It was more than strange and the urge to run hard again seized him. The policeman might have thought better of it and could be giving chase. Blind fear gripped him for an instant, but there was no sign of any dust trail.
Regardless of the reason for the open road, there was no way he was going to double back.
Had he dreamed all of this? He seriously considered it. Was he dreaming now? Was he delirious from the collision with the barrier? he asked himself. With the pain he was feeling, he thought he may well be hallucinating.
It was all crazy. Surreal. But he spied landmarks on the distant mountains he knew so well. In his quest to find caves to explore, he’d intensively studied the area maps and online satellite images. The landmarks triangulated in his head, and they gave him a good fix for where he was. He was between the two tar roads that converged on Carnarvon. To buoy his own spirits, he forced himself to laugh at the predicament he found himself in. At least if he was delirious, he thought, his humour and navigation skills were crisp.
He tamed his mind back to important matters, contemplating what to do when he’d exit the dirt back onto the tar in the distance. He’d have to take that other highway into Carnarvon and then double back toward the accident to get home.
As he thought this over, he came through another drift, a dip through a dry riverbed, and the road veered around a gentle corner. He was traveling mercifully slow, not much faster than a runner’s sprint when something slammed him viciously across the chest, stopping him dead in his tracks as the bike went out from under him. The impact and sound cracked like a gunshot.
There was a loud TWANG as he fell, smashing into the ground, driving the air from his lungs. The motorbike continued riding on its own momentum until it left the road, hit a boulder and flopped over, its back wheel chugging round and round where it lay.
The padded jacket he wore had taken the brunt of the wire strung across the dirt road.
“Look,” a familiar voice said, screened by a large bush, “it’s our Prrrrretty Boy.”
Dara instinctively tried to roll toward the direction of the voice, but the voice snapped at him in an accent so thick he could barely understand the words. The tone was enough. “Don’t you look at me, boy! Put your face in the dirt.”
Clutching for air, ribs smashed from the blow in the front and crushed from the fall at the back, Dara obeyed. He heard the metallic snickers and zings of bailing wire hastily retrieved, coiled and clattering in the back of a pickup. A pickup he hadn’t seen from his approach, screened as it had been behind the thick wall of thorn bush the voice had hidden behind.
Self-preservation took over and Dara tried to roll to his knees, but swift footfalls through the dirt closed in on him in an instant and an explosion of sound, light and pain burst in the same instant within his mind. His neck snapped dangerously as the running boot met his helmet. The impact of it rolled him over and over in the dirt. He exaggerated the rolls, trying to make distance, but the assailant followed and delivered a steel toecap into the small of his back. He arched to the pain of it.
Rolling again, over and over with grit and grime obscuring the helmet visor, he saw only the outline of the pursuing figure. I have to identify him! The idea of it urgent within his mind seemed ludicrous; he was certain he’d be dead, but he knew he must try.
Rolling away hadn’t worked, so he rolled into a tight ball and blows came raining in from every angle, a tornado of fury that made him grateful for the helmet. Then, miraculously, the pain flooded away. Dara only heard the thuds of blows reporting themselves to his numb mind. Everything crystalized—he must play dead. Fifteen, twenty blows and kicks arrived in an avalanche as he entered an ethereal dream world where the crocodiles of traumatic hallucination began to play trumpets, its lizards dancing jigs.
With his body protectively curled into a ball, his eyes began swimming in tears. At last the attacker began to tire, the blows arrived less regularly, and the assailant’s breathing rasped from the effort. And then they stopped.
One last almighty kick arrived, aimed at Dara’s crotch—a tester to see if he was truly out cold. It didn’t land squarely and the burst of pain he expected was dulled. Dara rode it, completing the illusion that he was unconscious, for he very nearly was.
“Not such a prrrrretty boy now, hey?” The rolled Rs were muffled by Dara’s helmet, but they were unmistakable. And he saw a gob splatter onto the visor, where it hung for a moment then trickled slowly through the settled dust, clearing a runnel of visibility.
Boot crunches retreated, the door of a vehicle opened and closed, and a diesel engine clattered into life. The ordeal left Dara facing down the road and away from the truck. He dared not sneak a look to identify what he could, he felt too numb and weary to bother. The wheels began to crunch slowly over the stony ground, approaching, louder and louder. Through the fog of pain, alarm bells rang through Dare’s mind. He experienced the urgent dilemma to roll aside and risk betraying his pretended coma, perhaps goading the driver to more violence, or to lay still and risk being crushed.
The crunch of wheels was close now, and closer still. Surely nobody would… his mind begged against the evidence of his ears. But a moment later, the pressure of a wheel pushed into his helmet, trying to mount it. The hard shell ground against the rough earth, stuttering forward until it seated in a rut and became wedged.
The wheel found traction and rode up but fell immediately back with insufficient engine revs. The engine gunned louder and the front wheel juddered again, bit and popped up and over, the tread imprinting its track onto the clear Perspex, smearing the dust and gob. The rear wheels only slapped him with a glancing blow as it accelerated past.
Dara lay in stunned disbelief. He heard the pickup shifting through its gears into the distance and in the silence of its wake, the motorbike still burbled as it idled on its side in the drainage trench.
Dara rolled to his back and groaned. He needed the helmet off, the protective shell of it now a prison to his senses. His mind was clearing, and the tight-fitting enclosure clamped on his head became claustrophobic. It obscured his vision and hearing in those moments of desperation when he urgently needed his senses on the highest alert to protect his body from further assault and tires.
He must get off the road, he knew it. If he was wrong and the police were still diverting traffic—what little traffic the local highway attracted—a detoured commuter might be in a hurry to buy back time.
He tried to lift his left arm, needing both hands to loosen and lift the helmet away, but with horror found it paralyzed, lying next to him at an awkward angle.
With his right hand, he reached over and lifted it by the sleeve. It was weighty and dead and felt detached—severed. The shock of it horrified him. He lifted it high enough to look at, and the angle it described left no doubt that it was broken. With some small joy, he realized it still felt meatily attached, as it would only go so far. He placed it across his sternum and it immediately slid from his chest, hitting the ground alongside him with a slap.
He tried to roll but his leg was dead too. Adrenaline coursing through his body had extinguished his neural response; everything felt dull, heavy and paralyzed—cadaverous.
As the shock subsided, the pain came on like a breaking wave, every violated part of his body screaming private agonies, a cacophony to an overloaded brain.
He was weeping, and realized he had been doing so all along, but now it was tears of pain. The sobbing collapsed his rib cage, crushed as it was from every angle.
Dara got a grip on himself, held his breath and willed the sobs away. “They won’t help you…” he admonished himself. “Focus—move—crawl!”
He tried, but couldn’t crawl, so he managed to roll to his good side and inch himself with his good arm across the ground until the stony dirt in his field of view through the visor gave way to the close-up detail of threadbare grasses, the sticks and stones at the margin of the roadway.
The effort of it exhausted him and the mo
vement brought fresh focus to this injury or that fracture in every extremity. “I’ll rest a moment,” he reassured himself aloud.
The last thing he saw was the zigzag tire pattern on the outside of the visor.
He could hear that the little bike was still chugging, and it pleased him that at least it was not too badly damaged.
Chapter 15
When Dara wasn’t home by dark, Marsha called the police, but the operator’s accent was too thick for her stressed mind to grasp. She had the house staff talk and interpret for her.
The farmer on whose land the SKA compound was built arrived to assist. He proved invaluable, immediately dispatching anyone who could drive or ride a farm bike to fan out into the mountains where Dara was known to normally wander. Calls came in and false leads were followed, the entire hunt dogged by limited radio communications imposed on the area by the SKA development.
The ordeal became immensely frustrating, with most of the communications in Afrikaans, laboriously translated into English.
Finally, near midnight, the news of a bike accident from an unexpected quadrant came in. A farmer on his way home saw the motorbike and broken body lying to the side of the rarely used road.
He reported the find as soon as he reached mobile coverage near the national road. Since ambulances in the area were a rare luxury, he’d loaded the kid into the back of his pickup and sped for Carnarvon.
By the time Marsha arrived at the small clinic to identify him, they’d cleaned Dara up and were conducting emergency procedures. He was delirious but breathing on his own.
“He’s in bad shape but very lucky,” the doctor told her gravely. “Three broken ribs. It looks like a crushed thoracic vertebra and a hairline fracture in a cervical vertebra—we’ll have to confirm that with MRI. Two weeks ago we’d have been in a world of trouble… this facility didn’t even exist then.”
Marsha was relieved. The new clinic and its doctor had only just arrived, part of the social expenditure by the SKA investment group and other donors.
“He’s our first serious case,” the doctor disclosed. Their respective accents made it clear that both were newcomers to the area.
“Thank you,” she said. She was shaking uncontrollably. “What happened?”
“Seems like he lost control. He’s pretty beaten up though, must have been going like the devil was after him. There are lesser problems; his elbow's dislocated, knee’s ripped wide open and arm broken. I’m sincerely hoping we don’t have internal injuries. He’s certainly concussed—good thing he had a quality helmet.”
Marsha was suddenly furious. What the hell was he doing off the farm and acting like a maniac? she thought. “It’s so unlike him,” she lamented. “He’s a cautious boy.”
“He’s what, sixteen? Seventeen?” the doctor asked, trying to soften it. “They’re all like this, think they’re bullet proof. It’s a wonder boys ever make it to twenty.”
“But it’s so unlike him…” she kept saying.
Mothers always think that. The doctor shrugged at the thought. Their kids never make bad calls. He gave her a moment. “His father here too? Or are you guardian?”
“Dad’s abroad, I’m sole guardian. I’ve called his dad, he’s getting on an emergency flight.”
“All right. I’m sorry. But it was on a public roadway and the police are buzzing me for details; they want to open a case.”
Chapter 16
They kept Dara heavily sedated for the first four days, and Marsha held vigil by his bedside round the clock.
The doctors understood and let her remain, moving a bed in beside him. Her employer footed the bill for additional medical staff to be flown in.
Moving Dara to another hospital was considered, but the decision to avoid an arduous road or air trip proved to be the right option.
The police had an open docket and wanted answers; Dara was an unlicensed motorist on a public road, albeit a secondary un-tarred one. In a farming district, the police generally turned a blind eye to a farm boy commuting between farms who stuck to the dirt, but Dara was not a farm boy and his only access to the dirt road on which he’d been found was by a significant distance down a national highway. According to Constable Andre Kruger who delivered the charge, his boss, Station Commander, was taking a very dim view of the whole affair.
Considering the extent of Dara’s injuries, “He must have been going on a hell of a lick,” the hulking constable told Marsha in broken English. “And I’m sorry Madam, but the Captain will make an example of your boy. So much is changing around here,” he added bitterly, “we can’t have every newcomer thinking it’s a wild-west show with no laws.”
The case was by all accounts cut and dried in the mind of the constable. But Marsha couldn’t understand why the recovered motorbike had virtually no scratch on it. The farmer who had found Dara reported he’d found it laying only a very short stretch from the boy. The bike only had a scratch or two and a minor bend to its crash bar against its rider’s pummelling; the whole affair made no sense.
Marsha was no forensic expert, but she went toe-to-toe with the big policeman, insisting that any reasonable person would see the glaring disparity in damage between the rider and the machine; one virtually unscathed, the other severely trashed.
The Constable grunted and said he couldn’t comment. He did offer her friendly advice, that she shouldn’t take it up with the Captain for fear of inflaming the situation.
Once he’d stabilized, Marsha left Dara’s bedside long enough to visit the scene of the crash to take photographs and some quick measurements of her own. It was clear that although the police were treating the run-up to the accident as serious, they were disinterested in the details of what they’d already judged to be pure recklessness.
At the crash site, there was not much evidence for her untrained eye to see. No skid or slide marks in the gravel, no pieces of the bike, though she hadn’t expected any of these since the bike and protective wear Dara was wearing showed no evidence of these things. All her hopes for some obvious visual clues had been dashed, but she kept the camera clicking at every angle and minute detail that she’d imagined an actual investigator might record.
Jakob, the farmer who was effectively her landlord, had arranged for Frik, the farmer who had found Dara, to meet up at the site.
The two farmers offered invaluable insight.
Frik showed where and how he’d found Dara, even laying down for her in the scrub to photograph his position and posture. Jakob crouched where the bike had been found lying, the impression of it still pressed visibly into the scrubby weeds days later.
Frik fancied himself as something of a game tracker and he pointed out a place where a vehicle had recently been parked off the road, hard up against a thick thorn bush adjacent to the incident.
He pointed out the discernible tire marks in the dust. There was also a crush of grasses and foliage where the vehicle had stood. “It’s within the last few days,” he assured. “Since the rains for sure. I don’t know what it means or if it can help, but a car has backed in here.”
They’d decided that Dara was stable enough to reduce his medication and bring him out of an induced coma.
He groaned, and much as Marsha wanted to scream with joy that the candle of his life was beginning to re-ignite, his laboured wincing at every breath and muted whimpers ripped at her heart.
She smoothed the jet-black hair at his temples, shushing and cooing soft motherly sounds close to his ear.
Then the moment she’d begged fate to grant arrived and his lids parted tentatively, testing the light; his eyeballs tracking slowly and worriedly, bloodshot and fearful.
“It’s okay baby, you’ve had an accident but you’re safe. You’re safe.” Marsha found herself crying, teardrops falling onto his pillow and she wiped them away. She didn’t want the first thing Dara saw to be her fear.
An hour later, Dara was fully awake, clutching for breath through shattered ribs, every movement an agony in another bo
dy quadrant.
“What possessed you,” Marsha gently lamented. She’d gone through an internal whirlwind of emotions in the past few minutes; gratitude that the doctors said he’d recover fully, anger that he’d done this to himself, and determination to get the answers out of him. She’d kept a lid on them all, but now she was cautiously testing how far she could push him in this delicate state.
“I’m sorry mum,” he winced, his words stilted and slow in coming. “I should have told you. I’m sorry, it was stupid of me. I just wanted to do something on my own; I just wanted to meet with a man I knew from the Internet. We thought it best we meet out of town.”
A man from the internet?! Marsha’s mind went into overdrive. It hadn’t been an aimless joy ride. A man from the internet! Alarm bells were ringing in her head, but she held back and calmed herself.
“What are you talking about, Dara? What man? Why were you on that road? Is he a farmer? You’re making no sense.” In spite of herself, her rapid-fire questions barraged him.
“I was coming back… back from Loxton.”
“From Loxton? The town Loxton? Sixty kilometres away?!”
“Yes, sorry mum.” He adjusted his position and almost cried out, his arm in plaster, his leg in traction.
“The doctor says you’re to lay still. I’m sorry baby, I, I’m just… I really don’t understand what you’re saying. You went to Loxton and you met someone?”
“Yes Mum, a guy from here, from Carnarvon, but he lives in Cape Town now. That’s why Loxton, it’s on his way here.”
“But why not meet in Carnarvon? Why didn’t he just come to the house?”
“It’s stupid. Now I realize he should have come to the house. I just…. I didn’t want him to know I’m a kid. He was a stranger, I didn’t know how it would turn out.”
The alarm bells were still going off again, Marsha’s mind still racing to all and any manner of shocking conclusion. A man off the internet, meeting my son and he doesn’t want the man to know his age! Her internal dialogue was a babbling crowd of insistent panic.
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