by Ann Halam
“Me too. Come on. We should be able to get past the flooded bit easily, and then I’ve got some ideas for new places to explore—”
Donny was the first to wriggle through the cleft in the rocks. As she was about to follow him, Tay saw a patch of rust-red fur moving on the steep slope beneath her. It was an orangutan, and she knew it must be Uncle. The release areas for the orphans were nowhere near there, and no wild ape would come so near a human. They usually stayed up in the high canopy. Uncle was free to come and go, and he had no trouble climbing the perimeter fence: but he rarely ventured outside the clearing. He stopped about twenty meters away, surprisingly well camouflaged against a big red-brown boulder.
“What are you doing here?” called Tay. “Are you following us?”
Everyone at the refuge talked to Uncle as if he was human. He seemed to understand a good deal too, no matter what language you were using. He sat down, folded his arms and looked at the sky, as if he was pretending he’d just come for a stroll.
Donny’s head popped out of the cleft.
“What’s up?”
“It’s Uncle. He’s followed us.”
“Does that mean we have to take him back?”
“No,” decided Tay. “He can look after himself. He’s a grown-up.”
She stared at the great red ape, wondering what was going through his mind. He wasn’t a pet, he was more like a . . . She couldn’t think of a word for it. He was just there. A wild animal who chose not to be wild. Uncle went on pretending not to notice her. Orangutans have a great ability to do nothing, ignore you and make you feel an idiot.
“He can look after himself,” she repeated. “Get out of my way, I’m coming down.”
The next few hours were very interesting. The passage that led to the deeper caves had dried out sufficiently that they could wade the dip. On the other side there was a thrilling larger cave, which they’d only visited once before, with stalactites and stalagmites and sheets of stone like marble curtains sweeping down from the dark above. The shoots of stone that grew from the floor made different sounds if you tapped them. They spent ages searching for the sweet spots that resonated best, playing symphonies to the echoes and sending stone-text messages to each other.
Then they went on, into passages that maybe even Tessa and Clint had never seen. They ate their packed lunch—early, because Donny was starving—and wriggled through a crawl space into a cave full of bats with stinking bat dirt thick as a feather bed on the floor. Donny had visions of making a fortune by selling it for fertilizer. There was a gallery where the roof was coated with a gleaming white phosphorescent sort of lichen, like fringed snowflakes: which Tay photographed with care, hoping it was something unknown to science. There were chasms to be leapt—not wide, but exciting. There were spooky echoes to be sounded. The caves seemed to have no end. The whole outcrop must be riddled with them.
“People would pay loads of dollars to see all this!” gloated Donny.
“Yeah, maybe. But no tourists in the Lifeforce Orangutan Reserve, remember?”
“Oh, I forgot. Drat.”
Tay was amazed when she checked her watch and found it was nearly four in the afternoon. Time to turn back. There was no danger of getting lost. They’d been marking the walls with chalk, and Tay was good at keeping maps in her head: but she set a brisk pace. There were places where they would have to wriggle and squirm, and she wanted to be absolutely sure of being home before dark.
It was Donny who first noticed something wrong.
“Tay?” he said. “Can you smell smoke?”
As soon as he said it, the smell was unmistakable.
The children stopped dead, the light from their headband lamps painting hollow shadows on their dirty faces. Fear. The fear was immediate.
“It could be a little brush fire on the outcrop,” said Tay. “It could be nothing much.”
They didn’t panic, but they’d lived long enough in the wilderness to know how quickly a hint of danger can turn into real trouble. They hurried on, saying hardly a word to each other. At the longest crawl space, where they had to get down on their hands and knees, the smell of smoke was stronger, but neither of them mentioned this. Through the crawl space, and they were back in the big cavern with the stalactites. Here the smoke was visible. They could see little winding trails of it, wreathing around in their headlamp beams, in the darkness overhead.
They looked at each other, each of them trying not to feel afraid—
“We’ll be okay in the entrance cave,” said Tay. “Smoke’s getting though cracks in rock down here, but the entrance cave is higher, it should be clear.”
They waded through the dip in the passage, and now they could hear the fire: like the muffled buzzing of a swarm of insects, like a humming, rustling thunder. The entrance cave was not clear, it was hazed with smoke. Red-tinged daylight flickered from the cleft where they had slithered in. Suddenly something dark loomed between the children and the light.
They both yelled in shock: but it was Uncle!
“What are you doing in here?” demanded Tay. “Apes don’t live underground.”
Uncle grabbed on to the children with his long arms and hugged them. Tay could feel his heart beating hard under his shaggy fur. He was frightened too.
“We can’t get out!” gasped Donny. “It’s a real fire! What are we going to do?”
“Well, the first thing is call in and tell Mum and Dad.”
That was when they discovered that the radiophone wouldn’t work.
“Does the battery need charging? You should have checked it, Tay.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the battery. It’s because we’re underground.” Tay thought hard. “Donny, this is what we’ll do. We’re perfectly safe. We’ll wait in here until the fire dies down. Mum and Dad know where we are. They’ll send help if this goes on . . . but they’ve probably got enough on their hands at the moment.”
She thought of fire sweeping through the refuge clearing. Donny must be thinking the same thing, but he didn’t say so. It wasn’t going to make them feel better.
“What about the smoke? We shouldn’t be breathing smoke, should we?”
“Take off your lamp, and your T-shirt.”
She took off her headlamp, shucked her rucksack from her shoulders and pulled her own shirt over her head. “We’ll soak them, in the dip in the passage, and hold them over our faces. I think we should stay near the entrance in case Mum and Dad come. The heat and smoke won’t get worse here, because there’s nothing much to burn outside.”
Tay was wearing a cotton scarf around her neck, like a cowboy bandana. She soaked this as well as her T-shirt and gave it to the ape. Uncle picked up what it was for at once. At the back of the cave they found a place where they could climb over a natural barrier wall into a small, sheltered hollow. Uncle climbed as if he was in a tree and helped the children over with his long arms: and at once they could breathe more easily.
They switched off their lamps. The fire outside was giving some light, and there was nothing to see anyway. Uncle set himself on the outside of the hollow, between the children and the sheet of rock that hid the main cave. He had wrapped Tay’s scarf around his face. Every few seconds he’d lower it to peep out and check, as if counting his charges . . . one, two. Two children, still there, still safe.
“He’s like that dog in Peter Pan,” said Donny with a shaky laugh. “The one that’s a nursemaid. He’s looking after us.”
The fire roared on.
Donny shifted his damp T-shirt to say, “We’re not going to be back by dark.”
“No, but we haven’t broken any rules. Are you hungry?”
They had spare food, and spare lights.
“No.”
When Tay climbed out (scraping her ribs and feeling like a skinned rabbit in just her shorts and bra) to wet the shirts and her scarf again, the floor of the entrance cave was covered in crawling things: beetles and millipedes and stranger creatures. Bigger animals, maybe ra
ts and mice, or snakes and lizards, moved in the shadows. She tried not to step on anything that was alive.
She and Donny weren’t hungry, but they drank some bottled water (Uncle sipped from their water bottle, he knew how to do that). At last, after several hours, the sound of the flames faded and the air cleared, but by now it was completely dark. Tay clambered out with the phone and stood under the cleft. She couldn’t climb up, the rock was too hot to touch.
No answer. No response at all.
In Kandah ordinary mobile phones only worked on the coastal strip, where the city was, and in a few other biggish towns. The refuge radiophones had a limited range. For anything more than talking to each other within a few kilometers, the staff used their satellite connection. But the phone ought to be working here, and no matter what they were doing, someone should answer. She ought to be getting something. . . .
“I think we’ll have to stay overnight,” she said when she got back. “It’s too hot out there, we’ll have to wait until the ground cools down.”
“What did Mum and Dad say?”
“I can’t get through. I think the battery’s dead.”
“You should have checked it. We’re always supposed to do that.”
“Yes,” said Tay. “I should have checked it.” The radiophone battery was not the problem, it was fine. But she couldn’t bear to tell him that, not yet. “I expect they tried to call us and they couldn’t get through. They’re trusting us to be sensible.”
“Yeah,” said Donny. “They’ll be here in the morning.”
And so they spent the night. There was no space to lie down, but neither of them wanted to get out and lie on the cave floor among the creepy-crawlies. Donny managed to fall asleep. Tay sat with her arm around him, full of fears that she dared not put into words, not even in her own mind. She felt a tugging at her wrist. The great ape took her hand and squeezed it; and that was a comfort.
Donny was bewildered. He hadn’t figured it out. But Uncle always knew things.
At first light Tay woke out of a confused doze. She woke Donny up: Uncle was already awake. The cave was full of dull daylight and empty of wildlife. All the other refugees had left the shelter.
“You two stay here,” she said. “I’ll see what it’s like outside.”
Feeling sick and scared, she climbed the chute that led to the cleft. The loose stones were hot under her hands and knees, but not hot enough to burn.
The outcrop had been covered in scrubby, orange-flowering bushes, the kind that the butterflies loved. Lower down there’d been graceful stands of bamboo and thorny pandanus palm. Everything was gone. There wasn’t a scrap of green on the slopes. The blackened skeletons of the butterfly bushes reached out twisted dead fingers over gray ash and baked stone. The path seemed to have disappeared because there was no undergrowth to mark the difference between path and scrub. The smoke had cleared, but there was no freshness in the morning. The sky was gray as ash, and the sultry air smelled foul. She tried the phone again, without much hope. Same result.
But below her the trees were standing. The red-brown trunks were burned charcoal black, and the low branches were smoldering, all around the outcrop. But the fire had passed by, and the trees were standing! And the high canopy was still green.
Her spirits rose a little. “It’s okay!” she called. “It’s over, and the damage doesn’t look terrible. Something’s wrong with the phone, but I think we’re going to be all right.”
The great ape clambered out first, and then Donny. The three of them stared at a devastated landscape. It was hard to believe that everything had been normal twenty-four hours ago. Uncle hopped from foot to foot. He touched the ground with one of his big, graceful hands and brought his fingers back to his mouth, making a long lip to kiss them several times: Ouch, ouch.
“He can’t walk on this,” said Tay. “What can we do with him? We have to get back.”
“I kn-know,” said Donny. His teeth were chattering, not from cold but from the strain of the night. “We can t-tear up my T-shirt, to make shoes he can wear.”
They didn’t tear up Donny’s T-shirt, Tay thought that was a bad idea; but they managed to make Uncle four snowshoes (or fireshoes). Donny’s rucksack became two shoes—after they’d stuffed everything that was in it into Tay’s bag. Their notebook, which luckily had board covers, made the two others. They tied them to his foot with strips of the plastic bag that had held their biscuits. Uncle sat patiently on Tay’s rucksack while the children fitted these odd slippers onto his long-fingered feet and hands.
“Maybe you’ll start a fashion,” said Donny. Uncle looked disgusted but grateful.
They followed the path, which was clear underfoot although invisible from a distance. If you stepped off it, you raised clouds of hot, choking ash. Even on the path they could feel the heat through the soles of their boots. It was better once they were among the trees, except for the smoldering branches that had fallen on the path. They got along as best they could. Uncle struggled with his ridiculous footgear (but they didn’t feel like laughing). Tay wanted to hurry, she wanted to run: but at the same time she could hardly make herself put one foot in front of the other. . . .
Everyone must have been fighting the fire all night. Everyone must be exhausted. That must be why no one had come to find them—
She didn’t try to use the radiophone again.
They reached the jeep track, and then the perimeter fence. The gates were wide open and leaning, warped out of shape. The fire had been through the refuge clearing. Most of the buildings were standing: charred black, like the scrub bushes on the outcrop, like the trunks of the trees. But there was nothing moving. No sign of life.
“Mum!” cried Donny, his voice breaking. “Mum and Dad!’
“It’s all right, Donny, it’s all right. It looks bad but they won’t be—”
They won’t be dead. Mum and Dad can’t be dead.
Slowly, very slowly, as if they were blindfolded or sleepwalking, they went into what had been their home. There were no flower beds. Some of the beautiful trees were sullenly burning, with flames and smoke instead of flowers in their branches. Smoke and ash hung in the air, and everything seemed wrong. It was as if they’d landed on an alien planet. Tay couldn’t get her bearings. Where were the staff cottages? Was that the generator house . . . ? Where had the helicopter pad gone? What had happened to the clubhouse?
She picked up a charred book that was lying on the ground in a spray of shattered glass. It was a copy of Shakespeare, a pocket edition that Tay and Donny’s gran had sent to Tay for Christmas two years ago . . . She’d never even tried to read it, the print was too small. She was standing under her own bedroom window. The book must have been on the windowsill, it must have been blown out when her window was shattered by the heat. She stuffed it in the pocket of her rucksack, from a confused feeling that she must salvage things. . . . All my clothes will be ruined, she thought. Suddenly she spun around, hunting for a familiar outline. The bamboo stand where the gibbons lived had vanished.
“Oh no,” she whispered. The numbness of terrible fear released her, and tears stung her eyes. They are gone, they are gone. They won’t sing their dawn chorus ever again.
“Where is everybody?” said Donny in a small, thin voice.
Inside the central square something different had happened. There were churned-up vehicle tracks everywhere, showing through the ash. The bungalow was scarred by fire like the rest of the buildings: but on the other side of the open space, where the observation studio and telecoms suite with its big dish aerial ought to be, there was only wreckage around a gaping hole, like a meteor crater.
“The fire didn’t do that—” muttered Tay, staring.
Uncle had found something. He was crouched down, making anxious nnh! noises. Tay went over to see what was wrong. There was a burned body lying on the ground.
She knelt, feeling very dizzy and strange, and forced herself to turn the body over. It was Lucia Fernandez. Tay knew her by
the locket she always wore, which the fire hadn’t touched. She was dead. She was burned black. But how, why? Why hadn’t she run from the fire? Unless she had died some other way and the fire burned her afterward . . . Tay tried to think clearly. She knew she must think, work this out, decide what to do. But here was someone she knew, dead. She couldn’t take it in. In her mind she heard Lucia’s teasing voice at the airport, saying: You two, you jabber like monkeys—
She stood up.
“Mum!” she shouted. “Dad! Please! Where are you!”
No answer.
Donny came and stood beside her, looking down. He clutched her hand. “Shouldn’t we say something?” he whispered, as if Lucia was asleep and he might wake her. “We ought to say a prayer. That’s what people do, isn’t it? When someone’s dead?”
“Okay, I’ll try. Please, God . . .” But nothing more would come, no words.
They just stood there.
“Donny,” said Tay at last. “The rebels did this.”
“Yeah. I think so too.”
“Look at all these tracks. The rebels came here, they killed Lucia, they started the fire. I think they must have taken everybody else away.”
“M-Mum and Dad and everybody’s been kidnapped? Oh, Tay, what’ll we do?”
“I’m thinking.” She felt the faintest glimmer of hope. The rebels must have come to loot the refuge, and taken the staff away hoping that Lifeforce would pay a ransom.“We have to get help, Donny. We have to tell someone what’s happened, but our phone doesn’t work and the ground station is wrecked. We’ll have to get to Kandah City.”
“Yes. We’ll have to do that. But how?”
“I’m not sure. We’ll walk out to the main road. Maybe we can get a lift. . . . Look, whatever we decide to do, we’ll need supplies. Let’s go to the kitchen and see if any food stores are left. And water. We’ll need water.”
Donny nodded, relieved to have something to do. “All right.”
“We’ll get help, Donny. Everyone’s depending on us. We can do this.”
If she told herself that often enough, maybe it would come true.