Incurable

by John Marsden

  For a moment I thought he’d somehow even managed to miss the windscreens but then the back one caved in with a terrible crack and a second later the front one went in sympathy. It was way different to the window in the Landcruiser. I’m sure the front one hadn’t been hit; it might have been something to do with the different air pressure in the cab when the back one went out. Windscreens O’Brien would have loved me if they had a branch on this side of the border. I’d promised myself I wasn’t going to let anyone shoot my car windows out again. That promise hadn’t lasted long.

  Maybe the only good thing about the war is that it taught us not to panic if we can possibly help it, but I gotta admit this was testing the limits. I’m not sure about that theory anyway, because Jeremy and Jess had a fairly comfortable time during the war and they weren’t panicking now, no more than the rest of us. All I could think was, ‘I’ll panic later, but for now we need to get out of here.’ I yelled back over my left shoulder, ‘OK if I hit the brakes, you guys roll out, you might get a shot at him as he goes over.’

  ‘OK,’ I thought I heard Homer answer, although a second later I realised it could have been, ‘No way.’ There was so much noise that my hearing was suffering. I had to hope it was ‘OK’ so I yelled ‘Hang on,’ and slammed the brakes with everything, and I mean everything. Not only the foot brake, but the hand brake as well, and then for good measure dropped the gearstick down to low. The ute practically stood on its nose. ‘Hhmm, nice brakes,’ I thought, ‘must remember to write to Toyota.’ I wouldn’t have been surprised if we’d done a forward roll. I think the boys already had their doors open but we stopped so hard that they fell out instead of doing a graceful exit. Lucky their rifles didn’t go off in the process.

  In one way it worked beautifully, because a few moments later the helicopter went right over the top of us at about zero altitude. If we’d had the radio on I reckon he’d have taken out the aerial. OK, slight exaggeration, but he was extremely low. If I hadn’t stopped when I did, I think we would have been dead meat, so that was the way it worked beautifully. In another way it didn’t work at all, because although I think Homer and Lee both managed to fire a few rounds they were too off balance and it had no effect on the chopper.

  They piled back into the car and I accelerated gently away. The helicopter was now throwing enough light again for me to see the next bit of road. It was fairly straight, bit of a curve to the right a few hundred metres ahead. The helicopter was doing a tight circle so he could come back for the next round. I’d bought us a bit of time, if nothing else. I tried to go faster but we were driving in crazy swerving patterns, half the time because I didn’t know where the road went and half the time because I knew where it went but I didn’t want us to be shot.

  ‘Where is he?’ I yelled back over my shoulder at Homer.

  ‘Starting another run at us. Straight behind.’

  ‘Got any ideas?’

  ‘Not right off the top of my head, no.’

  This all sounds like a calm intelligent conversation but it was done in jerks and bits and pieces as I slowed and accelerated and swerved and nearly stopped and zigzagged. I don’t know why we weren’t all carsick.

  ‘Here he comes,’ Jess yelled. ‘God this is exciting isn’t it?’

  I looked at her in disbelief. Well, I didn’t actually look at her but in my head I did. I was running out of strategies. I didn’t plan to do this but at the last second my foot did it for me; I must have instinctively felt that it was a good idea. My foot went down on the accelerator, the ute hesitated for a long second, then took off. I guess twin-cabs don’t exactly have the power lift-off of a Porsche but this thing did get going at quite a rate. And that meant we were suddenly going flat out at a wall of darkness. It took me a second to remember I had headlights, another second to decide whether it was wise to use them, and another second to find the switch. I suppose it then took another quarter of a second for them to come on.

  If I’m going to be strictly mathematical about this I’d have to add a few more units of time to register the fence coming up and then some more for my reflexes to start operating. When you panic, the reflexes are not as quick because they’re paralysed. By this time we were well and truly off the road, off the ground too I suspect, and although I finally got around to turning the wheel it was way too late. Jess let out a scream like Courtney when she got her first period. So much for her finding it all exciting. We hit the fence. ‘We don’t need the helicopter to kill us,’ I thought, ‘I’ll take care of the job all by myself An image of Chris appeared strongly in my mind.

  The fence was not a great one, but it wasn’t too bad. I hate to think what might have happened if it had been freshly strung with hard lines of steel barbed wire. But this farmer knew his fence had a good few years in it yet and he wasn’t ready to update. So we thundered into it almost headfirst, as I hadn’t got far with turning the steering wheel, and we burst through into the paddock, dragging quantities of wire and droppers and a fence post or two.

  We were bouncing hard in a fairly rough paddock. I snapped the headlights off but I’d seen that the paddock was quite open and seemed to go a long way. Now I had some room to manoeuvre, but if the paddock had the usual quota of cattle, logs, drink troughs, rabbit warrens and other hazards, I was fairly sure that I could find lots of ways yet to get into trouble. The helicopter’s light picked us up and I swerved violently to the left then back to the right. I flicked on the lights again, to get a glimpse of our future, but also to distract him. As I turned them off I thought I saw something. Well of course I saw something. Grass for example. But something else. I had a moment’s agony of indecision. I felt I couldn’t risk turning them on again. I had to trust my judgement and assume that I’d seen what I thought I saw.

  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, split
ting 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.