Near Extinction

by R. A. Spratt

  ‘Your contract betrayed you!’ exclaimed Dad. ‘That’s just an old wreck.’

  Ingrid let out a sigh. There was no point getting angry with Dad so she calmly explained. ‘Espionage operatives always drive cars like this. No one suspects the most lethal government agents would drive a hatchback.’ She opened the back door and took a package off the back seat. ‘Take off your clothes.’

  ‘What?’ said Dad. In the few weeks he and Ingrid had been living together he had been very careful to make sure she never got a glimpse of him anything less than fully dressed. In fact, he had actually been wearing extra clothes when she was around, almost as if they were a protective shield.

  Ingrid threw the package too him. ‘Put on this uniform.’

  ‘Will you turn around?’ asked Dad.

  Ingrid briefly considered knocking Dad out and changing him herself. She never turned her back on anyone. She had been trained not to when she had attended Sweden’s elite spy academy. But turning her back on Dad was like turning your back on an injured kitten, an acceptable risk level, she could set aside her years of training just this once.

  Twenty minutes later Dad was driving the Corolla down a fire trail into the valley. Ingrid was handcuffed to a rail in the backseat.

  ‘But how do we get inside,’ said Dad. ‘I don’t speak whatever language it is they speak here.’

  ‘Estonian or Russian,’ said Ingrid. ‘The staff will be multi-lingual. The Kolektiv is an international organisation.’

  ‘But they won’t expect someone in uniform to address them in English,’ said Dad.

  ‘Just don’t speak,’ said Ingrid. ‘In your country people talk talk talk so much more than is necessary. Here, not talking will be considered normal.’

  As they turned the next bend in the road, they could see the prison up ahead. Dad started to hyperventilate again. ‘I can’t do this. I can’t.’

  Ingrid couldn’t slap him because her hands were cuffed. She headbutted the back of Dad’s seat instead. It did startle some sense into him. He stopped wailing and just breathed ridiculously quickly.

  ‘You need to focus,’ Ingrid told him firmly.

  Dad nodded. He knew he had to get it together. ‘What should I focus on?’ he asked

  ‘The fact that I will kill you if you don’t get it together,’ said Ingrid.

  It had not occurred to Dad that the Kolektiv were not the only people he should be afraid of. He should be afraid of Ingrid too. He struggled to make his breathing normal. They were approaching the guard booth.

  ‘What do I do?’ asked Dad.

  ‘Stop and roll down the window,’ said Ingrid, sitting back in her seat and assuming the role of prisoner.

  Dad pulled up alongside the booth. A guard sat inside. He looked very young. Perhaps only twenty. He also looked cold. Despite the massive great coat and fur hat he was wearing.

  ‘Dzrakoff,’ said the guard.

  Dad did not even know what language the man was speaking. But somewhere inside his brain he instantly interpreted the word as ‘papers’. The guard wanted to see his papers. Dad patted his chest. There were papers in the breast pocket of the uniform he was wearing. He hoped it wasn’t a receipt from a dry cleaner. Dad pulled them out. They were written in a Cyrillic dialect. Dad glanced at them. The language was entirely foreign to him but he understood every word. ‘Transportation Orders for Prisoner XTH329004.’ He handed them over to the guard. The guard looked at them and handed them back.

  ‘Vse v poryadke,’ said the guard. He pressed a button and the boom gate opened.

  ‘Spasibo,’ said Dad, and he drove the car away from the guard.

  ‘I did not know that you could speak Russian,’ said Ingrid.

  ‘I can’t,’ said Dad.

  ‘You just said “thank you” in perfectly pronounced Russian,’ said Ingrid. ‘You even had an authentic Muscovite accent.’

  ‘I did?’ said Dad.

  ‘Kakoya vrema,’ said Ingrid.

  Dad glanced at his watch, ‘Chetvert’ tret’yego.’ Dad suddenly realised what he had done. ‘Oh my gosh! I do speak Russian. You asked the time didn’t you? And I said quarter to three.’

  Ingrid nodded. ‘It makes sense,’ said Ingrid. ‘Your wife must have taught you.’

  ‘She never gave me any lessons,’ said Dad.

  ‘Did she ever get you to listen to audio tapes while you were sleeping?’ asked Ingrid.

  ‘No,’ said Dad.

  ‘She never hooked you up to any devices?’ asked Ingrid.

  ‘No,’ said Dad. ‘Except . . . I did snore, so she found a ventilator for me. I had to wear that at night.’

  ‘You don’t snore,’ said Ingrid. ‘She was brainwashing you. Are there any other languages you can secretly speak?’

  ‘No,’ said Dad. He was still reeling from the idea of brainwashing.

  ‘Yalla,’ said Ingrid.

  ‘‘Ana aqwd bi’asrae ma ‘astatie,’ said Dad. He clapped his hand to his mouth. ‘Oh my, I had no idea I knew that. What language was that?’

  ‘Arabic,’ said Ingrid. ‘You wife was a great operative.’

  If Dad didn’t feel so violated he might have been impressed too.

  It was getting to be late in the afternoon. The cliché is true. In the desert, it can be blisteringly hot by day, but at night the temperature will drop like a stone. There was already a chill in the air and no one was dressed for that type of weather. The kids were starting to get cold.

  Mr Lang had tried using the bus’s radio to call for help but he’d had no luck. The radio was powered by the bus’s battery and that was as flat as a pancake. The students had spent half an hour trying to get their mobile phones to work. But they were too far from anywhere to get reception.

  ‘It will be another hour before we’re expected back,’ said Mr Lang glumly. ‘Two hours before people start to worry enough about coming out here to find us. Then four hours before they arrive here, by which time it will be pitch black.

  ‘And freezing cold,’ complained Daisy. ‘We should be huddling together to share body warmth.’ She looked meaningfully up at Joe. But he was too busy holding on to Fin to come down and share body heat. Daisy wished Fin’s head had been ripped off then she could hold Joe tight and comfort him, but the night was young. She hadn’t given up hope that the dinosaur would slip and Fin might still be decapitated.

  ‘I’ll light a fire,’ said Loretta happily.

  ‘With what?’ said Mr Lang. ‘I hope you didn’t bring matches or a lighter on a school excursion.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Loretta. ‘That would be wrong. It’s dangerous to play with matches. But I did bring a butane torch.’

  ‘A butane torch?’ said April.

  ‘Joe packed salmon sandwiches for our lunches,’ said Loretta. ‘I adore seared salmon.’

  April glared at her. It was so ridiculous it might not be a lie. You could never tell with Loretta.

  ‘But what would you set fire to?’ asked April. There was scrub and some tufts of grass but not much in the way of timber.

  ‘I was thinking the excursion handouts would be a good start,’ said Loretta.

  Several students cheered with joy.

  Soon everyone was thrusting their half-finished paperwork to Loretta and she was merrily roasting them all with her mini flame thrower. ‘Now toss on anything else you think might burn.’

  ‘The picnic table!’ suggested Kieran.

  ‘You can’t burn the picnic table,’ protested Mr Lang.

  ‘Of course we can,’ said Loretta. ‘The lives of children are at stake.’

  ‘It’s not that cold,’ said Mr Lang.

  ‘Who’s going to notice if this picnic table is gone?’ asked April. She kicked the bench hard and a plank snapped off. ‘If it breaks that easily, it isn’t safe. So really we should burn it for occupational health and safety reasons.’

  Mr Lang started to protest, but the students were bored and everyone loves a good fire. They were soon all
stomping on it to break bits off and add to the camp fire.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mr Lang,’ said Loretta. ‘This is all very educational. We’re learning survival skills.’

  ‘I would hate to live in a post-apocalyptic dystopia with you lot,’ said Mr Lang glumly.

  ‘That won’t be a problem,’ said April. ‘If it comes to that. The old people are always the first to die.’

  ‘I’m only forty-three,’ said Mr Lang.

  ‘Post-apocalyptic hordes aren’t going to ask to see your birth certificate,’ said April.

  Dad marched Ingrid down a long white corridor. Their steps sounded overly loud as they echoed off the linoleum floor and concrete walls. He was so nervous he wanted to be sick. There were cameras at regular intervals along the middle of the ceiling. Their every move was being watched. Ingrid jangled with every step. Her hands were cuffed together and so were her feet, with a chain running in-between. She could only take short shuffling steps. Dad would have felt better if they could run down the corridor, preferably while screaming at the top of their lungs.

  They reached a steel gate. Dad could see a guard’s office behind bulletproof glass off to the side. There were two guards inside. A man and a woman. Beyond the office was another steal gate that opened into a further corridor and the main part of the prison.

  ‘Show your card to the reader,’ said the guard, leaning in to the microphone. He was speaking in Russian, but again Dad miraculously understood every word. There was a key card on an extendable chain attached to Dad’s belt. He pulled it and held it in front of the reader. There was a buzzing noise and the lock on the gate clicked open. Dad and Ingrid stepped through, the gate automatically shut behind them.

  They were trapped between the two gates now. If they messed this up, they were never leaving. The first guard stepped out of the office into the corridor. He gestured for Ingrid to hold up her elbows so he could search her. She was wearing a pocket-less prison jumpsuit so there was nowhere she could hide anything, but presumably this was procedure. He patted her down quickly.

  Dad glanced at Ingrid. He wasn’t sure what she was going to do. Was she going to overpower the guard? The guard bent down to check her socks and shoes. If she was going to do it surely this would be the time, but Ingrid didn’t move. The guard stepped back and nodded to his comrade on the other side of the glass. There was a buzzing noise and the second gate opened. Dad took Ingrid by the elbow and took a step towards it. But Ingrid didn’t move. The guard was stepping back into his office. She spoke out to him in Russian saying, ‘Do you prefer vanilla or strawberry milkshakes?’

  The guard hesitated, puzzled by the bizarre random question. In that split second, Ingrid became a blur of fluid movement. She headbutted the guard so hard he collapsed backwards. Then she was walking over him before his back had even hit the ground. The other guard was surprised. It took a second for her to react and reach for the panic button. Ingrid leapt up and kicked out with both her feet together, slamming the guard into the wall. The female guard struggled to get up and reach for the control panel but Ingrid was behind her. She reached around with her arm and put the guard in a choke hold. The guard blacked out in seconds.

  ‘Quick, uncuff me,’ said Ingrid.

  Dad pulled out his handcuff key. But his hands were shaking so hard he could barely hold it. Ingrid snatched it out of his hand and did the job herself.

  Dad looked about at the two unconscious guards. This was bad, very bad.

  ‘Help me get her clothes off,’ said Ingrid.

  Dad noticed that Ingrid had stripped down her underwear and was now peeling the clothes off the unconscious lady guard.

  This was all too much. Dad fainted.

  When Dad woke up he was drowning. At least that’s what he thought at first until he realised that Ingrid was just tipping water on his face. She was fully dressed as a guard now. Some part of Dad’s brain registered that the uniform suited her. Although he suspected that all clothes suited Ingrid.

  ‘Get up, we only have three minutes before the next watch starts,’ Ingrid said as she grabbed his arm and hauled him to his feet. Ingrid hit a button and the far gate opened. Dad followed her through to the main part of the prison. There were two long corridors, one to the right and one to the left.

  ‘This will be quicker if we split up,’ Ingrid whispered. She set off down the right-hand corridor, stopping at the first cell and sliding the viewing hatch to the side, before jogging to the next one.

  Dad turned and mimicked her, heading down the left-hand corridor. When he threw open the viewing hatch on the first cell he was worried if he would recognise his wife. But he needn’t have been. The fist cell housed a very overweight man of African appearance. Dad knew his wife was a master of disguise, but she wasn’t that good. The second cell had a short thin man who appeared to be from the Middle East. The third held a man of Asian appearance. Perhaps they were in the wrong wing. There seemed to be no women here.

  Just then a deafening alarm started blasting from speakers everywhere. That had been much less than three minutes. Something had gone wrong. Dad could hear security gates slamming shut around the prison. He could hear guards yelling in Russian somewhere in the distance.

  ‘There is an intruder!’ ‘Lock down!’ ‘Lock down now!’

  Dad kept running, checking the cells as quickly as he could. He would never be able to fight his way out alone. But if there was one person who could get them out, it was his wife. She was capable of anything. He had to find her.

  There were only three cells left in the corridor. Dad ran to the first. She wasn’t there. Suddenly the yelling grew louder and angrier. Dad could hear a fight, hasty footfall, the sound of blows and then the voice he had come to know well. It was Ingrid yelling in Russian but with her distinctive Scandinavian lilt, ‘Let go of me! Don’t touch me!’

  Dad threw open the viewing hatch of the last cell. It was another man. His wife was not here. There was the sound of footfall at the end of the corridor. Someone was coming his way. Dad couldn’t go back the way he came. But there was no doorway out at this end. There was however, a hatch. Dad grabbed the handle and pulled it open. It disappeared into darkness. But there was something familiar about the smell. Detergent. This must be a laundry shoot. The footfall was getting closer. Dad didn’t even think. He dived headfirst into the shoot.

  The experience was horrifying. Like flying down an incredibly steep slippery dip in complete darkness. It was a long drop. Then a sudden SLAM!

  Dad had landed headfirst in a big pile of dirty sweaty laundry. He wasn’t dead. He had never been so relieved. The sound of the alarms and yelling was distant now.

  Dad was not a naturally brave man. He wasn’t even the type of man who found unexpected depths of courage in moments of desperate need. He had been psychologically devastated eleven years ago. He had been broken. He was a coward all the way through to his backbone, so on finding himself in a maximum security prison in lockdown, Dad followed his natural instinct. He crawled into a bin full of dirty laundry and hid.

  It wasn’t that late but it was pitch black, aside from the roaring fire as the picnic table burned. After a full day of near death experiences, the adrenalin had drained out of all the students, and most of them had drifted off to sleep. Joe included. He was sitting on top of the bus with Fin. They’d pulled a seat out of the bus to let Fin sit down. So even Fin had fallen asleep with his head still trapped.

  Joe was dreaming that he was being pecked by a bird. A very needy seagull that wanted a chip. Suddenly the seagull slapped him hard across the face. Joe woke up with a start. It wasn’t a seagull. It was Loretta. She had climbed up to talk to him.

  ‘W-what is it?’ asked Joe. His first thought was April. Had she started another fight? Or destroyed some more property?

  ‘I can hear something,’ said Loretta.

  Joe listened. He could hear something too. A distant rumble.

  ‘I think it’s a car,’ said Loretta.

  ‘
It must be the rescuers,’ said Joe. He went over to the side of the bus to call to Mr Lang, but Mr Lang was already on his feet.

  ‘Someone has finally come to help,’ said Mr Lang. ‘Thank goodness. I don’t get paid enough to deal with this sort of thing.’

  The sound of the car carried in the stillness of the desert. It was still a long way away. Joe and Loretta waited on top of the bus, while Mr Lang stood just below them on the ground. They all peered into the darkness for the first sign of the vehicle. They were not entirely sure which way to look. Joe was the tallest and standing on top of a bus so he spotted it first. ‘Over there, I can see headlights,’

  Two yellow globes flickered in the distance as the car juddered towards them along the dirt road.

  Mr Lang straightened his clothes, smoothed down his hair and started making his way up the embankment to the carpark. He wanted to make a good first impression on the rescuers. Getting stuck in the middle of the desert with fifty teenagers was not a good look. He didn’t want his clothes to look scruffy as well.

  Eventually the vehicle swung into the carpark.

  ‘It’s just a car,’ said Loretta. ‘I was expecting a police rescue vehicle, or at least a mechanic with a ute full of tools.’

  The beaten up old sedan pulled up under the one street lamp.

  ‘Isn’t that the c-c-car that nearly ran us off the road this morning?’ asked Joe.

  ‘I think you’re right,’ said Loretta.

  Loretta and Joe were curious so they climbed down from the bus to go and see. The doors of the old sedan opened. A man and a woman got out. There was no doubting it now. There was not a lot of diversity in Currawong. Don’t misunderstand, there were plenty of people of different ethnicities. But there were no other women with bright pink hair, and no men with that many tattoos. They were a tall couple. The man was brawny as well. They each carried a toolbox.

  ‘Hello!’ called Mr Lang. ‘We’re so relieved to see you. My name is Horatio Lang.’