It was a local paper, the Coober Pedy Times. The front page headline was: MYSTERY ILLNESSES CONTINUE. Underneath, a smaller headline said: Tormented by noises. There was a picture of the stationmaster Ben had spoken to earlier.
Ben looked down the corridor at the kitchen. The café owner was taking a packet out of the fridge. He turned back to the paper.
Monty Allen, Coober Pedy’s stationmaster, has enjoyed good health all his life, but in the past three weeks has been driven mad by an unexplained ailment. ‘I was hearing this humming in my ears,’ said Mr Allen, 63. ‘It went on for hours and I couldn’t sleep so I went to the doctor. He said he’d had a surgery full of people with the same problem that morning and he didn’t know what had caused it.
There was another story further down the page: ‘Farmer loses twenty calves in a week — is mystery illness spreading to cattle?’
Ben turned the page. There was a story about bizarre weather patterns: sudden hurricanes and hail-storms. Hailstorms, thought Ben — in this heat?
‘Here you go. That’s four dollars seventy.’
The café owner was standing in front of him, holding out a bag and a four-pack of water bottles. Ben dug into his pocket for more change and peered at the unfamiliar notes. He worked out he hadn’t got enough and pulled some more out of his pocket.
As he did so, a roughly folded piece of paper fell onto the floor. The café owner picked it up and was about to hand it back to him when something caught her eye. ‘Oh, is this from here?’ She opened it out.
Ben recognized it as the photocopy the police officer had handed him, showing the charred leaflet.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I got it in Adelaide.’
‘Depression, skin diseases, strange allergies, migraines …’ She skim-read the page, muttering some of the words out loud, then handed it back to Ben. ‘My sister has had a migraine for three days and she’s sitting in casualty right now. Last week I had this terrible itching. I thought my skin was crawling with insects. I went to the doctor. He said he’d seen ten cases but he didn’t know what was causing it. So we’re making headlines in Adelaide now, are we?’
Ben had assumed that most of the text was crackpot scaremongering, but now he wasn’t so sure. He glanced at the photocopy in his hand. The headline he had noticed before leaped out:
STOP SECRET US EXPERIMENTS
In Adelaide the army had established base camps for firefighting crews all around the city. They meant that the firefighters could rest up, replenish supplies and refuel without having to go back to their station house.
Engine 33 was based at the golf course. Driving in was like entering a military installation. There was a clearly defined perimeter, where soldiers in firefighting gear patrolled with water tanks on trolleys. They had already had to put out several minor blazes, ignited by sparks blown in on smoke from the burning town.
Inside the firebreak, the whole area looked chaotic: a mass of parked fire trucks and personnel in fire-fighting gear apparently milling about in all directions. But in fact it was tightly organized.
A soldier noted Engine 33’s identification number and told Petra where to park. She drove past a group of soldiers: some were tinkering about with an engine, others were replacing used breathing gear, checking rescue harnesses and testing hoses. Another engine bumped down the fairway towards them, its crew refuelled and ready for action again. The other crew waved as they went past and Wanasri watched them in the wing mirror as they reached the exit. Just then a glow of orange flared in the blackened bushes at the perimeter. The soldiers on duty immediately spotted it and dowsed it with water.
Even here, the firefighters couldn’t relax totally; the fire was never truly beaten. No matter how much water they hosed onto it, everything dried out so quickly in the blistering afternoon heat.
Petra turned onto the fairway where Victoria and Troy had been playing that morning. The golfers would have been appalled to see it now — the parched grass worn bare by the tyres of heavy vehicles and streaked with soot. The woodland had burned down to a no-man’s-land of blackened stumps.
A soldier beckoned them into a space between two other trucks, as if he was guiding a plane into a terminal building slot. Petra heaved on the wheel, manoeuvred the engine into the space and stopped.
A soldier opened the door. ‘We’ll re-equip your vehicle while you get some rest. Fifteen minutes and you’re out again. Leave the keys in the ignition in case we need to move it.’
Wanasri followed Darren out, moving across the seat in slow motion. She had never felt so tired in her life. Her muscles were aching from moving about in the heavy turnout gear, and mentally, too, she felt exhausted. She was grateful to be off duty, but daunted by the thought that she had to be back on in fifteen minutes.
Andy prodded her. ‘Come on, lazybones. There’s a bottle of iced water with my name on it and you’re in my way.’
Darren put out his arms. He lifted her out as if she was a feather and set her down on the ground. ‘Come on, let’s perk you up.’ He knew how she felt. They’d all been rookies once.
Wanasri’s feet protested as soon as she started to walk. Her boots were stiff and new and she had been running about in them for so long that her feet were a mass of blisters. Her turnout gear still felt as stiff as a suit of armour. She longed to take it off so that she could move freely. Her head throbbed — probably from dehydration after spending so long in such fierce heat, breathing in hot gases. She wanted to take her helmet off but the peak shielded her eyes from the fierce afternoon sun.
Darren marched her through a row of parked engines to a big khaki tent. Water bottles were stacked in crates along a trestle table. Petra cracked one open and downed the whole lot in one go. Darren thrust one into Wanasri’s hands. She twisted the lid off with her teeth, spat the cap out and drank gratefully. The water was warm, but she didn’t care. She just needed to sluice away the taste of cinders. The first bottle finished, she scrunched it between her hands and started on a second. Beside her, Petra, Darren and Andy were also gulping away.
It was only when Wanasri was on her third bottle that she was able to take it more slowly and look around. The tent looked incongruous in the middle of all these fire engines, like something from a genteel summer fete. The whole place stank of smoke. Firefighters walked around, massive as grizzly bears in their protective clothes. Everywhere she looked, reflective yellow stripes glinted in the sun. Wisps of steam rose off the engines and everything was coated in oily smoke. She tried not to think how much of that oily residue was from vaporized human remains.
Petra crumpled another finished water bottle and dropped it into an overflowing bin. ‘Come on, guys,’ she said. ‘We’d better make way for others.’
Wanasri, Darren and Andy followed her to the next tent. It looked like a jumble sale, with boxes of equipment laid out on tables. Petra went in, took her radio off her jacket, prised the cover off the battery compartment and swapped her old batteries for fresh ones. Meanwhile a soldier with a clipboard came up to her with her instructions. Petra listened carefully, then returned to the others.
Darren gave Wanasri a pat on the arm. ‘Come on, time to get back to work.’
Wanasri couldn’t believe their fifteen-minute break had passed so quickly. She followed Darren and Andy back to the truck.
The soldiers were just finishing up. Two of them clipped the pike poles back on the side of the engine. Another rolled up a hose attached to a big water tank.
Petra got in the cab and started the engine as Darren, Andy and Wanasri climbed in the other side.