Dark Wind Blowing

by Jackie French

  ‘That’s what’s going to happen,’ continued Loser. ‘Everyone in this room is going to die, and then it’s going to spread right through the town and everywhere. That’s what happens when you let a virus out,’ he added, his voice almost like a little kid’s telling a fairy story. ‘The virus spreads and spreads and you can’t stop it. There’re lots of viruses in here.’ He held the test tube higher.

  Mr Simpson moved towards him and stretched out his hand. ‘Lance, I think you’d better give that to me …’

  Lance moved. One step across the room, his arm raised, then PING, the test tube shattered against the table.

  The room was still. Loser gazed at their faces. ‘Now you’ll see,’ he whispered. Then he was gone.

  The room was silent. Someone giggled at the back. Caitlin, thought Mike. She was the sort who’d giggle at a time like this.

  Mr Simpson looked at the mess of glass and brown powder on the floor and table. ‘Can anyone tell me what that was all about?’ he asked plaintively.

  No one spoke. Mike swallowed. ‘Loser … I mean Lance … said he got that stuff out at the old Tenterfield property. He said they’re doing experiments out there and he got a test tube of this stuff.’

  ‘Viruses?’ asked Mr Simpson disbelievingly.

  ‘Well, that’s what he told Budgie and Jordie. But he told me when we were walking to school that it was a test tube of explosives, except you needed white powder to detonate it.’

  Mr Simpson’s lips twitched. ‘Explosives? Biological warfare?’ He bent down and rubbed a little of the powder between his fingers. It left a reddish stain, like dried blood.

  ‘I think I know what this is,’ said Mr Simpson. ‘It’s ochre. You can buy it at the hardware store. You add it to concrete when you’re mixing it, to change the colour.’

  ‘Loser … I mean Lance’s dad’s been doing some handyman stuff out at Tenterfield. At least, that’s what Lance said.’

  ‘Which is where I suppose he got this from,’ said Mr Simpson, ‘even if it’s not an agent of biological warfare.’

  He grinned. ‘I think we can assume it’s safe to get back to the history of the gold rushes. Someone … Caitlin … could you run and get a dustpan and brush from the tuck shop? Thank you. Right, where were we?’

  Chapter 6

  FRIDAY, 12.14 P.M.

  Mike bit his lip. He hated Friday tests. You thought all the information was in your brain, but as soon as you had to write it down it evaporated.

  He glanced across the aisle. Jazz was frowning over her paper too. In front of them Mr Simpson chewed his pen thoughtfully as he bent down to read what Budgie was writing. ‘Try to write a bit more legibly, boy,’ he muttered, blinking irritably.

  Suddenly, he straightened stiffly, as though his back and knees ached. ‘Does anyone else find it hot in here?’ he demanded breathlessly.

  Mike blinked. It was hot, but not that hot. No warmer than it had been yesterday, or the day before.

  Mr Simpson rubbed his fingers over his forehead, then spread them out and stared at them. His fingers twitched, then twitched again. ‘I think …’ said Mr Simpson slowly. ‘I think I had better sit …’ His voice stopped, but his mouth stayed open. Suddenly he screamed, arching backwards. He screamed again. This time he fell, landing awkwardly on the edge of Budgie’s desk. He tried to grasp it, but another spasm struck. He fell to the floor, still screaming.

  Someone else was screaming, Mike realised. Caitlin, and a couple of the other girls too. No one moved, but someone had to. Someone had to do something.

  Jazz scrambled to her feet. Mike clenched his fists to wake himself up and followed her. They bent over Mr Simpson.

  ‘No,’ gasped Mr Simpson, ‘no.’ He arched and screamed again, his arms and legs flailing against the floor.

  ‘I’ll get Mrs Trang,’ said Jazz hurriedly. ‘I’ll tell her to call an ambulance. You’ll stay with him?’

  Mike nodded. He wondered if he should get Mr Simpson a glass of water. That was the sort of thing they did in movies. But what use could a glass of water be? Maybe he should hold his legs down. Or …

  The others were crowding around. Mike found his voice again. ‘Stand back,’ he said. ‘Everyone back to their seats … no, I mean everyone go to the back of the room. Stand well back. Budgie, you and Jordie move your desk back. Better move the others too.’ The ambulance men would need room to put a stretcher down, he thought.

  Caitlin said shakily from the back of the room. ‘It’s the powder, isn’t it?’

  ‘What powder?’ began Mike, then realised what she meant. ‘No, of course it isn’t. The stuff in the test tube couldn’t have done this. It’s impossible. It’s just a coincidence.’

  Mr Simpson screamed again. His back arched, and his feet and hands drummed strange patterns on the floor. Then as suddenly as it began he was quiet again.

  ‘Mr Simpson?’ whispered Mike.

  Mr Simpson’s eyes opened. ‘Can’t breathe,’ he muttered. ‘Can’t breathe …’ His body spasmed again.

  Mike sat there helplessly. There must be something he could do. Something! He could hear someone’s laughter from another class; far off in the distance, the sound of magpies sleepy with the heat. Normal sounds above the painful breathing of the man on the floor.

  ‘Maybe we should, like, go outside,’ said Caitlin nervously.

  Mike stared at her. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because … because if he’s caught a virus from that test tube we might catch it too. He might be infectious.’

  ‘There was nothing in the test tube!’ said Mike angrily. ‘Nothing dangerous anyway. Where would Loser get something dangerous from?’

  ‘He said from Tenterfield,’ pointed out Budgie. ‘Maybe they’re from that sect in Japan.’

  ‘Yeek, I saw a programme about them on TV,’ said someone else.

  ‘They made that poisonous gas stuff and killed all those people.’

  ‘I saw it too! The show said the people are still at it,’ said Emma Donaldson.

  ‘No, it didn’t, it said they might be,’ said someone else.

  ‘They had a place in Australia. That’s where they made it …’

  ‘My dad says a teaspoon of that biological warfare stuff could wipe out the world.’

  Suddenly everyone was speaking at once. ‘Quiet!’ yelled Mike, then bent to Mr Simpson as he began to scream again. ‘Can’t you be quiet?’ What was taking Jazz so long, he wondered. Surely she should be back now!

  Someone pounded down the veranda. Jazz burst through the door, then leant against the wall, puffing. ‘The ambulance is on its way,’ she gasped. ‘I explained to Mrs Trang. How is he, Mike?’

  ‘Bad,’ said Mike. He glanced down at Mr Simpson. At least he was lying quietly now, though his breath still came in painful gulps.

  ‘Did you tell her about the virus stuff?’ demanded Caitlin.

  Jazz nodded. ‘She said it was probably just Lance showing off. But she said just to be sure we’re to cover the rubbish bin with this.’ She held up a plastic bag. ‘Just so if there is something dangerous in there, no more of it will get out. Then she wants us to go down to the hall and wait there.’

  ‘Is she coming here?’ demanded Mike.

  Jazz shook her head. ‘She’s waiting for the ambulance, to show them where to go. She says in case we’re infectious we’re not to speak to anyone, or go near anyone. Just go straight to the hall and wait there.’

  Caitlin began to cry noisily at the back of the room.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Mike absently. He looked up at Jazz. ‘We can’t just leave Mr Simpson here by himself,’ he objected.

  ‘Mrs Trang said we have to, just in case. The ambulance will be here soon anyway.’

  Mike hesitated. It seemed wrong to leave Mr Simpson all alone.

  ‘Come on!’ insisted Jazz.

  Mike looked round at the crowded faces. They were waiting for him to say something, he realised. They wanted someone to tell them what to do.

 
; ‘We’d better take our bags and stuff,’ he said finally. ‘In case we need anything in them. We’ve got to go past the lockers in any case. Okay, everyone, gather up your stuff. You go first,’ he directed Jazz. ‘I’ll bring up the rear.’

  Jazz nodded. She stepped over to her desk and grabbed her bag and the pen and books off her desk, then headed out of the room. The others followed her.

  Mr Simpson jerked again. The seizures were getting stronger now, Mike realised. He tried to think of anything that would cause fits like this, but there was nothing. Nothing. Epilepsy wasn’t like this. When that kid in Year Three had had a seizure, it hadn’t been like this at all.

  ‘Help me,’ muttered Mr Simpson. ‘Help me.’

  ‘Help’s coming,’ whispered Mike. ‘The ambulance is coming.’ Mr Simpson jerked again. Mike didn’t know if he had heard him or not.

  The last of the class filed out the door. Mike placed his hand gently on Mr Simpson’s shoulder. ‘I have to go. They won’t be long, sir. I promise.’

  Mr Simpson didn’t answer.

  Chapter 7

  FRIDAY, 12.32 P.M.

  Mike walked quickly out of the room. Down the corridor, past the lockers … he pulled his locker door open, grabbed his bag and the jumper he kept there in case he needed it and headed after the others. The hills shimmered in the distance, framed at the end of the corridor by the blue shadows hovering above the hot brown paddocks.

  Past the Year Nine Maths class, the faces peering at him curiously, down the stairs, over the hot bitumen to the hall …

  The door was open. Mike went inside.

  It was a large hall, built when the school had had twice the number of students it had now. There was a stage at one end, with long black curtains pulled aside, and a piano just below it. On either side of the stage were toilets, male and female, then a long expanse of scratched brown floor till the stacked chairs at the end. Under the high windows the walls were pockmarked with years of posters and art competitions, each leaving a Blu-Tac stain or bit of yellowed tape to show where they’d been.

  The class had spread around the hall. People were standing in twos or threes, or even alone. Mike wondered how many of them had realised that the person standing next to them might be infected, that if they stood too close, their best friend might infect them, too.

  Jazz had dumped her bag on the stage. She came up to Mike. ‘I’m going to ring Mum,’ she said.

  ‘But won’t that just worry her? I mean, Mr Simpson might be sick with something else.’ He tried to think how his mother would react if she thought he might have been exposed to some virus, and shuddered. She’d insist on coming down and taking his temperature or something embarrassing … ‘How can you ring her, anyway?’

  Jazz held up a mobile phone. ‘Mum’s a doctor,’ she said briefly.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ said Mike.

  Jazz shook her head. ‘Mum said not to tell anyone. She wanted to take a year off. She’s not registered to practice in Australia, but she thought, since there’s no doctor in town, people might expect her to anyway. It just seemed simpler not to say anything.’

  Mike nodded slowly. The regional Health Service had been advertising for a doctor for more than a year, and the Council was trying too. But no one seemed interested in coming way out to Elbow Creek. The nearest doctor was at the hospital at Gunyabah, and when he went on holiday or got sick there was no one at all.

  ‘Your mum’s Jamaican, isn’t she?’ he asked hesitantly.

  ‘Ugandan,’ said Jazz, swinging her dark hair behind her. ‘Mum and her family escaped from Idi Amin.’

  Who was Idi Amin? wondered Mike. The name was sort of familiar. He wanted to ask what it was like in England if you had brown skin, but he couldn’t think of a way to do it.

  ‘Better duck into the girls toilets to make the call,’ he suggested instead. ‘Then they won’t all be listening or want to use the phone too.’

  ‘They can borrow it if they like,’ said Jazz. ‘I don’t mind.’ Then she shook her head. ‘Actually, I’d better save the batteries. We might need it later.’ She slipped the phone back into her pocket and headed towards the toilets.

  Mike wandered over to the chairs. His feet echoed in the empty hall, clung, clung, clung. He grabbed a chair and set it upright, then dumped his bag on it as Budgie walked over to him.

  ‘Did the ambulance come?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mike. ‘It hadn’t when I left.’

  ‘Loser couldn’t have done that to Mr Simpson, could he? Not really.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mike slowly.

  ‘Nah. It’s impossible,’ said Budgie, a bit too firmly. ‘Guess what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Caitlin’s writing her will.’

  ‘Her will? What’s she got to leave in a will?’

  Budgie snorted. ‘Her Barbie doll collection maybe. I dunno. It could just be a goodbye letter or something.’

  Mike glanced over at Caitlin. She was sitting hunched on the floor, her back to the wall, with what looked like her English notebook on her knee. She wrote furiously for a moment, paused, frowned, chewed her pen, then made a face and went back to her writing.

  ‘There’s probably nothing at all to worry about,’ said Mike uncertainly. ‘He just got sick with something else …’

  ‘Sure,’ agreed Budgie. ‘I wonder how long they’ll keep us here for?’

  Mike tried to think. ‘Well, if it was the stuff in the test tube that affected Mr Simpson, it worked pretty fast. So if any of us are going to get sick it probably won’t take long. But it’s all impossible!’

  It had to be impossible, he thought. Death didn’t just seize you from an empty sky. Biological warfare and mass murder had no place in real life. It was just pretend. There was no way it could be real.

  Budgie let out a long breath. He looked at his watch. ‘It’ll be lunchtime soon,’ he said. ‘I hope they remember to get us something to eat.’

  ‘I’ve got sandwiches and stuff in my bag,’ offered Mike. ‘You can share if you like.’

  Budgie shook his head. ‘I want a hot dog and a packet of Cheezels,’ he said. ‘But thanks anyway.’

  ‘That’s okay. Come on, let’s grab some chairs. We may as well try to get comfy.’

  Chapter 8

  FRIDAY, 12.50 P.M.

  Jazz came out of the toilet. Her face looked damp, as though it had just been washed. Mike wondered if she had been crying, but she tried to smile as she came over to them. ‘Mum said not to worry, just to sit tight,’ she said.

  ‘Jazz’s mum’s a doctor,’ Mike told Budgie.

  Budgie looked affronted. ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘She’s not supposed to practice here. We didn’t tell anyone.’ Jazz hesitated. ‘She said that it’s really hard to make proper biological warfare stuff, much harder than people think. Either the virus dies before it goes very far or it kills the person carrying it. She says Mr Simpson probably has food poisoning or something. There’s nothing really to worry about.’

  Mike shook his head. ‘It didn’t look like food poisoning.’

  ‘You’re not a doctor,’ said Budgie.

  ‘Yeah. But it still didn’t look like food poisoning.’

  ‘There’s different types of food poisoning,’ said Jazz.

  ‘See?’ said Budgie.

  ‘Sure, but …’ Mike shut up. It wasn’t worth it.

  ‘Hey, what’s that noise?’ Budgie crossed the room and peered around the door. The others followed him.

  ‘We’re not supposed to go outside,’ Jazz warned him.

  ‘I’m not. I’m just looking. Hey, everyone’s getting out of class.’

  Caitlin shoved her way to the front of the group. ‘But the bell for lunch hasn’t gone,’ she objected. ‘They’re all going out the front, like you know, a fire drill or something.’

  ‘Evacuating,’ said Mike. How come they’re all evacuating if there’s nothing to worry about, he thought. But he di
dn’t say it. ‘Come on,’ he said to Caitlin ‘We’d better get inside.’

  ‘Oh, go jump,’ said Caitlin crankily. ‘Like, who made you boss, anyway?’

  ‘No one,’ said Mike. ‘I just think …’

  ‘I’ll do what I want to!’ Caitlin’s voice was high and tight. Mike had never heard her speak like that before. It must all be really getting to her.

  ‘If I want to stay here I will. I can …’ Caitlin’s voice trailed away. ‘It’s hot,’ she said more quietly. ‘I think I will come inside. Not because you told me to.’ Her voice grew sharp again. ‘Just because I want to … I want to lie down.’

  Jazz took her arm. ‘Caitlin, are you okay?’

  ‘I don’t know. I feel … funny. Everything looks sort of greenish. Like shadows … My knees, my knees won’t work.’

  ‘Yes, they will,’ said Jazz soothingly. ‘Come on, come inside and lie down. Mike, have you got a jumper or something she can use as a pillow?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Mike. He grabbed his jumper and brought it over to them.

  ‘I don’t want your jumper. I just want …’ Caitlin shuddered and she began to pant. ‘My hands,’ she gasped. ‘My hands feel … feel like …’

  ‘Come on, just lie down for a bit,’ said Jazz comfortingly, but her eyes met Mike’s anxiously.

  ‘I … I …’ began Caitlin. Suddenly her body arched. She fell. Her mouth grinned in a long and terrifying scream, over and over and over …

  No one moved. It was impossible to move, thought Mike. It was impossible that any of this could be happening.

  Suddenly Jazz stumbled forward. She reached a hand out. The movement brought Mike out of his daze.

  ‘Don’t touch her,’ said Mike sharply.

  ‘But …’

  ‘Don’t you understand?’ cried Mike. ‘We have to keep away!’

  Jazz looked at him strangely. ‘You mean if I touch her, I might die too? But we’ve probably already been infected. We’re already going to …’ Her voice broke.

  We’re going to die, thought Mike. It’s true, it’s really true. We’re going to die. The thought pounded through his head, yelling at him, screaming at him.