Incurable

CHAPTER 10

A spatter of bullets cut across the car. In the dark I couldn’t see them properly but I heard them above all the noise. The car shuddered and there were a couple of bangs on the roof. I hunched up and accelerated again. Someone swore in the back seat and I heard Jeremy say anxiously, ‘Did they get you?’ and Homer said, ‘No, don’t know how they missed.’

I was still thinking about what I’d seen in the far distance in the headlights. Just that glimpse. The huge pylons they use for high-tension wires, the ones that march across the country like giant soldiers. If it hadn’t been an illusion, and if the pilot hadn’t seen them, if I could somehow guide him into them… well, put it this way, if I couldn’t, we had no hope.

I had to reverse our roles. I had to become the fox, making the chook do what I wanted. Somehow I had to get him turning, and watching me, so that he didn’t notice the wires. And that’s still assuming the wires were there. I had serious doubts about that. You can see anything at night, and maybe I’d been looking at a big gum tree. Or a giant kangaroo.

I couldn’t turn my headlights on again, because if the pylon was there, I would just illuminate it for him. Based on my glimpse, I figured it was about two hundred and fifty metres ahead, but since then we’d probably halved that distance. So we were getting pretty close.

The helicopter had banked sharply and was coming in from my right. I started to veer left, and at the same time called to Homer in the backseat: ‘When I stop, can you and Lee both jump out and run back the way we’ve been coming?’ I wanted to distract the pilot, give him lots to think about. I expected that he would still follow the car, but would keep an eye on the boys, wondering what was going on, trying to see where they were heading, and that would keep him glancing to the left.

I braked pretty hard. As the car doors opened the helicopter came throbbing overhead. It was so close and so loud and so menacing that I felt deafened. The car rocked in the down draught. I heard more firing, but I think he missed completely, probably because he wasn’t expecting me to stop.

I only gave the boys a second, and then took off again. I had to let him know that the car was still moving, that we hadn’t abandoned it, so we would be his first target. I started to do a big circle, hoping I hadn’t underestimated the distance. If the pylons were another hundred or more metres away, this wasn’t going to work. And I wouldn’t get another chance.

In fact, I’d done the opposite, and a pylon loomed up so suddenly that Jess and I both screamed. It looked like a huge robot, standing in the field. A visitor from another place, from out in the far distant universe. I had to pull the wheel back the other way to miss it, and at about that same moment the helicopter hit the wires. If we’d hit the pylon we might have been electrocuted.

And there in that dark lonely paddock, we had Guy Fawkes night, the Fourth of July, Commemoration Day, and the opening and closing of the Olympics, all in one. The helicopter turned into flowers of light, scorching my eyeballs. I saw at least half-a-dozen fireballs, going off quite slowly, each in different directions. So many sparks came out of the wires that it was like a Niagara Falls of fire. The helicopter lit up inside, and for a moment I could see everyone and everything. Three men, each sitting in their different positions, glowing bright with fire and electricity.

It dropped the short distance to the ground. We were about eighty metres away, and by then it was on my right again, because of the turn I’d done, so I saw it explode. And I heard it, and I felt the ground rock, and the car being buffeted by a huge wind and rockets of fire shooting at me, and the next thing, I’m getting picked up and tipped over like a giant hand has grabbed the car, and I’m suddenly looking down on Jeremy, feeling as though I’m at a great height above him.

Of course I wasn’t at a great height, just the usual distance, but you don’t expect to be in that position. Once again the good old safety belts helped. It took me a long moment to realise that the car had been turned on its side. I didn’t have much of a view any more, but there were still streaks of fire going past the ute, and I could see grass burning about twenty metres away.

I spared a thought for Homer and Lee. I had no idea that I was dropping them into an inferno, and I hoped they had survived. I wondered how anyone could. There were whooshing and zinging noises, which I realised were pieces of metal from the helicopter flying past us like rockets.

By the time the three of us crawled out of the ute, most of it was over. Four different grass fires were spreading, in different parts of the paddock, and the helicopter was burning brightly, with black smoke coming from it. I guess it had a lot of plastic and toxic parts. There was no use looking for survivors in that. They’d had no chance. And just as I was wondering about survivors, Homer and Lee came running towards us.

They were both a bit hysterical. They were kind of laughing and babbling, but not in a normal way. I wondered if I should slap them in the face, which is something I’ve often wanted to do, but even while they were in this condition I thought it might be a bit dangerous. I realised I was a bit hysterical myself, when I heard myself babbling back at them. Basically we were all trembling and terrified. All I wanted to do was get the hell out of that place before any rescue parties arrived.

I looked at the ute and wondered if we could get it back on its four wheels. I couldn’t see how, without ropes or chain. Homer started yelling, ‘Let’s go, let’s get out of here,’ so I guess he felt it wasn’t worth bothering with the ute any more. I assumed he knew what he was talking about, and that fuel had probably tipped out of the carburettor or something (that’s about the extent of my mechanical knowledge), and besides, all those bullet holes might have affected its performance by now. So I followed him, and the five of us ran towards the road, turned left and continued to run, in a line behind Homer, on the right-hand side, for what felt like fifty kilometres, but was probably only one.

When we couldn’t go any further, we gathered under a big gum tree. It was very dark now, and there was still no sign of traffic. The running was good in a way, because although it brought me to the end of my physical endurance, it calmed me down, and I think it had the same effect on the others.

‘God, Ellie, did you know about those wires?’ was the first thing Jeremy said.

‘I thought I saw them, but I wasn’t a hundred percent sure.’

But I knew there was no use having a conversation about that.

‘What are we going to do?’ Homer asked. ‘We need a vehicle, but it’s pretty quiet around here.’

‘All we can do is keep going as fast as we can until we find something,’ Lee said. ‘If everyone’s feeling as stuffed as me, we mightn’t get very far, but the further away from here the better.’

No-one had a better suggestion, so we kept walking and jogging, talking a bit as we went. Jess said to me, ‘This is amazing. I never thought I’d be in anything like this. I can’t believe it. It’s so weird and wild and terrifying.’

I laughed. But I wasn’t feeling very funny. ‘Hey, welcome to my world,’ I said.

We passed a house about two kilometres further on, but there was no sign of life. I assumed they were out, or else they’d slept through the whole thing. A dog started barking wildly as soon as we got near, so we didn’t look for a car or a motorbike, just hurried on.

I was tired and really hurting. I was starting to pant and gasp for breath, and left the talking to the others as I had no energy for conversation.

We passed three more houses before we came to someone nice and messy. There are times when I love messy people, and this was one of them. There was a tennis court, but the wire in the fence was badly torn; they had half a truck on the front lawn with bits of engine all around it; and they had kids who didn’t put their toys away. We couldn’t do much with the truck, as the idea of assembling it, fuelling it and then driving it away didn’t seem too practical. But between us, as we tiptoed around in the dark, we collected two bicycles and a pair of rollerblades. It wasn’t much, but we didn’t dare go closer to the house to look for a car. Anyway, they were more likely to notice the loss of a car straight away. The chances were that the owners of the bikes and skates wouldn’t realise till a good while after breakfast.

In the distance I could hear another helicopter, so I figured they’d started looking for us. It seemed a good time to go, even if we didn’t have much to go with.

Homer and Lee got to do the pedalling, and Jeremy seemed attracted to the skates, so that left Jess and me to be dinked. There was an awkward moment when I was an equal distance between Homer’s bike and Lee’s and both of them were looking at me, expecting me to get on behind them. I chose Homer. Lee just turned his head away.

For a while I think we weren’t going much faster than if we’d been walking. Both of the boys were pretty rusty on their bike skills, and having a passenger didn’t make it easy. Jeremy got quite a way ahead, but once Homer and Lee settled into a rhythm they began to catch up, and soon we were together again. It was not the kind of glamorous getaway that people make in Hollywood movies, but it was all we had, and it worked fairly well. Three times we had to dive into bushes as headlights showed cars coming towards us, but we could see the headlights from a long way off, so we had time.

At about three in the morning we hit the road that I’d taken earlier. A simple right turn took us back to the border. By then the pedalling was pretty slow again, and clumsy, and we had to take a couple of rest breaks. We reached the border a bit after four.

At about five o’clock we were trudging up a hill, Lee pushing one bike and me the other. Jeremy had chucked the skates into a patch of scrub quite a bit earlier. He was a few hundred metres behind. Our heads were down and we were making very slow progress.

Things were so desperate that Homer had taken to telling bad jokes to keep us awake and moving. He’d just told us one about three girls telling their mother where they are going that night, and the first one is going out with Pete to eat, and her sister’s going out with Vance to dance, and when the next sister says she wants to go out with Chuck, the mother stops her. Jess laughed, I groaned, Lee didn’t react. Jeremy was the lucky one: he didn’t hear it.

At that moment a single shot came towards us, splitting the darkness and our group apart. It went right between Homer and me, like a knife cutting the night into two worlds. A knife made of flame. The noise was like a single stroke of thunder.

I nearly ruptured myself. I sort of jumped up and twisted around at the same time. I couldn’t help making a screaming sound as I dived to the right. I couldn’t see which direction the others were diving in, but I hoped that they were all right.

Then the next thing a little voice called out, ‘Sorry,’ except that the r’s sounded more like l’s.

I rolled over and sat up again. I’d grazed the right side of my face on a rock, and a stick had poked into my knee. I stood up and went forwards, ready to throttle the owner of the voice. I didn’t throttle him, although I probably should have. When I saw him I just shook my head and said, ‘Where have you been?’

Gavin, being deaf, couldn’t hear that, but he was pleased to see me. He threw himself at me, and hung on, tight hands digging into my back. He wasn’t even crying, just hanging on. Well, no wonder. He knew he had done the wrong thing in following the utes. He’d lost contact with the motorbikes, punctured both tyres on the yammy, and spent the night on his own. He was probably lost, although he didn’t actually admit to that, not after the terrible consequences of his being lost in the bush last time. And then firing at these vague human shapes coming towards him in the darkness, and realising an instant later that it was us, had been a bit much even for Gavin.

There was nothing for me to do except let myself be held, and to stroke his back and pat his head and put aside thoughts of strangulation. I couldn’t let myself admit the obvious, that as glad as he was to see me, I was that and more to see him. I did have the horrible thought that even though the bullet had missed us three it might have got Jeremy, coming along behind, but he came trotting up a few moments later, without any holes through him.

Everyone patted Gavin for a while, without making remarks about checking your target before you pull the trigger. That would have to wait for another day. In the meantime, we still had a long walk home.

We dumped the bikes, taking them well into the bracken and hiding them behind fallen logs. We hadn’t yet sat down to figure out the trouble we’d be in if the shoot-up at the mall was traced to us, but as long as we went out and got the utes and the Yamaha back, it was unlikely we’d be connected with it. We’d be just as likely to cop the blame for global warming or tasteless strawberries or World War II.

After covering up the bikes it was trudge, trudge, trudge, the familiar part of war, which I’d almost forgotten about but which seemed to form the majority of my experiences during the time of the invasion. Plod plod plod. Slog slog slog. Gavin kept so close to me that he kept getting his feet tangled up with mine, but I bit my tongue and reminded myself of what an awful night he’d had. Even if it was his own fault.

Plod plod plod. I kept thinking about home. Home is where you go and they have to let you in. Home is whoever loves you. There’s no place like home. All of that seemed true enough, but there was no-one at my home to let me in, and there was no-one there to love me any more. It seemed so empty with my parents gone. The house was too big now, and Gavin and I rattled around in there like a couple of grains of wheat in a silo. When I walked the corridors I heard echoes. There had never been echoes before.

When we did get within sight of the farm I was quite shocked to see lights on in the house. Like, someone’s broken in? This is the revenge attack already? But the others kept walking, and then I remembered Bronte and Pang.

Pang had ignored the spare room and was asleep in my bed but Bronte had kept awake somehow. She came to the door. It was strange, I was being welcomed into my own home by someone I still didn’t know all that well.

She ushered us in and with no fuss got us organised with Milo and noodles and toast. I don’t know what it is about toast. It’s the most comforting smell in the world. Even if you’re not feeling hungry, once you get a whiff of someone else’s bread in the toaster, you find yourself hypnotically drawn towards the loaf, and before you know it you’re pulling out a couple of slices and dropping them in. That liquorice smell that hangs around Darrell Lee’s, which someone told me they get by burning liquorice oil in an aromatherapy thing, that has a strong effect on me too, and so do chooks cooking in supermarkets, but nothing beats toast. I reckon home is where the toast is.

Anyway, even though I could hardly keep my eyes and lips open, it was incredibly comforting to sit around the table and talk. If anyone’s going to keep a secret, it’d be Bronte. She has such calmness and strength that you know you can trust her with the name of your newest boyfriend, the password for your emails and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls. If we were going to stop news of our activities spreading around Wirrawee, we didn’t have to worry about it coming from Bronte. All that aside, I was still worried about how much we could tell her, because of it being Liberation business, but the others didn’t hold back at all. So I went along with their judgement.

Homer did most of the talking, but this time he had a bit of competition from Jess. ‘The intelligence was pretty good,’ Homer said. ‘We found them approximately where we were supposed to find them. They had three houses, right next to the shopping centre, and at least four vehicles. We watched for about forty-five minutes, and there were a heap of them, getting themselves organised. They were obviously planning a major raid. But we’re good boys and girls, and we did like the Scarlet Pimple said, and we didn’t attack, just watched.’

‘We counted eighteen guys,’ Jess said. ‘They were pretty open about what they were doing. Carrying rifles around and loading ammunition into the car. Anyone who was wandering past could have stopped and taken a look.’

‘Yeah, like we did, more or less,’ Homer said. ‘Anyway, we decided to move on to phase three, and head down the highway a few hundred metres and wait for them there. We’d seen a good spot. But at that point things went horribly wrong. We’d borrowed a couple of utes, so we piled into one and left the other as a back-up. Our quickest way out was through the supermarket car park, and we figured that it was dark enough to be safe. So off we went, but unfortunately we didn’t get very far.’

‘I’d better interrupt at this point,’ Lee said. ‘Because otherwise Homer will take half an hour to get this out, but the fact is I ran over a woman in the car park.’

I did stop eating my toast when he said that. I sat there with the slice halfway to my mouth, staring at Lee.

‘It’s okay,’ Lee added. ‘I didn’t mash her into a pizza shape. She bounced right up again. But you know how it is, you can’t just drive on, although if I had my time again I would have. But I was so shocked, I stopped the car and I opened the door. The woman was standing right in front of us, looking pretty wild, which is fair enough, and I didn’t think I should run over her a second time.’

‘Then,’ Jess said, ‘before we knew it her husband or someone appeared jabbering away, getting all excited, and we were in the middle of a diarrhoea epidemic.’

I did laugh at that. But now I understood how things had gone so badly wrong.

‘To cut a long story short,’ Homer said, ‘we had to abandon the vehicle. We had a couple of cars up our arse, which was pretty uncomfortable, as you can imagine, but it also meant we couldn’t reverse. Lee jumped back in and did this amazing manoeuvre to the corner of the car park and then we piled out and ran for it. We hid about a hundred metres down the road and waited till we thought the excitement would have died down. Then we tiptoed delicately back, feeling very happy that it seemed so quiet.’

‘Too quiet,’ Jess said.

‘Seems like they were waiting for us,’ Jeremy said.

‘And then,’ Homer continued, ‘Ellie arrived.’

Lee made a trumpet noise.

‘She practises doing this,’ Homer said to Bronte and Jess.

I had the feeling that Homer and Lee were getting a bit sick of me saving them, or worse, me getting credit. Well, I was happy to stop any time.

Jess stuck up for me though. ‘God, it was amazing,’ she said. ‘Ellie, you are an amazing hunk of womanhood. You sure came at the right time, and you had so many smart ideas. I swear, if you hadn’t turned up, we’d be in the dump masters, and not because we were making an escape either. We’d be on our way to the tip, in little pieces.’

‘Oh, shucks,’ I said. ‘You know the trouble with the world nowadays? There’s no telephone booths for superheroes to get changed. Everyone’s got mobiles. I had a serious problem with that.’

‘What happened?’ Bronte asked me.

‘Well, I’d tracked them to this coconut tree place,’ I said, ‘because I remembered these guys mentioning it before they left. They were in a slightly complicated situation when I found them, but there was a four-wheel drive with keys in it and the door open. So I suggested they get in the dump master, because I figured the steel sides would keep bullets out, and then I got a bit of chain and used the four-wheel drive to tow them across the car park. When I think back, it seems like a crazy idea, but it worked. Then we just piled in a ute they’d laid on, and drove home. Except that we lost the ute along the way.’

‘It’s been the most amazing twenty-four hours of my life,’ Jess told Bronte. ‘You wouldn’t believe what we’ve been through. We were being followed by these guys on motorbikes, and we ambushed them, with petrol. It was terrible. But Ellie…’

I could see that the next little while was going to be uncomfortable. I wasn’t just being modest, like ‘Oh no, really, I’m not that great,’ it was a bit more than that. I felt that if they all had to sit there telling Bronte how good a job I’d done (because I knew I had done a good job) it would make them uncomfortable and they’d even get a bit jealous. No matter how much you like someone, or admire something they’ve done, there’s a limit to how long you can sit around praising them to other people, especially in front of their face. So I went to the bathroom.

By the time I’d got back, Gavin was asleep in the old brown armchair and the others were staggering around like zombies. I put Gavin to bed, then crawled in beside Pang, leaving the older kids to their own devices. They were big enough to find beds for themselves, and they knew where the spare blankets and pillows were stored.