We dropped our bikes and crouched low in the dirt.
Jordan stuck out a hand and pointed along the road in the direction we’d been heading. ‘Look,’ she hissed. ‘There’s someone out there.’
Chapter 22
SATURDAY, MAY 16
89 DAYS
Way off in the distance, two black-uniformed security officers were standing guard in front of a heavy boom gate that stretched out across the road. Both of them were armed. Not with the pistols that all the security guys in town kept holstered to their hips – these guys were carrying giant semi-automatic rifles.
The one closest to us was holding something up to his face.
‘Binoculars,’ Jordan breathed. ‘Did they see us?’
The guard’s eyes traced a wide, slow semicircle from one side of the road to the other. Then he froze, binoculars pointed almost right at us. I glanced up onto the road and a jolt of panic hit me as I realised how much dust we’d kicked up scrambling into the ditch. A big cloud of it was still hanging in the air.
The guard stared at the cloud. He straightened up and took a step towards us. I pressed my body into the dirt, silently cursing myself for not being more careful riding down the road. But a second later, the guard lowered his binoculars and slouched back down against the end of the boom gate.
‘See? Nothing to worry about,’ said Peter, his voice a lot higher than usual. ‘They’re just bored. I reckon the most exciting thing they’ve seen out here today is a kangaroo. Besides, they’re just security guards. They wouldn’t actually hurt us, right?’
I’m not sure who he thought he was kidding. It felt like my heart had suddenly decided to bust out of my chest and make a run for it. And, all things considered, making a run for it didn’t seem like such a bad idea.
‘That’s weird,’ said Jordan, her eyes locked on the guards.
‘What?’
‘The security guards are only watching this end of the road,’ said Jordan. ‘They don’t seem too worried about anyone coming from the other direction.’
She was right. Every now and then, one of the guards would turn and look back behind them over the boom gate, but they were clearly more interested in making sure no-one got through from our side.
‘They’re guarding something,’ I whispered. I straightened up a bit higher against the wall of the ditch, trying to get a better look, but all I could see beyond the boom gate were more trees and more road. I dropped down again as one of the guards reached for something at his belt. But then he lifted his hand and I realised he was just unclipping a water bottle.
‘We’ll have to go around,’ said Jordan.
‘Yeah,’ I said, trying to sound determined instead of terrified. ‘But let’s leave the bikes. We’ll make too much noise dragging them through the bush again.’
I turned to look at Peter. His expression had suddenly shifted. Obviously his belief that the guards wouldn’t hurt us was not something he wanted to test.
‘You coming?’ Jordan asked him.
He stared at her for a long time, then gave her a mute little nod.
With Jordan in the lead, we left our bikes lying in the ditch and clambered up the far side. We crept about fifteen metres straight out into the bush, then veered around to the left, wanting to cut as wide a circle as possible around the security guards. But we also needed to stick close enough to the road so that we didn’t lose track of how far we’d come and emerge from the trees too early. Which meant that if the guards looked hard enough, they’d probably spot us coming past.
I glanced down at my bright red T-shirt and wished I’d been smart enough to wear clothes that would blend in with the bush. Every time my foot snapped a branch or crunched down on a leaf, I stopped dead, expecting to hear the sound of gunfire ripping through the trees.
It was a completely different kind of fear to what I’d felt at the airport with Crazy Bill. Back there, everything had happened so quickly. It was all a blur of loud noise and flashing torches with no time to absorb any of it. But here in the bush, inching our way painfully slowly between the trees, I had all the time in the world to think about how dead I would be if we were spotted.
As we passed within earshot of the guards, I caught a few snatches of their conversation.
‘…not really what I had in mind when they offered me the job,’ one guard was saying.
‘You’re not wrong there,’ said the other. ‘I dragged the whole family out from Perth on the promise of a new life. And now what? I stand out here guarding an abandoned road all day.’
‘This is temporary though, right?’ said the first guard. ‘I had a word with the chief, and he said in a couple of months we’ll all be upgraded to more challenging work.’
I glanced over at Jordan, who was biting her lip at this piece of news. I kept moving, trying not to think too hard about what this ‘challenging work’ might involve.
Through a gap in the trees, I saw the other guard shrug. He lifted up his binoculars and started peering around into the bush again.
I crouched low behind a tree and saw Jordan and Peter do the same.
‘You ever wonder what they’re really doing out here?’ the first guard asked. ‘Why they need so many of us?’
‘Nope,’ murmured the other, his eyes sweeping across our hiding place. ‘Not my job to ask those sorts of questions.’ He dropped the binoculars again and began drumming his fingers on the butt of his rifle, staring into space.
I glanced over at Jordan and cocked my head in the direction of the guards. Keep moving?
She nodded and we got to our feet again.
We continued like this, parallel with the road, for another fifteen minutes or so – stopping and starting, jumping into hiding at the first sign of danger – until we were sure we’d gotten well away from the security guards.
Away from those security guards anyway. For all we knew, there could be a hundred more lurking around out here.
‘What now?’ Peter whispered. ‘Cut back to the road?’
‘Might be safer to keep going through the bush,’ said Jordan. She turned to look at me. ‘What do you think?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘We’ll be harder to spot in here, I guess. But so will –’ A low rumbling sound broke my train of thought.
‘Do you hear that?’ asked Jordan.
‘Sounds like an engine,’ said Peter.
‘Another truck?’ I said, straining to hear.
‘It’s coming from up there,’ said Jordan, pointing out ahead of us.
A second later, she took off through the trees, running towards the sound.
‘All right,’ Peter sighed. ‘So I guess we’re giving up on the whole stealth thing.’
The two of us broke into a run and started chasing after Jordan, doing our best to keep up without face-planting into a bush. In my mind, I saw security guards hiding behind every tree, waiting to jump out and start laying into us with their weapons.
Jordan leapt down into a dried-up riverbed, sprinted across it and raced up the other side. A second later, I reached the bank and found that my reflexes were not quite as quick as hers. I lost my footing and tumbled down the slope, crashing into the mess of dried leaves at the bottom. Peter hauled me to my feet and we crawled up the far bank after Jordan.
In the small corner of my brain that wasn’t eaten up by fear and panic and concentrating on not stacking it again, I noticed that the rumbling seemed to be moving away to our right, like it was cutting across in front of us.
Peter and I sprinted to close up the gap between us and Jordan. She jumped a fallen log and then stopped so quickly that we almost slammed into her.
‘Shh!’ she hissed, as though rampaging through the bush had been our idea. She tiptoed forward and peered around a tree, into a narrow gap in the bushland.
It was another road. Not a proper asphalt one like the main road out of town. This one was narrow and dusty, not much bigger than one of the bike tracks, with trees pushing in on it from both sides. Up on the left, I saw
the place where it branched off the main road. The turn-off was almost completely hidden by the trees, and I doubted that we would’ve noticed it if we’d just been riding past.
Looking right, I saw the truck we’d heard making its way down the road, throwing bits of gravel out behind it. The driver was taking it slow, clearly not wanting to risk slipping into a ditch or smashing his windshield against an overhanging branch.
‘Where’s he going?’ Jordan whispered.
Peter pulled Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland from his back pocket and opened it up. ‘Dunno,’ he said, pointing to the X that Crazy Bill had scrawled among the trees on his map. ‘But wherever he’s headed, I reckon our mate Bill wants us to check it out.’
We took a few steps back between the trees, and then started following the sound of the truck again, running alongside the road as it wound its way deeper into the bush. After all that riding, my legs felt like jelly, and pretty soon I was feeling shooting pains under my already-bruised ribs. I pressed a hand against my side and forced myself to keep moving.
After about five minutes, we heard the truck come to a stop a little way ahead of us. There were shouts, and then the sound of metal scraping against concrete – a gate opening. We crept forward, crouching down in the undergrowth, until we came to a clearing in the bush. I rubbed at the stitch in my side and tried desperately to keep my breathing slow and quiet.
Stretching out across the clearing was an enormous steel-walled warehouse-type building, as big as Phoenix Mall. There were no windows as far as I could see, just a big roller-door at the front to let people in and out. The whole place was surrounded by a massive razor-wire fence. I could make out four security guards patrolling outside the warehouse, all armed with the same heavy-duty weaponry as the men at the boom gate.
As we peered out through the bushes, the driver brought his truck in through a narrow pair of gates, circled around and backed up against the warehouse door. Two men climbed out of the truck, both dressed in white uniforms like the delivery men we’d seen in town the week before. The driver pulled out a blue clipboard and started talking to the nearest security guard, while the other one – a guy with a long blond ponytail – went around to open the back of the truck.
A second later, the warehouse door rolled up and the two men in white stepped inside. From our angle, it was impossible to see into the building. But the men soon reappeared, carrying a heavy wooden crate. They loaded the crate into the back of the truck, then checked their clipboard and went back into the warehouse.
‘What do you think they’re doing?’ Peter whispered.
‘Come on,’ said Jordan, standing up. ‘Let’s see if we can get inside.’
Chapter 23
SATURDAY, MAY 16
89 DAYS
‘Are you kidding?’ hissed Peter. ‘Did you not notice the small army standing guard outside?’
‘We’ll go around the back,’ said Jordan, scramb-ling through the undergrowth. ‘See if there’s another way in.’
‘You’re insane,’ said Peter, but we both stood up and followed her.
I was tempted to side with Peter on this one. Surely we’d seen enough of this place without having to go inside. But I decided to keep my mouth shut.
We made our way along the outside of the fence, but there was no convenient back door or ventilation shaft or hole in it. Just more of the same steel walls and razor-wire. Which I guess is the difference between spy movies and real life.
At least there were no security guards around this side. Not right now, anyway. Probably all distracted by the arrival of the delivery truck, but who knew how long that would last?
Jordan started pacing back and forth along the edge of the clearing, looking up into the trees. ‘I think maybe we could climb one of these,’ she said. ‘See how those two branches stretch right over the fence?’
Yeah, I thought. Right into the razor-wire.
‘Maybe we should head back out to the main road,’ I suggested. ‘See what the other –’ ‘Hold on.’ Jordan’s eyes traced a path back down to the ground.
A big old eucalyptus tree had uprooted itself – in a storm or something, I guess – and started falling over. If it had made it all the way to the ground, it would’ve smashed right through the fence guarding the warehouse. But instead, it had collided with another tree and stopped mid-fall.
Jordan walked across to the half-fallen tree and tested it with her hands. It wobbled very slightly against the other tree. I realised what she was think-ing, and my heart made another escape attempt.
‘Jordan!’ I hissed.
‘We need a diversion, don’t we?’ She began heaving at the side of the dead tree, slamming her full weight against the enormous trunk.
I felt the blood drain from my face. ‘Yeah, maybe, but –’ ‘Get ready to run,’ she warned.
‘Wait!’ hissed Peter urgently. ‘No, no, no, Jordan, stop!’
Jordan ignored him. The tree was rocking back and forth now, rolling further with each shove.
Peter took a couple of steps back into the bush. ‘Jordan, please –’
Too late.
There was a horrible wooden creaking sound as the dead tree finally dislodged itself from the live one and continued its journey towards the ground. It crashed into the razor-wire fence and kept on falling, hitting the dirt just short of the warehouse wall.
Alarms blared. Seconds later, we heard shouts and thundering footsteps from the other end of the warehouse.
‘Run!’ Jordan ordered.
Neither of us was about to disagree with that part of the plan. Jordan took off into the bush again, sprinting away from the fallen tree with Peter and me pounding the dirt behind her. She circled back around the warehouse, staying just far enough into the bush to avoid being seen.
A minute later, we were back at the dirt road. Jordan stopped, looked right. Then, without warning, she burst out into the clearing, running full-tilt toward the open front gates.
‘No,’ gasped Peter, sounding terrified. ‘We are not –’
But Jordan kept running. And suddenly I was running out after her. I tore straight through the gates, eyes half-closed, hands shielding my face. Any second now one of the guards would see us and I would be dead and that would be the end and then
– And then I was inside the warehouse. And I wasn’t dead.
It took my panic-riddled brain a second to catch up with what had just happened. Jordan’s diversion had worked. The security guards were all up at the other end of the warehouse. But they wouldn’t stay there for long.
‘We need to get away from the door,’ I said, leaning close to Jordan so she could hear me over the alarms that were still screaming out around us.
The warehouse looked even bigger from the inside. Rows of industrial shelving stretched away into the half-light, all packed full of crates and boxes. There were fluorescent tubes hanging all along the ceiling, but with no windows anywhere they made the floor below look even more dim and shadowy.
We moved clear of the doorway and turned down one of the long aisles between two lines of shelves. A metal sign hung in the air at the top of the aisle, stamped with a big number three and the words, MALL SUPPLY – GENERAL.
The shelves towered over us, pressing in from both sides, making the whole place feel somehow huge and claustrophobic at the same time.
I kept glancing back over my shoulder, positive that we were digging our own graves deeper with every step. The guards would be back any minute now, and then we’d be trapped in here. And with the alarms still going off all over the place, we wouldn’t even hear them coming.
Up ahead, a cardboard box had fallen from a shelf and was lying open on its side, spilling a pile of clothes onto the floor. As we got closer I saw that they were red skirts, all identical.
‘School uniforms,’ said Jordan, picking one of them up. She turned it over in her hands, like she was checking it was the real deal, then dropped it back on top of the pile.
Peter was
scanning the shelves behind her. He whispered something in her ear and pointed at the shelf that the box of skirts had fallen from. There were hundreds of other boxes up there, all neatly labelled.
P.H.S. Collared Shirts – LS (M)
P.H.S. Collared Shirts – LS (F)
P.H.S. Trousers
P.H.S. Polyester Ties (Red)
Enough to keep the whole school stocked up for about a million years.
But it wasn’t just school stuff. Crammed along the shelves below were boxes stuffed with everything from jeans to dinner suits – supplies of what looked like every piece of clothing sold at Phoenix Mall.
We kept moving and a few seconds later we realised that clothes were only the beginning. Further down the aisle were shelves piled up with toys and board games and sports equipment. Then there were boxes of paper cups and plastic spoons and sugar packets and serviettes and tins of drinking chocolate and giant bags of coffee beans. And more and more stuff after that, and this was just the first aisle we’d looked down.
I stopped walking. The alarms were still blaring, but I barely even noticed them anymore. ‘This is … everything, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘All of our stuff. Everything that’s getting brought into town by those delivery trucks. It’s all coming from –’ I gestured weakly at the piles of stuff all around us. ‘None of it’s coming from outside, is it? It’s all from … from here.’
‘No,’ said Peter. He was trying to sound determined but his voice was even shakier than mine. ‘No, come on, it’s not – it’s some kind of temporary storage facility, right? For, like, overflow from the mall. They bring the supplies in from the outside and then store them here until we need them in town.’ He shook his head. ‘This is just – this is normal.’
‘Guarding coffee cups with semi-automatic weapons?’ I snapped. ‘You think that’s normal?’
It seemed like the more scared I got, the less patience I had for Peter’s obsessive attempts to deny what was right in front of him.
‘Look at this,’ Jordan whispered, stopping Peter before he could answer. She reached down and picked something up from one of the shelves.
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