Incurable

CHAPTER 5

Basically I took the fastest route I knew to Rawson Road, or, like Lee said, what we used to call Rawson Road. I stopped three times, when I got into muddy sections of the track, to see if I could figure out what was going on. And the third time, about two k’s past the border, I did get a beautifully clear picture of what had happened. It was like reading a story. The two utes were hidden behind a tree. In some places the track was better than the last time I’d come this way, but in most places it was starting to degenerate, and you could see where Homer and the others had swung off the road and parked. Up ahead was a rocky section that would have tested the utes beyond their limits. There was a whole chopped-up area behind the utes with footprints and motorbike tyre marks, where the four of them had obviously gotten on the bikes and ridden away. And although it took me three or four minutes, three or four minutes I couldn’t afford, eventually I found the marks of a third motorbike. They were on the left-hand side, away from the other two, which went down the middle. The same as I’d seen back at the machinery shed with Pang: a chunky tread but with bigger spaces between the chunks than the other bikes. It had made a lighter impact in the mud, as though it had less weight on it, and like the others it was fresh.

I ran a couple of hundred metres back towards my place, looking for more evidence. I needed to know whether Gavin had joined up with them or not. Near a huge gum tree, in another long stretch of soft ground, I saw where his tracks had left the road. I followed them and lost them almost straight away, but when I went to the gum tree I found where he had hidden. There were a couple of oil spots and part of a Fruit Tingles wrapper. I reminded myself to have a look at the bike sometime in the impossible future to see how much oil it was losing. My guess was that he had hidden somewhere further back, waited for the utes to pass him, and then followed. While they abandoned the utes he waited behind this tree then continued to follow. He was too close to home to let them know he was there. If they realised he was dogging their steps they would still send him back.

I set off again. I knew I was a long way behind but there was nothing I could do about that. I rode into darkness. The daylight failed fast. At least it seemed to get a bit warmer as the wind dropped away. At the first crossroads I went left. I had a feeling this road was called Sutherland’s but I wasn’t certain. It didn’t matter much, as I was pretty sure of my general direction.

I was trying to plan my strategy for when I got to Rawson Road. The whole idea of planning for something so out of my control was dumb but I suppose all planning is dumb in a way. Seeing you can’t predict the future, and seeing you can’t control other people, not to mention vehicles, animals, falling trees, the weather and your own self most of the time, planning has got to be… what? A kind of insurance policy. A way of trying to make yourself feel OK, because you can pretend you do have control of your life and the world around you. This is very reassuring when you’re heading into dangerous and horrible situations.

That’s what I thought about, riding along in the cold damp evening, trying not to use my lights. Generally I used a torch instead of headlights, which was not nearly as good of course. Safer in terms of attracting attention but violently dangerous when it came to road safety. I knew the others would be doing the same though, so at least I wasn’t losing more time.

I’d thought I would find Rawson Road pretty easily, but something basic had changed. I don’t want to sound too cosmic and psychic but because it wasn’t our country any more it seemed almost impossibly different. How weird that was, to be in a foreign country where such a short time ago it had been a part of our everyday world. The dirt road I was going down now for instance: not much more than a year ago I could have driven or ridden or walked down here without much thought. Just another dirt road lined with gum trees, a fence that badly needed fixing, a concrete-lined ford across a dip, and in the distance a farmhouse with lights on and people at home. I should have felt at home myself. But a new spirit had spread across the land and I trembled as I pushed forwards, knowing that although it felt like my land it was not. It smelt different. The energy was not the same. I was in alien territory. Instead of getting onto a plane and flying for a zillion hours to get somewhere else, now we could do it by wandering down a track for four hours.

Soon enough though I had to think about stuff that was more down-to-earth. Like self-preservation. All those days back in Wirrawee, going to school, looking after the farm, managing the cattle, trying to manage Gavin: all of that suddenly slipped off me and once again I was the hunter and the hunted. I felt like I’d turned into an animal, a fox maybe, and without any effort I was focused on finding the prey without being shot. I’d seen foxes do terrible things but I’d also admired their cunning. They could grab a duck in broad daylight, when I was working less than fifty metres away. They could find the only hole in the wire; they could tunnel into a chook yard; they seemed to know when you were holding a rifle and when you were only holding a stick; and on the one night when you’d forgotten to lock the gate into the poultry yard, they somehow knew and came sneaking in and killed everything that moved.

Well, I had to be the fox, and somehow I put on the skin of a fox and became a fox on a four-wheel motorbike. You can make a bike go pretty quietly if you keep the revs down and sneak along. I thought my problem at this stage would be more to do with finding Rawson Road than with aggressive enemies. I was trying to picture a map in my head and I thought Rawson Road ran from north to south, from my right to my left, across the flat monotonous country that I was in now. I forced the pace as fast as I could, but the noise of the bike got too loud when I went above thirty or thirty-five. I wondered how the others had done it. Would they have abandoned their bikes and gone on foot? With two bikes — plus one they didn’t know about — their noise problem would be more severe than mine of course.

Time was passing too fast and I felt under pressure to push on. Headlights travelling from right to left showed me I was coming to an intersection. It looked big and busy. Rawson Road? I waited for the headlights to pass, then had to wait for two more vehicles going the other way. Busy road. Maybe it was Rawson. I rode out onto the bitumen and looked around, feeling kind of bold. There was no way to tell what road it was. I rode cautiously down it, wondering how far I should go. If I’d got the wrong one this could be an expensive side trip. I suddenly remembered too that you’re not meant to ride four-wheelers on made roads. Well, not my four-wheeler anyway. It was something to do with the tyres. They ploughed up the paddocks any time I went off the tracks. Around the front of the machinery shed where I rode in and out, you could see nothing but muddy tracks. The grass was worn away in no time flat. They were heavy-tread tyres and I don’t know why they couldn’t tolerate bitumen but apparently they couldn’t.

Well, tough luck. For tonight they had no choice.

I’d gone about a k and a half when I saw one of those green and white direction signs ahead. Thank goodness. I’d been lucky no more cars had come. If I was really lucky the sign would tell me I was on Rawson Road. If I was really really lucky Homer and Lee and the others would be waiting there with Gavin to say, ‘Hi Ellie, the whole thing turned out to be a false alarm and we can all go home.’

I wasn’t too lucky. The sign was not in English but the numbers were the same as ours, and it looked like they’d kept the road numbering system we’d used. I didn’t know what number Rawson Road was meant to be but I knew it wasn’t Highway 3 and apparently I was on Highway 3.

Swear swear swear. Swearwords can be satisfying sometimes. I wheeled the bike around then had to go straight off the road because there was a car coming. In fact it was a truck with a string of cars behind it so I had to lie low for about four minutes while they all trundled past. As soon as there was a break I revved the bike back to the intersection. I didn’t have to worry about noise now, not out here on the highway.

I turned left and headed off on the dirt again. The landscape looked exactly the same. Sometimes it gets so boring, the way it just goes on and on. Sometimes it’s depressing. On TV ages ago they were talking about the Germans invading Russia during World War II, and how the landscape of Russia sent some of the soldiers crazy. It was to do with the way they woke up each morning and set out again and marched all day but nothing changed. Nothing ever changed! For day after day, month after month, they kept moving through a world where they felt like they weren’t moving at all. Walking and walking and walking and the horizon never moved and it all stayed the same.

No, I remembered, I didn’t see it on TV, I heard it on the car radio, and Mum was driving, because I remember her looking out at the bush and saying, ‘Yes, God, yes!’ when she heard this.

I didn’t agree with her — our landscape never had that effect on me — and I was worried by her saying it. For one thing I thought she was being disloyal. But still, I understood what she meant. At the same time if you knew the bit of bush you were in, or if you stopped and spent some time there, or if you opened your eyes and had a decent look around, you couldn’t see it as monotonous. It was only when we were driving that the endless miles got slightly depressing sometimes.

I sort of knew Rawson Road when I came to it. I’m not sure what it was, but something gave me the vibe of ‘Yes, I think this is it.’ It must have been three years since I’d come along here, and that was in the car, with my parents.

I turned left and rode fast on the gravel at the side, looking for another green and white sign. There wasn’t one, but after a couple of k’s I passed the entrance to a farm, and in paint on the front gate was the address, unaltered since before the war, 1274 Rawson Road.

What a relief. I pressed on. My next problem was to find out whether I was going in the right direction. I figured I was now on the hypotenuse of the triangle. The other two sides were from my place to the start of Sutherland’s, and Sutherland’s itself. The hypotenuse didn’t really lead back to my place, but it came out about eight k’s away. Close enough.

I knew that the square of the hypotenuse would be equal to the sum of the square of the other two sides. Thank you Wirrawee High for that piece of knowledge. But it didn’t seem much help right now. I needed something else. I needed the intuition and awareness of a fox. I remembered how foxes do this thing where they get a rooster to stick his head through the wire of the pen so the fox can bite it off. I didn’t know how they did it but I’d seen it a couple of times myself and the Yannoses had it happen to their chooks too. I don’t mean I actually saw it, but I saw the results. You go down to the chook pen in the morning and there’s a decapitated rooster lying inside the wire. How is it possible? We have quite a big pen and yet somehow the fox was able to get the rooster to come all the way to the wire and obligingly stick his head through so the fox could have it for supper.

I needed to find the trick, to know how to do it. I suppose it’s like using the energy in the ball and deflecting it to win a point. I vaguely remembered Robyn explaining something like this to me once when we were playing tennis. She understood sport in a way I never could. She said you don’t try to hit the ball hard. You let the other player do that, and you just put your racquet in the way and let the ball go back with the speed the other player has already put on it.

If a fox can make the rooster come to the wire and put its head out to be bitten off, the fox doesn’t have to do much work. I didn’t want to start a war here; all I wanted was to bounce Gavin back to the other side of the border.

I kept going but I could see I was heading into a serious problem. Rawson Road was quickly turning into a suburb. There were houses ahead, and they were close together. Being in a rural environment had been fine by me, but there was no way I could ride through settled areas on a four-wheeler. It was one of those mid-moon nights, where you could see well enough, not like a full moon, as good as daylight, but light enough to put me in a dangerous situation.

I snuck past the first group of houses, took the curve, saw another even longer row of houses and slipped past them too, but I was running out of nerves and I knew I’d soon be running out of luck. I didn’t want to wait until my last bit of luck actually fizzled out like foam on the sand. I pulled over onto a bit of broken ground and sat there trying desperately to think. I hated being in this position, where I had to make life and death decisions in a matter of seconds, with practically no information to go on. I like being in control. I was biting my bottom lip one minute and chewing on my knuckle the next. What to do? What to do? My mind threatened to break out and stampede, to knock down the fences and run wild, to go in a dozen directions at once.

‘All right,’ I told myself, ‘at least work out what you want most of all. What are you doing here?’ I knew the answer straight away. I was here with a mission and that was to find Gavin and keep him safe and get him home alive. It would be nice to help Homer and Lee and Jeremy and Jessica, and save innocent people from being attacked by a bunch of terrorists, and preferably to keep myself alive too, but this was a Gavin mission and it was as simple as that.

OK, so how was I going to do it?

No easy answer, just keep going and look everywhere and hope like hell or heaven I could find him.

I had to leave the bike though. I rolled it behind a tree. It wouldn’t be safe for long but if this was the beginning of the suburbs I couldn’t ride any further. I slung the rifle onto my back and trotted down the side of the road, keeping to the shadows, looking for something, anything, a clue, a prop, a guide.

Sometimes in life you do get what you want. In this case, though, I was quite a way past the sign before I recognised it.

It was another road sign, this one from pre-war days, a sort of mustard colour with a green logo. A tourist sign I think. There was no name on it, just a picture of a palm tree and 800 metres.

I was so busy looking for a car to steal, some sort of transport, that I got a hundred metres past the sign before I started thinking about palm trees. By now I was well and truly in the land of the flats and the low-cost houses and the tar and cement. A set of traffic lights was ahead. I was getting really wary. Things were quiet, but there were cars occasionally and I saw a kid on a skateboard and a couple of people going in and out of their homes. It was weird. This didn’t look like a war zone. I felt like I was the terrorist. I was the one with the rifle.

Palm tree. Wait a minute. Palm tree. Jeremy’s voice. Ambush. ‘Under the coconut tree,’ that’s what he’d said. What did he mean? An ambush under the coconut tree?

I started jogging. I had to take a long detour to get around the intersection. Luckily half the lights weren’t working, so it wasn’t as well lit as it would have been in the old days. The whole atmosphere was like that though, everything run-down, shabby. Potholes in the road, a drain blocked and water banked up in a big pond, a bus shelter with the roof missing. I ignored all that and hurried on. I covered maybe half a k and then saw the coconut tree. It was hard to work out what it was. On my left was an old house, like a historic place that was probably open to the public or something before the war, but on the right was a shopping centre. Out the front was a row of palm trees, all looking a bit old and trashed, and in the middle of the main entrance was a big neon palm with three-quarters of its lights out. Why on earth would anyone choose this as a place for an ambush? I could see an arcade or mall in the middle, a lot of individual shops, and a car park all around it. Down the far end was a supermarket, with big bins of fruit or vegetables out the front. Watermelons or potatoes or whatever. The lighting wasn’t too great here either and I couldn’t tell what half the shops were, let alone whether the bins held watermelons, or cans of dog food, or toothbrushes. Closest to me were a hairdresser’s and a clothes shop. There were shoppers everywhere. These people had a serious commitment to late-night shopping.

The next thing that happened was that I saw Jeremy.

It was a shock. I was scanning the car park and everything was alien and unrecognisable and in the middle of it all was a face that was familiar and friendly and part of my life. I focused on him at the same time as a leap of wild excitement happened inside my chest. Although I had been looking for them for hours, I could hardly believe I was seeing him. He moved quickly from the far side of the car park and as I watched he went behind a row of dump bins that were at right angles to the supermarket. He’d been trying to walk naturally, like he belonged there, but he didn’t look too natural to me. For one thing he walked a bit fast. That’s what had attracted my attention I think.

There was no sign of the others. I stayed where I was, behind a small tree, and tried to figure it out. They were probably behind the dump bins with him. Or maybe they were in different points around the car park waiting to ambush the terrorists? It still seemed a strange place for that.

Another movement attracted my attention. This time it wasn’t someone walking too quickly. It was someone moving too slowly. I gazed with a slowly building sense of horror. A man was creeping around the far side of the car park towards the dump bins, and it wasn’t Homer or Lee. And a moment after I saw him — this is hard to describe — it was as though I now, almost immediately, plugged myself into a new network of seeing. Now I was no longer looking at the car park and the occasional shopper with a trolley and the family at the boot of their Daihatsu and the seagulls swooping around looking for scraps. Now I saw a different view: this man with an automatic weapon, and another man coming around from the other side, also armed, and three others following him, and at least three more advancing through the car park, dodging from car to car, and all of them holding their rifles and moving like professionals.

I didn’t even have time to swear. I lost control of my legs for a moment, tried to move but just wobbled, then made myself set off across the road. ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ I asked myself, in one of those stupid thoughts that come into my head in the worst and wildest situations. I didn’t have an answer. ‘To get eaten by the fox, I suppose.’ I had no plan. I got control of my legs, though, and was suddenly in full war mode again. Keeping my head down and grabbing the rifle so tight I hurt my hand, I raced down the right-hand side of the car park, using the shadow of an overgrown hedge for cover.

With everyone’s attention focused on the dump bins, it wasn’t surprising that no-one noticed me but I wasn’t thinking about that. Just hoping that for once in my life I could be invisible. Just praying no-one would look my way. Arriving at the next tree panting like I’d run three thousand metres in an Olympics final.

I had about four seconds to decide what to do. Go in behind the dump bins and join Jeremy and whoever else was there? Attack the hunters? Hardly. A fox wouldn’t do that. Beyond the car park a rough old track ran uphill. There was a building site, probably an extension to the shopping centre, but it looked like no-one had done any building for a long time. What was that joke? Why do they still call it a building after it’s finished? Why don’t they call it a built? Well, this was definitely a building not a built, because they hadn’t got far past the foundations. What to do? What to do? The question kept pounding at the walls of my brain. It was paralysing me. Go to the dump bins? No. I’d just be joining Jeremy and anyone else there so I could die with them.

Attack? No, instant suicide.

I had to create a diversion, draw those men with guns away. OK, run across the car park firing the rifle so they chased after me? That sounded horribly like suicide too. But lying here on the damp and cold ground wasn’t going to save anyone and it wasn’t going to get me any closer to finding Gavin. Remember the reason you’re here, Ellie? Remember what you said to yourself just a few minutes ago? You can’t leave it to future Ellie to deal with the situation. This is the situation.

No, there was only one way and one place where a diversion might work. I took a deep breath but still felt as though not a skerrick of oxygen reached my lungs. Didn’t matter. I had to assume my body would take care of the breathing thing, like it had done fairly well up till now. I had to throw my life to the winds.