Timi’s handsome Korean features wrinkled in disgust. ‘I don’t see what he’s getting so excited about — Jonny Cale’s an idiot.’
‘Oi, you!’
They turned round to see Joseph hurdling a small white gate. He’d dropped his bag and was running in the direction of their car, shouting. Before he could reach it, the engine coughed into life and the car door slammed.
Timi and Amy gave chase but they were too slow. They stared in disbelief as the red hatchback roared off down the road and screeched round a corner, leaving a cloud of dust in its wake.
‘Oh, brilliant!’ shouted Amy. ‘We’re here trying to do some good, and a joyrider steals your blinking car.’
She heard a crunch behind her. When she looked round, Timi was kicking down a white picket fence.
‘Tim!’ she exclaimed. ‘What are you doing?’
Joseph grabbed Timi by the arm and pulled him away. ‘Hey, man, that doesn’t help anyone.’
Timi swore at him in Korean, a furious sound like an animal snarling. His foot kicked out like a whiplash, splintering the white wood to smithereens. The violence of it made Joseph flinch.
‘I’d just finished making the down payments on that car,’ Timi snarled.
‘Mate, it’s not these people’s fault,’ said Joseph, looking at the ruined fence.
Timi whirled and grabbed him by the front of his T-shirt. ‘No? They just look away — turn the other cheek, whether it’s petty crime or the rape of the whole planet! It’s all their bloody fault!’
He reached over the splintered fence, grabbed a garden gnome and dashed it to the ground. Plaster fragments shot everywhere. ‘We’re just wasting our time!’ Timi was screaming. ‘The world’s going to hell and nobody wants to know.’
The noise was attracting attention. Amy saw grubby curtains twitching in the house next door. ‘Timi, please — people can see …’ she said quietly.
But Timi was in a blind rage. He didn’t care whether people could see or not. He was caught up in his own world of fury.
Dodge took the hatchback around the streets at breakneck speed. That was good for about five minutes, but he soon got bored. The car had the reactions of a possum in a coma and it didn’t even have air conditioning — he would have taken a tyre iron to it if he’d had the energy. But the two beers he’d drunk that morning, coupled with the heat, were making him feel a little sleepy. He drove to the municipal park, stopped and lay back in the car for a snooze.
He was awoken by a tap on the window. He saw a pale face and greasy dark hair. Snoopy. Dodge looked at his watch. Eleven a.m. That figured. Eleven was about the time Snoopy normally got up.
Dodge got out. ‘Hey, Snoop, want to buy a car?’ Snoopy was holding a can of lager. Dodge grabbed it and took a swig. With his other hand he clapped Snoopy on the shoulder. ‘You can pay me later.’
Snoopy looked in through the window. ‘Anything interesting in there?’ He noticed the boxes of leaflets in the back. ‘What’re all these? And what’s all this about?’ He gestured at the windows, where there were several stickers. NUCLEAR POWER — NO THANKS! STOP GLOBAL WARMING. OZ PROTECTORS FOR A HEALTHY PLANET.
Dodge went round to the rear and opened the door. He finished the beer, tossed the can into the car and lit a cigarette. With his free hand he picked up a couple of loose leaflets and touched the flame of his lighter to them. ‘Yeah, stop global warming, eh?’ he said to Snoopy, and sniggered.
‘Hey,’ said Snoopy, pointing to the flaming sheet of paper. ‘Did you see that?’
‘What?’ Dodge replied. The flames reached his fingers and he dropped the burning paper, waving his fingers and blowing on them.
‘The flame went kinda funny,’ said Snoopy. ‘Do it again.’
Dodge picked up another leaflet and lit it. The flames licked up the page, turning it black and crisp. Where they met the green Oz Protectors logo, they glowed bluey green.
Dodge grinned at Snoopy. ‘Hey, pretty colours.’
‘Told you,’ said Snoopy.
He picked up some more of the leaflets, put them down on the parched grass and lit them with his lighter. They watched the flames intently, waiting for them to change colour when they reached the green printer’s ink. When it happened, they grinned and took some more out of the box. A light breeze stirred the trees and fanned one of the flaming pages in Snoopy’s hand. Curls of paper floated away across the grass like scraps of burning lace …
Chapter Four
Adelaide was surrounded on three sides by hills of vineyards. On the fourth side was the glittering blue ocean and thirty kilometres of white beach. Tram and train lines led from the beach to the city centre, which was laid out in rectangular blocks. Further out, in the residential areas, there were also parks and golf courses, a cemetery and a racecourse. Horses the size of ants were making their way around the white rails of the course.
It was the second time Ben had seen it all from the air and he was starting to get impatient. Kelly had said he could have a go at the controls, hadn’t she?
‘We’ve done the scenic tour,’ he said. ‘Surely it must be my turn to have a go at flying now?’
‘Shh,’ said Kelly. She checked something on the map on her knee and muttered to herself as if she was figuring out something important.
Ben suspected she was deliberately ignoring him. He leaned forward and pointed at the items on the instrument panel, one by one. ‘That must be the altimeter … that’s the airspeed indicator … radio … this is a global positioning system, fuel gauge, engine temperature, engine HT — that’s the rev counter, isn’t it? It’s just like Microsoft Flight Simulator.’
Kelly made a contemptuous noise. ‘Microsoft Flight Simulator? You sure know how to have fun. And don’t imagine it’s anything like real flying.’ She raised the plane’s nose and they climbed a little.
Ben sat back and folded his arms. ‘Looks pretty much like a flight sim to me. In fact it’s a lot less complicated than a Boeing Seven Eight Seven. Where’s the artificial horizon?’
Kelly tapped a mark on the middle of the windscreen. ‘There.’
She was pointing to a piece of black tape. For a moment that took the wind out of Ben’s sails. Surely she was joking? But there wasn’t another artificial horizon on the instrument panel.
Kelly looked pleased at his reaction. ‘Flying this is not like playing a computer game.’ She moved her legs and looked down at the map on her lap again. Ben saw the pedals move on his side of the foot well. She was making little adjustments the whole time. It was fascinating.
He stretched his feet towards the pedals. ‘What did you do just then?’
Kelly looked up from her map immediately. ‘Don’t touch those!’ she snapped.
Ben pulled his feet back. ‘So what do they do?’
‘They’re attached to the rudder.’
‘And this joystick? That’s steering, right?’ He reached for the lever between the seats. ‘Where’s the throttle? Or is it on the joystick?’
Kelly batted his hand away from the controls. ‘It’s called the stick. A joystick’s the thing on your Gamecube.’ She made an irritable noise. ‘Before you touch anything, I’m going to give you a rule. When I hand over to you, I will say, “You have control,” and you say, “I have control.” Otherwise you might think I’m flying the plane and I might think you’re flying the plane and—’
Ben said: ‘I have control,’ and closed his fingers around the black rubber handle.
He thought Kelly might stop him but she didn’t. He was now in charge of the plane. Butterflies danced in his stomach.
‘Just push the stick forwards a tiny bit,’ said Kelly, ‘and keep an eye on the airspeed indicator here.’