by John Marsden
‘Tell us the whole story,’ Homer said.
‘There’s not much to tell. About 3 k’s from here, there’s a church and a hall, and a farmhouse across the road. I was just coming over the hill behind the church when I heard dogs barking. I dropped down and crawled forward a bit, and there they were: searching the church and hall. Four soldiers, each with a dog. When they finished, they went over to the farmhouse and did the same thing there. Only took them ten minutes. And I forgot to mention: there were two others with rifles, just watching. Then they all got in a truck, and drove along to the next place, looked like an old primary school. Same thing there, then they had a bit of a conference, looked at their watches, hopped in the truck and drove back the way they’d come.’
‘So they look like they’re working their way along the road?’ I asked.
‘Exactly. And if that’s what they are doing, they’d be here by tomorrow lunchtime. At the latest.’
We all looked at each other.
‘Well, who’s for the Isthmus?’ Homer asked, when no one else said anything.
It seemed the most sensible thing to do. We had to go by car now, because if we tried to walk the dogs would pick up our scent. We had to move the Jackaroo, because it was such a fatal piece of evidence against us. Seemed like the time had come to get way out of this district.
After that it was all action.
We didn’t have any maps but we thought we could scam it. If we kept to the south of Stratton we should hit the Conway Highway
, and that went through Ferris. I figured on a three-hour drive. Petrol might be our biggest problem. Here we were surrounded by hundreds of cars and not a drop of petrol to be had. The Jackaroo was three-quarters full and I could only hope its tank would be big enough.
We decided to leave at 2.30 am, but in the end we got so bored and impatient sitting around that we went a few minutes before two o’clock. Robyn and Fi had been sitting in the car for an hour already: they said they were doing it to make sure they got the front seat. The boys grumbled a bit but finally sorted themselves out in the back; I jumped in the driver’s seat, and a moment later we were on our way.
The rain was blowing in again and the temperature was dropping; not a great start to our beach holiday. But we were in a better mood. Just being on the move again was good.
We crawled along on the edge of the bitumen, without lights. A few times when the bush thinned and the road curved I stopped. We took it in turns to walk up to the corner, check it out, and wave the car on.
Random patrols seemed to be a thing of the past, and we felt we would see any convoys before they saw us, even if they did have their lights dimmed. It struck me that since our attack on Cobbler’s Bay we’d hardly seen any convoys. I mentioned that to the others and it cheered them up even more. Maybe we really had achieved something special with our anfo. Certainly Lieutenant Colonel Finley’s reaction had been encouraging. He wouldn’t have come rushing to the radio to speak to us if we’d just let down someone’s tyres.
We started talking about it all. It seemed a new compulsion: everyone suddenly gushing about what they’d done and what they’d seen and how they’d felt. It had been the same after our other big hits, talking about them over and over until we didn’t feel the need any more. But we hadn’t really done that with Cobbler’s Bay. Maybe we’d been too tired, or too depressed. For me, it was because the whole thing was too big. I couldn’t cope with the enormity of it. Especially the last bit, shooting those soldiers. That was way too big. And the biggest thing of all was that in another way it had hardly affected me. I’d put bullets through their guts, shot them dead and left them there with their blood pouring out onto the bright red sand, and I’d hardly noticed I’d done it. Just another moment in my life, an ‘incident’, like drenching sheep. I was numb about it.
So we drove on and I talked about all that, a bit. Not a lot, mainly because it was so hard to get a word in. Everyone was cutting across everyone else, jumping in before the other person had finished what they were saying, finishing their sentences for them, even. It was like some of our drama rehearsals at school. Homer was still the quietest but he did say a few things, each of them making me realise how much the time in the container and the escape across the Bay, into the arms of the enemy, had affected him. I remember hoping desperately that he wouldn’t get caught again, because I didn’t think he’d be able to stand it. It had really fazed him, the swim, then being grabbed by those guys at the creek. It had damaged his confidence.
‘I’d given up,’ he said, when I asked him about the time in the water.
‘You’d given up?’ I said, shocked.
‘They’d seen me, and I was too tired to dive anymore.’
‘Who’d seen you?’
‘The guys in the boat, and the ones in the chopper.’
‘So what happened? Were they shooting at you? How’d you get away? You hadn’t really given up?’
He shrugged. ‘I was just floating there, watching them come for me. Then the ship blew up.’
He wouldn’t say much more. I asked the others: ‘What happened at Baloney Creek?’ But none of them really knew how they’d been caught.
‘It must have been the chopper,’ Kevin said.
‘We were pretty slack,’ Fi confessed. ‘We didn’t ...’
‘I didn’t even hear their car,’ Lee said.
‘I guess we were talking too loud or something.’
‘I heard you scream,’ Robyn said to Fi, ‘and that’s the first I knew they were there.’
‘God, I’ll never forget it,’ Fi said, shivering.
‘And what you said to them,’ Robyn said to Lee, laughing.
‘What?’
‘He told them to piss off.’
‘You what?’
‘It was the shock,’ Lee said. ‘I said it before I knew I’d said it. It just blurted out.’
‘I don’t think they heard it,’ Homer said.
‘They heard it,’ Kevin said, ‘but they didn’t take it in. It was just part of all the shouting and carrying on.’
‘Yeah, what was all the shouting and carrying on?’ I asked. ‘What was the shot?’
‘It was lust,’ Kevin said, but the others didn’t laugh, so neither did I.
‘They were after the two girls,’ Homer said.
‘And the two girls weren’t moving,’ Lee explained.
‘The shot was to make me hurry up a bit,’ Robyn said.
Then I started to understand what had been happening, and how lucky I’d been to arrive when I did.
We ploughed on. The only sign of life was a cream-coloured van that looked as though it might have once belonged to an electrician or plumber. It was parked in a truck stop with its parking lights on, but because it was well away from the road we didn’t see it until we were almost level with it. The bad weather didn’t help either.
There was nothing we could do but accelerate and keep going. We went four k’s as fast as I dared, with Kevin looking fearfully through the back windows for signs of pursuit. Then we pulled into a side track and sat there for ten minutes. But there was no sign of anyone and we couldn’t afford to waste much more time if we were going to reach the Isthmus before daybreak. I started the engine and we kept going towards Ferris.
‘It was probably a patrol and they were having a nice quiet sleep,’ Homer suggested. ‘In this rotten weather they wouldn’t feel much like wandering up and down the road.’
Even though it seemed odd, we still thought that was the most likely explanation. I sure thought so, anyway. That’s why it was such a complete and utter shock when we were caught.
Chapter Twenty-two
They’d chosen the spot well. It was a narrow stretch of road crossing the old Huntleigh Bridge. The road twisted around, then turned on itself to cross the bridge. Beyond the bridge it started to climb again, in a long sweeping bend that led to the Stratton turn-off. It was nearly four in the morning when I dropped a gear to poke the Jacka
roo slowly round the bend and onto the bridge. Everyone was asleep, or I would have asked for a volunteer to walk down and check it out. I saw out of the corner of my eye the no passing on bridge sign, a dim yellow diamond. Then we bumped across the old wooden roadway. It was like driving down a railway track.
We crossed it and I started to accelerate again, into the long bend. I thought I was imagining things when I saw a big grey obstruction in the middle of the road. A huge dim grey boulder. Stupidly, as I began to brake, I started wondering if there’d been a landslide. People were waking up. Then Homer was yelling something, I don’t know what, in my ear, so loudly that the fright of it paralysed me. But I saw what it was in the middle of the road: a dirty great tank with its huge grey gun barrel pointing straight at us.
My next rational thought was that they might be asleep, like the people in the van we’d passed earlier. I still thought we were in with a chance. I stood on the brake and shoved the gear stick into reverse, not even looking in the rear-vision mirror, thinking there was no need. But I saw enough through the windscreen to realise the trouble we were in. A line of soldiers suddenly appeared either side of the tank. About eight of them in all. Each one carried a gun that I think could fire a shell or missile: the barrels on these guns must have been a metre long, and as big as drainage pipes. I don’t know how the soldiers carried the weight of them. Then Homer yelled again in my ear, and this time I heard him clearly. He said, ‘Stop, stop, they’re behind us.’ Then he said quietly, ‘No good.’ Looking in the rear-vision mirror for the first time, I realised what he meant. They had us all ends up. There was a whopping great Army truck, a proper green Army truck, right up our bumper bar. And an instant later, before I’d had time to digest what I was seeing, a soldier was at my window and a rifle muzzle at my right cheek. The soldier was breathing hard, his face shiny with sweat, and his eyes wide open, as if he was on drugs. I guess he was just hyped up at making a bust, but I was scared by how unstable he seemed. I slowly, carefully, very carefully, raised my arms. By moving my head fractionally to the left I could see Robyn and Fi. They were still waking up, struggling to understand what was going on. That’s how quickly it all happened. Their hair was all mussed up and Fi’s mouth was open as she looked around and realised that our good luck had come to a sudden bitter end.
She too raised her arms, then Robyn did the same. I couldn’t see much of the back seat in the rear-vision mirror, but guess it was the same scene there.
The soldier beside me opened the door and I slowly got out. He turned the engine off and took the keys then, with a nod of his head, pointed me to the side of the road. I went there and stood next to the three boys. Robyn and Fi, with a soldier escorting them, came over to join us a moment later. I said to Homer, ‘Some holiday this is turning ...’ but didn’t get to finish the sentence: the soldier who stood next to me hit me across the side of my face with the back of his closed fist.
He was a tall man and he swung hard. I felt like I’d slammed into a wall. The side of my face went instantly numb, and I couldn’t hear anything more in that ear. Everything started tingling, my eye, my cheek, my ear, as though it had all gone to sleep. Tears stung my eyes, not crying-because-of-pain-and-shock tears but reflex tears from my tear ducts. I just hoped the soldier wouldn’t think that I’d gone all girly and was crying from being hit. I didn’t want to give them that satisfaction. I didn’t want my friends to think I was weak, either.
Standing by the side of the road I knew all too well there was a good chance we were about to be shot. It was something about the way they had us lined up. It looked chillingly like a scene from movies where they have firing squads. I don’t know if the others thought that, but I certainly did. No one spoke again. We just stood there with heads bowed, feeling our own fears. Then Kevin farted suddenly and, unbelievably, we all got the giggles. It was such a loud rattling fart and so unexpected and out of place that we couldn’t cope with it.
I thought we would get our faces smashed in for sure. I stood there almost waiting to be hit, but then I noticed a couple of the soldiers trying not to laugh, too. I guess some things are universal. But an officer, one of a group of officers standing talking on the other side of the road, shouted something, and the soldiers hardened up again. By then we’d got over our initial sniggers and when we saw the soldiers getting serious we controlled ourselves. But I still remember that moment. It made things just a fraction easier to bear.
There was no firing squad. After ten minutes we got marched to the back of the big Army truck. We stood there a few more minutes watching the tank crawl away and then a soldier motioned Homer to climb in the truck. As Homer got onto the steel step the man hit him hard across the back of the head, so that he half fell forward. Kevin was next and he got bashed too, then Robyn. Seemed like it was a part of the routine. But it hurt me when he hit Fi. In all my life I’ve never seen anyone hit Fi. It was like hitting a beautiful water bird. I watched as the fist smacked against her. Her head dropped lower and her shoulders too but, of course, I couldn’t see her face. When my turn came and I got in, getting the same treatment, Fi was already sitting turned away, her face towards the front of the truck.
It was dark in there and smelt of canvas, and something else, creosote perhaps. A couple of soldiers got in behind us and spent a few minutes tying our wrists to crossbars that ran the length of the truck. When they were done they sat at the back watching us. It made it difficult to do anything, or even talk. All I could do was think.
Robyn tried to speak to the soldiers, but she didn’t get far. She said to one, ‘Did you know we were on this road?’, but he just looked away. I don’t know if he understood English.
She tried the other one but he said: ‘Shut up. No talk.’ That didn’t allow a lot of possibilities for conversation. Robyn, who was opposite me, looked at me and made a face. I grinned back, hoping I looked like a hero, but feeling so wild with fear inside that I could hardly make my face work.
‘Does your face hurt?’ Robyn asked.
The soldier who’d told her to shut up made a movement forwards, towards Robyn.
‘You shut!’ he shouted. ‘You bad girl.’ Then to all of us he shouted ‘You bad people. You kill my friends. You all die, now you die.’ And he sat back again, trembling.
I felt sure then that we would be shot. I felt sorry for the man a bit, too. I’d never really thought about these soldiers having friends, being friends with each other. It must have been as awful for them to have their friends killed as it was for us. It had been a long time since I’d thought about all these issues of right and wrong. We’d become used to doing the things we did, to attacking and destroying and killing, without thinking whether there was right on both sides. Sure in the early days of the invasion we’d thought about it – I remember writing about it. We had so much in our country: so much food, so much space, so much entertainment. But we’d resented sharing it with anyone, even refugees. The longer the war had gone on, the more we’d become used to thinking of the soldiers as the baddies, and us as the goodies. As simple as that. As dumb as that.
I thought about it all now again, though. And without caring what the soldier would think, or what the others would think, I said to him, ‘I’m sorry about your friends.’
He looked like I’d hit him. His eyebrows rose and his mouth went into an ‘O’ shape. He looked shocked, angry, then for a moment he stared at me like he was a real person again. For that brief time I saw that he wasn’t a mechanical killer, just someone as young and confused and under pressure as we were. Our eyes met almost like friends.
It didn’t last long. His face went back into the sulky aggressive expression he’d had before. But I was glad I’d said it.
A male officer got into the cabin of the truck, on the passenger side, and a woman soldier on the driver’s side. She started the engine and away we went. I could see the tail-lights of another vehicle through the windscreen and behind us the parking lights of the Jackaroo. There wa
s another vehicle behind that. I began to realise how impossible escape was going to be. Yet I was determined not to go passively to my death. I’d rather be shot trying to escape than just walk to a wall and stand there while they filled my body with bullets.
We drove for over an hour. I spent the time shivering with cold, speculating about what might happen to us, while glancing from time to time at the faces of my friends to see how they were going. We all looked so white, so tired, so strained and frightened. How could they ever believe that we were dangerous? How could they send all these trucks and the tank just for us? Yet I knew all too well that we had done more damage to these people than anyone else in this whole district, in the whole state, maybe. We were public enemies, no doubt about it. We were probably public enemy number one.
In the dim lights of the trucks I saw a green and white road sign: stratton 14.
So that’s where we were headed. It figured. It was good in a way; it gave me something other than death to think about. As we got closer I peered through the windscreen to see how Stratton was looking. It was so long since we’d been in a city. We passed a deserted truck stop that seemed to have been smashed to bits, as though a giant had attacked it with a giant sledgehammer. Then we were in the suburbs. It was a shocking sight. There’d been some damage in Wirrawee, but nothing like this. You could see that a lot of cleaning up had been done, but it would take years and a billion bucks to clear it up properly. In some blocks the buildings were pretty much untouched but in plenty of others every one had been flattened. The roads were clear but nothing else was. It was all rubble: bricks and wood and stone, and sheets of galvanised iron sticking out and flapping in the breeze, like cold metal leaves.
My grandmother lived in Stratton, but a long way from where we were now, in a big old house up in the hills. Thinking about her sent a tear rolling down my cheek; a real tear. I brushed it angrily away. I didn’t want to show any fear. I wanted to keep my fear all to myself: a storm inside but a desert on my face. That was the only way I could maintain any kind of strength.