A Killing Frost

by John Marsden

  "Looks that way."

  "I was hoping so much..."

  "I didn't know if it'd be good or bad. I never thought they'd pick us up anyway, and I don't know about walking out on my family."

  "Yeah, that was what I was worried about. But there doesn't seem to be anything we can do for them. Not yet."

  "You don't like me any more, do you?"

  He'd caught me by surprise. I knew it was coming, but not like that.

  "Yes, of course I like you."

  "But not the way it was."

  "No, I guess not"

  "Why?"

  "Dunno. It just happened."

  "What, you mean that one minute you liked me and a millisecond later you didn't?"

  "More or less, yeah."

  "That doesn't sound very likely."

  "I don't care what it sounds like, that's the way it was."

  "Did Fi say anything against me?"

  "Fi? No, why would she?"

  "I don't know, but you're always talking to her and you take so much notice of what she says."

  "I don't know about that, but she didn't say anything to put me off you. She's not a backstabber, not like me." I grinned, but'Lee wasn't into laughs today.

  "Is it something I said?"

  "No, no, really. Nothing dramatic happened, I swear. Maybe we'd just seen enough of each other for a while. I mean, God, we're only young, we're not meant to be getting married, you know. At our age we're meant to have lots of romances."

  "My father was seventeen when he was married."

  "Well, whoopiedoo, I'm very happy for him, but I've got no plans yet, believe me."

  "Are you having it off with Homer?"

  I lifted my arm fast, to hit him, then changed my mind. But I don't know how I didn't push him straight off the roof. lie had such a hide, saving that. I know he was only saying it because he was upset, but that didn't make it all right. What a dickhead. It made me really-pleased that I'd dropped him, because at that moment I didn't care if I never saw him again, and I had no interest in continuing the conversation. So we sat there in silence for a couple of minutes.

  He knew he'd gone too far—I mean, you didn't have to be a Nobel Prize winner to work that out.

  I could feel him getting ready to apologise. There wasn't much else he could do. But I wasn't going to make it easy for him. He could stew for a while vet, as far as I was concerned. Eventually though, after he'd cleared his throat a couple of times, he managed to struggle through it, taking about five minutes.

  "OK, OK," I said at last, "don't worry about it. But honestly, Lee, nothing special's happened. I just want some time and some space. Let's not make a whole big issue of it, please. We've got on pretty well so far—we haven't had too many fights. But I've got the feeling that our toughest times are still ahead. I think we're in for a really rough stretch now, because there's no obvious path for us to take, and I think it could get seriously depressing. So we've got to keep cheerful and not get too hung up about stuff like this."

  He didn't answer and the two of us kept sitting there for a long time, until it started raining.

  "Come on," I said at last, "let's get down. I'll have to find somewhere else to watch for the bad guys."

  Twenty-one

  Late in the afternoon we had a meeting in a parked car where I'd sat for hours. It was an old white Rover 2000 with leather seats, in quite good condition. I don't think it had been in an accident; it probably just died of old age, but I figured I might as well be comfortable, so that's why I chose it. Plus it was one of the few cars that still had its windscreen. There were a couple of leaks from rust spots in the roof but I sat far enough away from them and stared out through the scratched and dirty windscreen at the grey road beyond.

  The others had been back in the middle of the car yard, lounging around doing nothing much. Most of them seemed asleep when I went to check on them. I rigged up a long cord with a can of pebbles on the end of it, so that if any soldiers appeared I could yank on the cord, making a noise which would alert the others. And at 3.30 I got to use it. A couple of trucks appeared on the road, going much slower than the other traffic which had sped past from time to time. I pulled the can over straight away. By now I knew the look of a patrol when I saw one. Then I slithered out of the Rover and did a stomach crawl back to the gang. We made a quick decision—there was no time for any other kind—they would hide in the pit and I would go up the tree above the pantech and watch from there.

  So I shinned up the wet trunk, trying not to hug it too tightly, to keep as dry as I could. Then I huddled in among the dripping leaves and watched the patrol. They turned straight into the gates of the yard then stopped, and eight soldiers, six of them women, got out. The encouraging thing was that there was no sense of purpose about the trucks or the people. They didn't look like highly trained commandos launching a search and destroy mission. They looked like a bunch of part-time soldiers who'd been dragged out into the ram to do a job that they didn't have a lot of enthusiasm for. There was an officer with them, and she yelled and pointed for a few minutes, and then they split up into pairs and went off in different directions.

  It was all a bit casual. They poked around and under cars, and looked in most of them. But that was the extent of it. One of them went to the back door of the house, which he probably thought was the front door, and broke the pane of glass in it. I heard the tinkle of it falling. He peered through it, but came back almost straight away wrinkling his face and saving something to his partner. I could guess what it was: this place stinks. It did too; I didn't blame him.

  Within half an hour they were gone. I waited ten minutes, then went and got the others out of their hole. No one was too excited. We'd seen it all before. It was another escape, not a particularly close one, but of course it could easily have been different. It would only have taken one curious soldier to notice the galvanised iron over the pit and call the others, and that would have been the end of us. One day it would happen. One day we would be caught. Seemed like it wasn't going to be'this time.

  I went back to the Rover to continue my watch, and it was there that the others came, half an hour before sunset. Robyn sat in the front seat beside me, with Fi on her lap, and the boys squashed into the back. It was so crowded that they had to leave the back doors open to fit themselves in. Kevin sat right under a leak and got dripped on every few seconds.

  The most unexpected thing about our meeting was that it was Fi who took charge. Everyone else seemed too tired and depressed. Homer looked terrible, like he'd been to a B & S and was the last one left at the Recovery. Lee was sunk in his own private thoughts. Kevin looked so jumpy; he kept blinking all the time, as though he had dust in his eves. Robyn was OK, I think, but quiet, but Fi seemed strong and determined, like she could be sometimes.

  "Seeing nobody else seems to have any ideas," she said in a firm voice, "I'm going to say what l think."

  "Onya, Fi, go for it," I said.

  "Well," she said, "I think we have to take care of ourselves for a while. The best thing would be a three-week holiday on the Barrier Reef, all expenses paid and a thousand dollars spending money. I don't think we're going to get that, though. But even in World War Two the pilots only had to fly a certain number of missions, and then they'd be rested. Battle fatigue, I think it was called. Well, we've got our own battle fatigue, and we need to take a rest. If we try and do any more for a while we'll just wreck ourselves. The last 'few weeks we've been going steadily crazy, and part of going crazy is that you don't notice you're going crazy. Whether we do it for our own sakes or whether we do it because it'll make us better fighters doesn't matter; the fact is we have to look after ourselves."

  "So do you think we should have a holiday?" Homer asked.

  I was so relieved that Homer was showing some life again that I could have cried. I think the thing that mattered most was that Fi was giving us permission to take a break. There were no adults to say such things to us, and we'd stopped saying them to ou
rselves. We'd got ourselves into a state of mind where we couldn't think clearly; we were just driving onwards until, like overworked'engines, we broke down. As Fi talked I realised that it was OK to take a break, that we didn't have to win the war all by ourselves.

  "Yes," said Fi firmly.

  "I don't want to go back to Hell," Robyn said.

  "Likewise," I said.

  "I wouldn't mind," Kevin said. "It's so long since I've been there."

  "I was thinking of the Isthmus," Fi said.

  "Yeah!" Lee suddenly said. We got such a shock at the way he blurted it out that we got the giggles. I could see Lee in the cracked rear-vision mirror; he looked a bit sheepish, but he was grinning.

  "You like the idea, huh?" Homer said to him.

  "Well, I like the Isthmus," Lee said.

  The Isthmus is a long neck of land that connects the town of Ferris with Blue Rocks National Park. It's actually called Webster's Isthmus, but no one ever uses its full name.

  There's no access to the National Park by car; you have the choice of foot or boat, because there's no road across the Isthmus. That made it ideal for us, of course. The park is beautiful, but it's the Isthmus itself that's extra beautiful. I'd been there once with Fi's family, staying at a cabin that some friends of theirs owned. I didn't know Lee had been there at all.

  "When did von go there?" I asked his reflection in the mirror.

  "With the scouts," he said.

  "I didn't know you were a scout."

  "Well I was. For more than a year. There's a scout camp about a k from Ferris, and we spent five days there one Easter. It was great. They made us hike our little butts off, but I enjoyed it. What a place."

  "Mmm," I agreed, remembering that wild rocky landscape, and the water exploding against the cliffs. "We'd be safe there for a while. I think the colonists'll be too busy colonising to go bushwalking."

  "It means staving away from Wirrawee quite a bit longer," Robyn said hesitantly. "I feel guilty when we're not near our families, even if we can't do anything to help them."

  "Of course," said Fi. "We all feel that. But honestly, what can we do for them? We all know the answer: nothing. We've got to think of this as a holiday. Let's say we'll go there for two'weeks, and at the end of the two weeks we'll go back to Wirrawee and check out the situation. We've got enough food, easily, with the cans we scored here, but too much to carry. We'll have to take the Jackaroo. I think it's worth the risk. If we go in the middle of the night, drive slowly, don't use lights, we should be safe. Surely they'll be thinking that we're out of the district by now. All the search parties'll be coming back to Cobbler's saying they found nothing, and I guess their bosses'll never know what sloppy searching they do."

  "Hope they never find out," Robyn said, with feeling.

  There was no real opposition to Fi's idea. The only problem was the timing. No one felt comfortable about leaving straight away. It was still too soon after the attack. We decided we would wait four days, and see whether they had stopped combing the district by then. It would be boring, but boredom was better than death, any day.

  So we fiddled around, doing nothing. I spent the time sitting and thinking, looking out across the paddocks. I'm embarrassed to say that I went back to thumb-sucking in a big way, till the thumb on my left hand looked soft and white and wet. But at least it was clean.

  We looked in the house for books, but only found two, apart from technical manuals. I thought it was amazing, a house with just two books. One of them was How to Win Friends and Influence People, and the other was Gone With the Wind. No one wanted the first one but Fi and Robyn argued over Gone With the Wind. In the end, they compromised. Fi's the faster reader, so she started it, then as she finished each page, she tore it out and gave it to Robyn. It was a good system.

  Homer and Kevin started mucking round with the Jackaroo engine, trying different parts that they salvaged from the wrecked ears. They claimed they were making it faster, quieter, cleaner, smoother. By the time they finished, I was just grateful it was running at all.

  Lee disappeared for hours on end. I mean many hours, like eight or ten. I think he just roamed across the countryside, going wherever his mood took him. He was so restless. I wondered if he was turning into a wild animal, a lone wolf maybe.

  It was four o'clock on the third day when our plans changed. I was on the top of the pantech, sucking my thumb, watching Lee come back across the paddock. He was sticking close to the beeline, slipping quickly from tree to tree, a shadow among many shadows. When he was climbing the fence into the wrecker's yard, I went down to meet him.

  "Get everyone," he said as soon as he saw me. "Tell them to meet at the Jackaroo."

  I took one look at his face and ran to find the others. In just a couple of minutes we were gathered there, facing Lee. He said one word, and that was enough.

  "Dogs," he said.

  "How do you mean'" asked Fi, but the rest of us knew.

  "They've got a pack of dogs," Lee said. "Two alsatians and a couple of beagles. They've knocked off for today but I reckon they'll be back tomorrow. And they're not mucking around! They know what they're doing."

  "Tell us the whole story," Homer said.

  "There's not much to tell. About 3 k's from here, there's a church and a hall, and a farmhouse across the road. I was just coming over the hill behind the church when I heard dogs barking. I dropped down and crawled forward a bit, and there they were: searching the church and hall. Four soldiers, each with a dog. When they finished, they went over to the farmhouse and did the same thing there. Only took them ten minutes. And I forgot to mention: there were two others with rifles, just watching. Then they all got in a truck, and drove along to the next place, looked like an old primary school. Same thing there, then they had a bit of a conference, looked at their watches, hopped in the truck and drove back the way they'd come."

  "So they look like they're working their way along the road?" I asked.

  "Exactly. And if that's what they arc doing, they'd be here by tomorrow lunchtime. At the latest."

  We all looked at each other.

  "Well, who's for the Isthmus?" Homer asked, when no one else said anything.

  It seemed the most sensible thing to do. We had to go by car now, because if we tried to walk the dogs would pick up our scent. We had to move the Jackaroo, because it was such a fatal piece of evidence against us. Seemed like the time had come to get way out of this district.

  After that it was all action.

  We didn't have any maps but we thought we could scam it. If we kept to the south of Stratton we should hit the Conway Highway, and that went through Ferris. I figured on a three-hour drive. Petrol might be our biggest problem. Here we were surrounded by hundreds of cars and not a drop of petrol to be had. The Jackaroo was three-quarters full and I could only hope its tank would be big enough.

  We decided to leave at 2.30 am, but in the end we got so bored and impatient sitting around that we went a few minutes before two o'clock. Robyn and Fi had been sitting in the car for an hour already: they said they were doing it to make sure they got the front seat. The boys grumbled a bit but finally sorted themselves out in the back; I jumped in the driver's seat, and a moment later we were on our way.

  The ram was blowing in again and the temperature was dropping; not a great start to our beach holiday. But we were in a better mood. Just being on the move again was good.

  We crawled along on the edge of the bitumen, without lights. A few times when the bush thinned and the road curved I stopped. We took it in turns to walk up to the corner, check it out, and wave the car on.

  Random patrols seemed to be a thing of the past, and we felt we would see any convoys before they saw us, even if they did have their lights dimmed. It struck me that since'our attack on Cobbler's Bay we'd hardly seen any convoys. I mentioned that to the others and it cheered them up even more. Maybe we really had achieved something special with our anfo. Certainly Lieutenant Colonel Finley's reaction had been en
couraging, lie wouldn't have come rushing to the radio to speak to us if we'd just let down someone's tyres.

  We started talking about it all. It seemed a new compulsion: everyone suddenly gushing about what they'd done and what they'd seen and how they'd felt. It had been the same after our other big hits,' talking about them over and over until we didn't feel the need any more. But we hadn't really done that with Cobbler's Bay. Maybe we'd been too tired, or too depressed. For me, it was because the whole thing was too big. I couldn't cope with the enormity of it. Especially the last bit, shooting those soldiers. That was way too big. And the biggest thing of all was that in another way it had hardly affected me. I'd put bullets through their guts, shot them dead and left them there with their blood pouring out onto the bright red sand, and I'd hardly noticed I'd done it. Just another moment in my life, an "incident," like drenching sheep. I was numb about it.

  So we drove on and I talked about all that, a bit. Not a lot, mainly because it was so hard to get a word in. Everyone was cutting across everyone else, jumping in before the other person had finished what they were saving, finishing their sentences for them, even/it was like some of our drama rehearsals at school. Homer was still the quietest but he did say a few things, each of them making me realise how much the time in the container and the escape across the Bay, into the arms of the enemy, had affected him. I remember hoping desperately that he wouldn't get caught again, because I didn't think he'd be able to stand it. It had really lazed him, the swim, then being grabbed by those guys at the creek. It had damaged his confidence.

  "I'd given up," he said, when I asked him about the time in the water.

  "You'd given up?" I said, shocked.

  "They'd seen me, and I was too tired to dive anymore."

  "Who'd seen you?"

  "The guys in the boat, and the ones in the chopper."

  "So what happened? Were they shooting at you? How'd you get away? You hadn't really given up?"