Those tram lines might be what saved her, Bel thought. She knew that they ran towards the west side of town — and the sea. She couldn’t see more than a few metres in front of her now, but she could follow the tram lines.
She passed a traffic light lying in the street, a vaguely oblong block of melted black plastic, with circles of red, amber and green, like a piece of sculpture by Salvador Dali.
The heat was making her head throb like a bass drum and the yellow protective coat didn’t help. It was stiff and heavy to move in. Her entire body was running with sweat, her shirt and skirt wringing wet.
She angrily pulled open the coat’s Velcro fastenings and took it off, but as soon as she did so, her back, chest and arms started to scorch. It felt as though she had peeled her own skin off. She put the coat back on, fastened it all the way to the top and walked on.
Ahead of her she saw a phone box — a mess of blackened plastic like a burned-out shower cubicle. The fire brigade had ringed it with yellow caution tape. That meant there was a body inside. Bel averted her gaze, but couldn’t help catching a glimpse of what was inside. A blackened figure was hunched, bent over the phone. Bel knew from her work in other disaster areas that when somebody burned to death they curled up like a cooked prawn.
A noise behind her made her jump: it was the sound of a vehicle moving. She peered through the smoke and steam — was it coming towards her or going away? Red brake lights, enlarged to blobs by the smoky air, looked like a dot of colour on wet blotting paper. She started to run towards them, waving her arms.
‘Hey! Help! Help!’
The driver of the army truck wanted to get out of the burning streets as fast as possible, but he had to be careful as debris kept looming out of the fog. He had a truck full of rescued civilians and the last thing he needed was to damage the truck and strand them all.
In the seats behind him, a bedraggled-looking group sat in a silent row. They looked like they had come from a set of Happy Families cards — a vet, a decorator, a postman, a jockey and two people wearing tattered golf clothes.
Victoria, Troy and their embattled companions had been rescued at last. By chance, they had run into the path of the rescue truck. They would look back on this as the day they’d beaten the odds.
But Bel wasn’t so lucky. Victoria was gazing, exhausted, out of the back of the truck. The streets went past in a dream of fog. The heavy thrum of the truck’s diesel engine was lulling her to sleep. She didn’t hear the woman calling, just caught a brief glimpse of movement. She rubbed her eyes and looked again, but it was only a fluorescent yellow smudge in the gloom, a trick of the light. She settled back in her seat and closed her eyes.
Fate had flipped a coin.
Bel ran fast, but she couldn’t run fast enough to catch the Jeep. The red gleam of the rear lights gradually dissolved into the smoky air. Bel’s eyes were blurred with stinging smoke and her tears of desperation.
Suddenly, behind her, she heard a sound like the growl of a waking giant and a shockwave threw her to the ground. She landed heavily on her knees and elbows, and for a moment crouched, stunned with pain. When she looked, up the smoke hung around her so thickly, it was as though her face was draped in a grey curtain. There was a ringing in her ears and she became aware of a weight pressing down on her. As she moved, pieces of rubble slid off her back. Broken masonry was all around her: bricks and shattered concrete, black and greasy from fire.
What on earth had happened? Unable to take it in, she sat down amongst the rubble for a few moments, recovering from the shock.
The dust gradually settled, and when she turned and saw the scene behind her, Bel couldn’t believe her eyes. Where moments before there had been a building, there was now a hole like a missing tooth. The façade had collapsed into the street. If Bel hadn’t been running after the Jeep, she would have been right underneath it when it came down
Fate had flipped another coin.
Her ears were ringing so loudly she didn’t notice the sound of her phone.
Up in the microlight, Ben looked at his phone in the hands-free cradle on the dashboard. The display gave the message he had been longing to see: ‘Calling’. The dialling tone came through strongly in his and Kelly’s headsets.
They looked at each other, excited.
‘A little more throttle,’ said Kelly. Her voice was hushed, hardly daring to speak in case Bel’s voice came through.
They were sharing control of the microlight while Kelly mapped out their route. She operated the pedals and kept her forearm on the stick, while Ben adjusted the throttle and tried the mobile phones.
‘The lines must be back up,’ said Kelly. ‘She’ll answer in a minute.’
She stiffened in her seat and looked down at the map and then out of the windscreen. ‘Oh my goodness. That’s Adelaide.’
A dark smudge had been growing on the horizon. At first it was barely noticeable — just a grey speck in the blue evening sky. But now it was getting wider, like ink spreading through the clouds.
Ben had a cold, ominous feeling. How much of the city had burned in order to turn such a big patch of sky dark like that? A story Bel had told him many years ago came back to him. She had been visiting some place after a volcano had erupted. He was too young to remember the details, but she had told him that the ash in the air turned the sky dark as night.
Bel’s phone continued to ring unanswered, and as the microlight drew closer to the pall of smoke, its two passengers felt very uneasy.
‘Where are we going to land?’ asked Ben.
Kelly looked down at the map. ‘There’s an airfield a little way down the coast. We can head for there. It should be well away from the fire area.’
They were nearly safe, but Ben felt far from relieved. Why didn’t Bel answer?
Kelly’s phone rang. She automatically went to pick it up, then waved her bandaged hands in frustration. ‘Quick! Answer it!’
Ben hooked his phone out of the cradle, put Kelly’s in and pressed answer.
‘Kelly?’ It was the major’s voice.
‘Dad!’ exclaimed Kelly. ‘Where are you?’
‘In Melbourne. Where are you?’
‘Melbourne? Is that where the kidnappers have taken you?’
‘What kidnappers? I got picked up by the army.’
Kelly and Ben exchanged puzzled looks. ‘But you said some protestors had kidnapped you,’ said Kelly. ‘When you called me.’
‘When I called you …? I only called you to see if you were all right. But, oh, you mean the protestors at the conference centre. I told you about them. But they weren’t kidnappers. They tried to get a statement from me. One of them was a little crazy — he pulled a knife.’
‘A knife! Dad …’
‘I wasn’t in any serious danger, sweetheart. He was just young and frustrated. I kept calm and let him boil off the worst of his anger, and once his friends started arguing with him he soon gave it up. Once they realized they weren’t going to get me to say anything, they didn’t hang around.’
Ben’s phone was on his knee. It flashed up a message. ‘Cannot connect’. He had been timed out. He stabbed the CALL button again. Would it work a second time? Had that been his only chance?
It started ringing again.
‘So why,’ Kelly was saying, ‘did you call me and say you were on the Ghan?’
‘The Ghan?’ repeated the major. ‘I didn’t say that.’ There was a pause as he obviously tried to remember what he did say. ‘I was on the gantry outside. They brought me out of an emergency exit onto the top of the fire escape. I was trying to let you know Bel needed help — she was still inside. Have you heard from her? Did she get out OK? I’ve been asking the fire department here but it’s total confusion, as you’d expect.’