Gunshot Road

by Adrian Hyland

  ‘Somebody up ahead,’ I heard him comment.

  I glanced up, made out a figure pottering around the tailings midden near the battery.

  ‘Gougers up and about by now,’ I suggested. ‘Price of gold the way it is, make a few bucks picking over the old rubbish.’

  The man up ahead heard us coming; he paused, rested on his machinery—a jackhammer?—turned his head in our direction.

  We were a hundred yards away when something, a shiver of apprehension, flashed through my mind.

  ‘Hang on a tick, sir.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Well why do you…?’

  ‘Just be careful. Something wrong.’

  He clucked his tongue. ‘Heard that before, Emily.’

  ‘And I was right then too.’

  As if to emphasise his point, he accelerated. The bloke at the battery watched us draw near. He was tanned and taut, muscular. A bag slung over his shoulder, a lock of orange hair bristling out from his hard hat. Vaguely familiar. No surprises there—I’d come across a lot of the men on the goldfields at one time or another—but something here had set the radar pinging.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He put the jackhammer down, picked up another implement: some sort of axe?

  Cockburn sailed on, oblivious.

  Where had I seen this bloke before? We were driving into the shadow of the battery when it hit me: outside Danny’s place, yesterday morning, operating a jackhammer. Come to think of it, what had he been doing working on his own? And on a Sunday morning?

  ‘Pull up—it’s a trap.’

  ‘For god’s sake, Emily.’

  The fellow on the mullock heap put a foot forward, raised the axe and swung a powerful blow at the rocks by his feet.

  A muffled explosion sounded somewhere and the severed ends of a length of wire sprang into the air.

  I instinctively followed the line of the longer length, saw that it reached to a point half way up the battery. Heard a peculiar, terrifying sound, a metallic screech, like parrots fighting overhead. The building began to shudder on its foundations.

  ‘Turn away!’ I threw a hand onto the wheel, trying to force it round.

  ‘What are you…?’

  He shut up when he realised there was a hundred tons of solid steel toppling onto us.

  Snowball

  IT WAS ALMOST A thing of beauty: sheets of iron broke off and floated away, their drift and spin deceptive, distracting the eye from the terrible energy concentrated in the body of the building.

  The parrot calls escalated into a brutal clangour of girders, trusses and tortured steel. The structure fell onto us, into us, its buckling brute strength crushing the car and casting us into a cauldron of chemical stench, of twisted metal and blades of glass.

  Maybe I saw it coming earlier, maybe my reactions were a fraction quicker, maybe he was impeded by the wheel; whatever the reason, I made it under the dash and Cockburn didn’t.

  I glanced at him as a length of steel drove through the windscreen. It speared him under the ribs, pinned him to the seat. His body rocked and folded, his face twisted in shock.

  We locked eyes, and the things I saw there are with me still. An understanding, in his last moments, that he didn’t understand. That he’d moved into a world beyond his ken. A place full of paradox and puzzle that could turn on you in the blink of an eye. Coupled with that insight, despair, remorse. A suggestion, even, of apology.

  One of his hands moved towards me, didn’t make it.

  He struggled to speak; was overwhelmed by a crimson gloop that sluiced from his mouth, blobbed and splattered onto his chest. He stared at it in horror, then his head fell forward.

  A crunch of boots on rough gravel.

  I looked out through the shattered windscreen. Orange Hair was cascading over the rocks, splitting axe in hand, boots a blur.

  I tried the door: hopeless, crushed under an avalanche of metal.

  Trapped.

  Our attacker dragged a sheet of iron aside, clambered onto the bonnet, assessed the situation in a glance.

  He tore a length of metal from the wreckage, raised it like a spear and rammed it into the place I would have been if I hadn’t hurled myself to one side.

  He bared his teeth, lifted the weapon again, determined not to miss a second time. Not much chance of that: we were looking at big fish and small barrels here.

  The improvised spear came crashing down—then jerked and fell away as an explosion rocked the cabin and his face fell in on itself, fine red fracture lines shooting out from a hole that bloomed at the bridge of his nose.

  He stayed on his feet for a moment, strung out on the rack of his own disbelief, then toppled backwards.

  I twisted my head, bewildered.

  Cockburn, pistol in hand, the cabin a fug of dust and cordite.

  He looked at me, gasping. Puzzled, wondering—as if he were seeing something miraculous. Struggled at words which might have been, ‘The boy…’

  Dropped the gun, flopped forward.

  I tried to stanch the blood, knowing it was hopeless. ‘Oh, Cockburn,’ I groaned.

  I took his hand and held it as he died.

  Then I grabbed the gun. Crawled through the shattered windscreen, weapon poised; inscribed an arc through the air.

  Orange Hair lay face down in the gravel. His hat blown off, the back of his head ditto. Otherwise nothing.

  Nobody else in sight. Operating on his own?

  Who the hell was he, apart from a bogus road worker, and how did he fit into this bloody turn of events?

  I heaved him over. Ugh. Nice to meet you. Rummaged through his pockets: keys, bullets, a box of detonators, a wallet. The bag he’d been carrying was a leather satchel, vaguely familiar.

  I looked inside. A blue folder; scribbled across the top, the words Snowball Earth.

  I felt like a starving man sitting down to a meal: were the questions that had turned me inside out these last few weeks about to be answered?

  In the folder, a canvas-covered notebook, identical to the ones in Doc’s cabinet.

  The old geologist’s frenetic script.

  I skimmed through the early pages: field notes from a trip out west. It seemed to be the first of several he’d made with Ted Jupurulla. Their objective: Dingo Springs. He’d come across it years before, doing exploratory work for Copperhead. The place had intrigued him, even then—now he wanted to reassess it in the light of recent advances in geological theory.

  I read his response to the peculiar conglomeration of rocks at Dingo Springs, his puzzlement over the proximity of the ice rocks and the volcanics. A dozen pages in, a significant sentence:

  Rhyolite flow interbedded in the glacials and the carbonates? And the weathering? Should be low, because of the CO2 levels. But not. How can such a thing occur? Unless…ice?

  The first hint that the rocks were talking to him, saying something about Snowball Earth.

  I pushed on:

  How old? Proterozoic? Need to test the radiometric ages for synchronicity—Namibia, south China—

  635 Ma?

  The first half of the book was in a similar vein, scribbled observations marked by a growing suspicion that the site might shed light on the Snowball Earth theory. He was old school, hadn’t wanted to believe the radical theory, was struggling to reconcile long-held beliefs with the evidence before him.

  But further into the journal, other things began to slip into the narrative, the first of them a note on his companion’s behaviour:

  Jupurulla still troubled—spends all night singing—trying to ward off—ward off what? Damned foolish superstition. Poison? Plants shrivelled—animals—wallabies? ‘The songs and the water,’ he says, over and over. What the hell’s he talking about? Tempted to dismiss it out of hand, but how often have I seen his ramblings prefigure the science?

  Several pages later, a set of mathematical calculations:

  K = 10–3 + 8.6 m/d


  I = 500/50 km

  Vol = 4.9 mt

  Vel = 8.6 × 0.01

  P–086 m/d = 31.4 m/y

  What on earth did volume and velocity have to do with the rocks? Nothing, surely. He was talking about water, moving water. Something connected to a Proterozoic ocean? Presumably m/y meant miles per year. Not a glacier then. Far too fast. He must have been calculating the flow rate of a present day aquifer, not something from hundreds of millions of years ago.

  I recalled what Windmill had said about the rock formation behind Doc’s shack: that it was a map of a water dreaming.

  Doc was trying to decipher the flow pattern of the water that lay beneath the del Fuego desert, using a lifetime’s accumulated geological knowledge to trace the path of the spring that emerged at Dingo Springs.

  The next few pages consisted mainly of annotated illustrations, sketches and maps.

  The first was a geological map radiating out from Dingo Springs, from Handbrake Bore in the west to the Ricketswood Ranges in the east. He’d outlined rock patterns, describing alternating layers of shale and sandstone over a granite bedrock, assessed their cleavage patterns and porousness.

  The notes here were a puzzle: fractures exacerbated by the blasting process?—possible—depends upon the shape of the grain—rounded, angular—rapid flow?

  Blasting. Who was blasting? The gougers? Roadworks?—Wishy Ozolins said something about a quarry out this way. Maybe he or his men had been working with explosives.

  Another page revealed a wobbly cross-section of the area to the east of Dingo, as far in as the Ricketswood Ranges. Doc had taken particular care to list any other water sources—Wild Dog Creek, the Burning Angel Bore, Water-the-Horse Rockhole, Ricochet Springs, the Billy Cans—and their relationship with the underlying geology, their links to Dingo Springs. Alongside several of the waterholes were dates. What did that mean? That he’d visited them, taken samples?

  He was mapping the spread of something. Some contaminant in the water, but he never said what.

  The handwriting gradually deteriorated, the notes became more confused, petering out altogether as his health disintegrated. The last entry, a forlorn cry:

  Where the hell is it coming from?

  Where was what coming from?

  I went to put the book back, a last frustrated riffle through the pages. Wait. There was something taped into the back. A series of computer printouts: Kells Laboratories, the University of Adelaide. The lab analyses had come back. The first page:

  Water Sample 689: 7Q: Dingo Spring.

  Parts per billion: Cs: 127 bql

  I : 75 bql

  U: 963

  The symbol U hit me like a stockwhip.

  Uranium.

  Cs? Cesium. And I was iodine, another indicator of radioactivity.

  All at levels higher than normal. The water at Dingo Springs—the water that Doc, Jupurulla and just about every other living thing in the region had been drinking—was radioactive.

  Those wallabies covered in quicklime. Somebody trying to hide the evidence. What else had I missed? God only knew, but there must have been a multitude of signs: even a blind man had sensed them.

  I flicked through the remaining lab results:

  Water Sample: 689: 7R: Bolt’s Rockhole

  Parts per billion: Cs: 67 bql

  I : 32 bql

  U: 107

  Water Sample: 710: 7A. Ricochet Springs.

  Parts per billion: Cs: 67 bql

  I : 17 bql

  U: 68

  Scribbled onto the last page of the report, a note in Doc’s trembling hand: Christ—how can a spring in the middle of nowhere be poisoned by RADIO. WASTE?

  Radio: Doc’s shorthand for radioactive.

  The question that had been tormenting Doc reared inside my own head: how the hell had a waterhole in the middle of nowhere become contaminated with uranium?

  Doc had used up the last of his energy and sanity trying to solve the question. I thought of him in his last weeks, a dog-tired old man struggling in the heat to lug those heavy stones into position. Desperate to solve this last mystery.

  He had to be sure before making accusations. What had he said to Jojo? He wanted it set in stone. Everybody thought he was mad already: an allegation like this, they’d have ignored him at best; possibly locked him away.

  Or killed him.

  I put the folder aside, then took another look at it, lying on the ground: the ruffled blue top, the tattered yellow pages. I’d seen it before. I racked my brain, my thoughts hurling through the jumble of associations thrown up by the chaotic events of the last few weeks.

  Somewhere in the distance, I heard a bird carol: a magpie. And the pictures spinning through my mind coalesced around a single image.

  Magpie! He’d had it. This was the bag he’d been carrying at Stonehouse Creek. I conjured up the memory. Yep, there was a blue folder in the bag. But how the hell had Magpie gotten hold of Doc’s papers? I couldn’t imagine him killing anybody.

  The mental snapshot changed: the accident out on the highway, my first morning on the job. There was Magpie, poking round the scene of the car crash, picking things up. Trying to be of use, sure, but still a magpie—curious, acquisitive.

  There had been a bag of some sort among the wreckage he’d collected. I could well imagine Magpie rummaging through it, finding the file. He wouldn’t have been able to read it, but the maps and diagrams of his country would have fascinated him.

  But there was another image pressing for my attention. I’d seen it since then, I was sure.

  Danny, the day I took him home from church. The bag was sitting on the kitchen table. I’d assumed it belonged to Bandy, but I was wrong. It was Danny’s. And the blue folder was still in there, jumbled up in the contents.

  Danny had found it at the Stonehouse camp, must have suspected it was significant, particularly after Windmill told him what Doc’s rock formation meant. Magpie might not have been able to read it, but Danny would have been able to get a vague sense of what was going on.

  It was what had tipped him over the edge: the realisation that they—whoever ‘they’ were—were doing terrible things to his country.

  He hadn’t understood the details, wouldn’t have made much sense of the bulk of the report. But that final sentence—Christ—how can a spring in the middle of nowhere be poisoned by RADIO. WASTE?—would have been enough to trigger his deepest fears, even if he had misread the last words as ‘radio waves’.

  He hadn’t known where the toxins were coming from, what they were. All he knew was that they were creeping through his country, and that they were lethal.

  He’d carried the secret in his head, not knowing what to do with it, worried who to tell. He’d seen, in the deaths of Doc and Jupurulla, in the attack on himself and his father, what they did to those who knew about them.

  The pressure might have been enough to drive him half out of his mind. Enough to merge these dark, whitefeller forces with the dangerous spirits and pale ghosts of the Kantulyu dreaming. What was it he’d called them? His Windringers.

  I thought about his whispered warnings:

  There’s a fire out there, Em, running underground, through the air, like knives flashin. Green fire, burns your blood, kills you slow and hard…They killin our country.

  ‘They’. Who the fuck were they?

  They’d tried to kill Danny before he was arrested, would have succeeded if Bandy hadn’t intervened. But how had they known that Danny, in his own befuddled way, was onto them?

  Somebody had seen or heard something: enough to know they had to nip this spreading secret in the bud.

  I supposed the man on the ground before me, if he’d still been extant, would have had some light to shed on the matter. Presumably that was why he’d been posing as a workman and watching Danny’s house. Looking for a chance to lift the bag.

  Who was he working with?

  I flipped through his wallet, came across a licence that ID’d him as Desmond Harvey, 27 K
orps Road, Bluebush.

  Korps Road. He’d be right at home there now.

  I dug deeper, found a photo: a quick snap, taken through a car window. A concrete house, a candelabra wattle, three people struggling through the gate. In the middle, a skinny boy in a red and blue footy guernsey glancing back, the whites of his eyes glazed with fear. Bandy Mabulu holding onto one arm. On the other a short woman in a red dress with a mess of black hair. Me.

  Who’d taken the photo?

  The answer, not just to that question, but to the whole maddening conundrum, hit me like an explosion.

  Worse: it hit me at exactly the same time as an explosion—the crashing echo and thump of metal on rock, roaring out from the hill where I’d left Danny and the car.

  I looked up, silent sirens screaming in my head.

  Danny.

  It was him they’d been after all along, and I’d left him alone back there.

  Into the abyss

  I TOOK OFF AT full tilt, ignoring the heat, absorbing it almost, feeling it burn inside me like a rocket’s blast, giving strength to my legs. I raced up the ridge, saw from a hundred yards away that the Hilux was gone. It wasn’t hard to follow: the scars in the sand, the broken grass.

  The tracks ploughed down the slope to the beetling precipice of the Gunshot Mine. I spotted a broken pole, dragged wire, the remnants of a fence: the car had smashed through, gone straight over the edge.

  I sprinted towards the mine, stopped short on the lip of the abyss. Eighty feet below: a shattered wreck, wheels spinning in the air. Red dust drifting.

  I reeled away, despairing: how could anybody have survived that?

  Oh Christ—what sort of an idiot had I been, leaving him alone?

  Then I noticed a skinny black foot poking through a patch of long grass to the left. He must have abandoned ship as the vehicle rolled forward.

  I rushed to his side. He was lying on his back, his thin body motionless in its blood-stained guernsey. A brutal wound on the side of his head: a fractured skull? His mouth was open, his eyes were closed.

  Most poignant of all, for some reason, the grevillea blossom, still in his hand.