corey bounces the football again, keeps running.
Thirty-five metres becomes twenty-five.
Corey loses his balance again — then instantly regains it.
What on earth?
He can’t worry about it. The goalposts are right there. They’re still on an angle but much closer, just twenty metres away. He steps right, drops the football, swings his right foot and unleashes a thunderbolt.
Boom. The football soars between the uprights.
Goal! The crowd goes nuts.
And the siren sounds.
Game over.
Corey punches the air then turns to the grandstand, searches for Roberta. She always sits in the middle at the back so she has a bird’s-eye view—
Crack. The wooden structure shudders violently, then lurches to the left.
‘What was that —’
The ground beneath Corey rises sharply. ‘Hey!’ He’s thrown off balance, crashes to the turf, can smell the freshly cut grass. He scrambles to his feet but the ground shakes with a fierce lateral movement and it’s impossible to stay upright. He’s tossed to the ground again.
Earthquake.
Corey looks up. Wood shatters and bolts snap on the grandstand. Parents, teachers and students rush to the exits, create a bottleneck in both aisles. The grandstand tilts wildly. The ground splits underneath the left side and swallows the cement foundation.
‘Jesus.’
Where’s Roberta?
Corey scans the panicked faces in the grandstand. There! Exactly where he thought she’d be, in the middle at the rear. She grasps the back railing, hasn’t followed the mass of people who surge to the exits.
He must help her. He rises to his feet. It’s difficult to stay balanced but he drives himself forward, slow at first — then faster — then faster still. He sprints towards the grandstand forty metres away. He has no idea what he’ll do when he gets there, he just knows he must get there.
Screams fill the air as Corey reaches the right side of the heaving structure and circles around to the back. He looks up, locks eyes with Roberta, her face a portrait of terror. ‘Hold on!’
How does he fix this? He searches the grandstand, looks for a way up to her. There must be a route — he just can’t find it. It’s happening too fast.
The shuddering intensifies. The chasm widens and the left side of the grandstand tips over at an even steeper angle, slides into the widening fissure like it’s being swallowed whole. Roberta holds on to the railing.
He’ll catch her. Yes. That’s what he’ll do. He rushes forward—
The earth tears and rises in front of him, pitches him to the ground. He looks up. The railing Roberta holds is wrenched from its moorings. She hangs in the air for a terrible moment — then silently falls into the chasm.
‘No!’ Corey finds his feet and sprints towards it, to grab her and pull her out.
Crack. The left side of the grandstand collapses — and drops into the chasm after her.
The shaking stops. Corey runs to the mound of debris, but there’s nothing he can do.
He drops to his knees, stricken.
The fifth of March, 1997.
The Burra earthquake occurs between the Para and Eden-Burnside fault lines, one hundred and sixty kilometres north of Adelaide. It registers 5.0 on the Richter scale and claims the lives of three people, including Roberta Purchase, Corey’s mother, three days before his sixteenth birthday.
1
11:57 P.M.
‘Won’t be long now.’
From his position on the overpass, Zac Bunsen stares down the desolate 110 Freeway through miniature Nikon binoculars. Traffic is light and the moon is high as it illuminates the sprawling City of Angels before him.
A winner in the genetic lottery, the thirty-nine-year-old resembles Brad Pitt’s better looking cousin. Dressed in black, he checks his Patek Philippe Nautilus again, then adjusts the volume on his iPhone and returns it to his jacket pocket.
He’s not listening to music through his headset. Back in 2004, researchers at the University of Bonn developed a microphone that captured soundwaves inaudible to the human ear. The researchers trapped the ethylene gas released when the stem of a plant was cut, then bombarded it with calibrated laser beams, causing it to vibrate, which produced a soundwave that was recorded by the new microphone. The more a plant was cut, the louder the sound.
At first Bunsen found the recordings unbearable to hear. They were like screams of torture. Then he realised that’s what they were — an audible representation of the pain human beings have inflicted on the natural world for centuries. So now he listens to them when he needs to pump himself up, like a boxer listening to ‘Eye of the Tiger’ before the big fight. He’s listened to them a lot recently, in preparation for the biggest fight of his life — a fight that begins tonight.
He looks through the binoculars again and picks up three dark shapes on the freeway. They’re distant but move towards him fast. He pockets the binoculars and kills the sound in his headset: ‘We are live.’
Two men stand beside him on the overpass: his second in command, the weather-beaten head of security, Kilroy Jones, with the unapologetically long, grey ponytail, and the fresh-faced Jacob Ryan, with the severe buzz cut. Like Bunsen they are both dressed in black, and wear backpacks and miniature headsets.
Bunsen can see the dark shapes clearly now. Three vehicles drive in convoy. A black sedan leads a large, tall, dark blue van, which is followed by another black sedan. They move quickly: five hundred metres and closing.
Bunsen turns to the others. ‘Ready?’
They nod. They’ve trained long and hard for this moment. They know exactly what must be done. As one they step up to the guardrail.
Bunsen takes a breath. He remembers the lyric of a song his mother loved back in the day: ‘You’ve gotta be cruel to be kind.’ For Bunsen, this is the beginning of cruel. Kind will come later, but only after he has been very, very cruel.