‘I don’t think it’s anything.’ I certainly hadn’t felt a thing. ‘It’s probably just a bit of glass. Head wounds always bleed a lot.’
Already we were approaching Meldon Marsh Road. I slowed down and turned the lights off, leaning forward to concentrate. Driving at night without lights is horribly hard and dangerous, but I figured we’d lost the element of surprise that we’d had with the trucks. These guys would have radios. We had to rely on concealment now.
To drive directly to my place would have taken about forty or fifty minutes. But we still had a couple of hours of darkness left, and we’d agreed when making our plans, back at Robyn’s, to use that time. It was a choice of two evils. To go straight home would make it too easy for them to track us. To stay on the roads would expose us to enemy patrols. We could have hidden up somewhere and gone to my place the next night, but we figured that with every passing day, the grip these people had on the district would tighten. And after the damage we’d just done to them they might well bring in more troops by the next night.
Besides, we all wanted so desperately to get back to Fi and Corrie and Kevin, and to the sanctuary of Hell. We couldn’t bear the thought of another day so far away from it. We wanted to get as close as we could. It took all our self-control to take a roundabout route now.
Homer’d had the time, as he sat silently waiting in the BMW, parked in the shadows of Three Pigs Lane, to work out a rough route, and now he started calling out instructions from pencil marks he’d made on a map. ‘This takes us past Chris Lang’s place,’ he said, as we drove as fast as I dared along Meldon Marsh Road. ‘We’ll change cars there. If the keys aren’t in the cars, I know where they’ll be.’
‘Why are we changing cars?’ asked Lee’s tired voice from the back. I think he was dreading another painful move.
Homer explained. ‘Our plan is to go up to Hell in four-wheel drives and hide out there for a while. The Landrover’ll be packed and ready, at Ellie’s. That means we’ll be dumping whatever car we’ve used to get there. Now if, a day or two later, a patrol arrives at Ellie’s and finds a shot up BMW, that they’ve been searching the district for ... well, some very nasty things could happen to Ellie’s parents.’
There was a pause, then Lee said, ‘Chris’s parents have got a Merc.’
‘That did cross my mind,’ Homer admitted. ‘And they’re overseas, so the Merc’s probably in the garage, not at the Showground. I don’t think Chris has got his licence yet. If we’re going to have a war we may as well have it in style. Next left, El.’
We arrived at Chris’s ten minutes later, racing straight past the house to the garage and sheds, about a hundred metres away. We were getting tired, not just with physical exhaustion but with the emotional intensity of the last few hours. We climbed stiffly out of the car. The others went looking for the Merc while I went to the back of the BMW to talk to Lee. I was shocked by how pale he looked; his hair was blacker and his eyes bigger than ever. He smelt even worse than we did, and there was a new dark red stain on his bandage.
‘You’re bleeding,’ I said.
‘Only a little. I’d say a couple of stitches probably came apart.’
‘You look awful.’
‘And smell it too. Lying there sweating for twenty-four hours, I wouldn’t recommend it.’ There was a pause, then, self-consciously, he said, ‘Listen, Ellie, thanks for getting me out of there. Every minute of the twenty-four hours I could hear the footsteps of soldiers coming to get me.’
‘Sorry about the wild trip in the truck.’
He grinned. ‘I couldn’t believe it. Towards the end there, when you hit the brakes, I actually got thrown out, but I did a sort of roll and landed back in. That’s when I bust a few stitches I think.’
‘Yeah, I’m sorry. We needed to get rid of a car behind us.’ I wiped my face. ‘God, I can’t believe the things we’ve done.’
‘A couple of bullets hit the shovel. They didn’t go through it, but the noise they made! I thought I was dead. But I don’t think they knew I was in there, or they would have sprayed it with bullets.’ Homer came backing out of the garage in a large olive-green Mercedes. Lee laughed. ‘Homer hasn’t changed.’
‘Yes he has.’
‘Has he? I’ll be interested to see that. He’s a pretty smart guy, Homer. Listen Ellie, there’s one problem here. If we leave the BMW sitting where it is, and a patrol finds it, they’ll think there’s a connection between us and Chris’s family. They might burn his house, or if they’ve got Chris as one of their prisoners, they might do something to him.’
‘You’re right.’ I turned to the others, who were getting out of the Merc, and repeated what Lee had said. Homer listened, nodded, and pointed to the dam.
‘Can we do that?’ I asked. ‘To a nice new BMW with only a couple of bullet holes?’
It seemed that we could. I drove it to the upper side of the dam, put it in neutral, got out and gave it a good push. It was a light car and moved easily. It ran down the slope, holding almost a perfect line, and went straight into the water. It floated out for a few metres, getting lower and lower, then stopped floating, leaned to one side and began sinking. With a sudden gurgle and a lot of bubbles, it disappeared. There was a small cheer from Robyn and Homer and me.
And it was the noise of that small cheer which brought Chris out from his hiding place.
He looked funny, dressed in pyjamas, standing there, rubbing his eyes and staring at us. But we probably looked funny to him, like scarecrows in shock, staring back at him in astonishment. He’d come out of their old piggery, which these days was just a row of old sheds, so obviously abandoned and derelict that it was a good choice for a hiding place.
Time was getting short. We had to make some quick decisions. It didn’t take Chris long to decide he wanted to come with us. For a week he’d had no contact with anyone, just watched from a tree, and later the piggery, as patrol after patrol came through the property. The first group had taken all the cash and jewellery; Chris had buried the other small valuables after that, but had spent the rest of the week in hiding, emerging only to check animals and pick up supplies from the house.
His story, told from the back seat of his family Merc as we cruised the side roads, made us realise how lucky we’d been to avoid ground patrols. His house was closer to town than ours, and much grander and more conspicuous, and he’d had daily visits from soldiers.
‘They seem nervous,’ he said. ‘They’re not into being heroes. They stick close together. The first few days they were really jumpy, but they’re more confident now.’
‘How did it start?’ I asked. ‘Like, when did you first realise something funny was happening?’
Chris was normally quiet but he hadn’t talked for so long that now he was the life of the party.
‘Well, it was the day after Mum and Dad left for their trip. You remember? That’s why I couldn’t come on the hike with you. Murray, he’s our worker, was taking his family into the Show and he offered me a lift, but I didn’t want to go. I didn’t think it’d be much fun without you guys, and I’m not heavily into that kind of stuff anyway.’ Chris was a lightly built boy with intense eyes and a lot of nervous habits, like coughing in the middle of every sentence. He wouldn’t be into Commem Day or woodchopping competitions; he was more into the Grateful Dead, Hieronymus Bosch, and computers. He was also known for writing poetry and using more illegal substances than you’d find in the average police laboratory. His motto was ‘If it grows, smoke it’. Ninety per cent of the school thought he was weird, ten per cent thought he was a legend, everybody thought he was a genius.
‘Well, Murray never came back that night, but I didn’t realise, because their house is quite a way from ours. I didn’t really notice anything unusual. There were Air Force jets racing around, but I just thought it was Commem Day stuff. Then, about nine o’clock, the power went off. That’s so common I didn’t get excited, just waited for it to come back on again. But an hour later it was still off, so I thought I’d better ring up and see what was happening. Then I found the phone was off too, which is unusual – we often lose one or the other, but not both. So I walked over to Murray’s place, found they weren’t home, thought “They must have gone out to tea”, came home, went to bed with a candle – if you know what I mean – woke up in the morning, found everything was still off. “Now this is serious,” I thought, went back to Murray’s, still no one there. I walked along the road till I got to the Ramsays’ – they’re our neighbours – went in there, it was empty, kept walking, found no one at the Arthurs’, realised there’d been no traffic, thought “Maybe I’m the only person left on the planet”, went round a corner and found a wrecked car with three dead people in it. They’d hit a tree, but that hadn’t killed them – they’d been shot up badly. Well, bad enough to kill them. You can imagine, I freaked out, and started running towards town. Around the next corner was the next shock – Uncle Al’s house, which had been blown up. It was just a pile of smoking rubble. I saw a couple of vehicles coming, and instead of jumping on the road and flagging them down, which I would have done if they’d come along earlier, I hid and watched. They were military trucks, full of soldiers, and they weren’t ours. So I thought “Either I’ve been using some very strange and heavy stuff or else this is not a typical day in the life of Wirrawee”. It’s been pretty weird ever since. Waking up in the middle of the night and seeing a BMW floating in the middle of the dam was just another part of it.’ Chris kept us entertained for a good half-hour by the time he’d told us what had happened to him and we’d told him our story. And more importantly, he kept us awake. But long before we got to my place Homer and Robyn were heavily asleep. Chris and Lee and I were the only ones still conscious. I don’t know about the other two but it was a terrible struggle for me. I resorted to things like dabbing my eyelids with spit, which might sound strange, but it did help a bit. It was with deep relief that I saw the first soft light from the east reflecting off the galvanised iron roof of home. Only then did I realise I’d spent all that time driving the most elegant car I was ever likely to have, and I hadn’t thought about it once. What a wasted opportunity. I was quite cross with myself.