by Paula Weston
He slides into the sedan and calls in the shooting.
French jogs back to them. Blood streams down her left arm.
‘Sir, what the hell?’
‘Injury report, private.’
French lifts her arm to get a better look. ‘Glass fragments, sir, from the motel window.’
Khan holsters her weapon and dusts off her pants.
‘Do you still need me to sell the case that these mercenaries are connected to Xavier?’
The Major ignores her. He’s more interested in the holes peppering the timber-clad motel. There’s not a single stray bullet: each one has lodged in the front wall and door of room six. Not room five, not room seven. And all of them are above head height. Even the unmarked cop car: the bullets hit tyres and panels away from where the constable took cover.
Khan stands with him, her eyes following the same path. ‘Almost respectful, one might say. A polite warning between professionals.’
He ignores the implication.
‘They know we’re following the Agitators,’ Khan says.
The Major checks the clip in his pistol.
‘They know you are. Let’s hope that’s all they know.’
29
They clear the outskirts of Adelaide as the first strains of dawn lighten the eastern horizon.
Jules has adjusted the passenger seat so she’s not wedged under the dash, and Ryan’s slid his back as far as it goes and still barely fits under the steering wheel. The language is getting worse every time he bumps his knee on the console. Jules is bleary-eyed from the early start and a night of broken sleep. It’s been at least a year since she’s slept in a bed other than her own, let alone with a six-foot soldier in the room.
They played darts until nearly midnight. At first she’d thought Ryan had let her win the opening game. But the way he grinned after beating her in the next, she knew it was on. He was way too competitive to pull a throw, let alone a game. They played best out of three, then best out of five. It was three-all when Ryan reminded her they had to be up and gone before the sun in the morning.
Jules had showered first—awkward and self-conscious in a strange bathroom—and was tucked under the blanket in her T-shirt and undies by the time Ryan came in. The light was out but she heard his zipper slide and his jeans hit the floor. Jules lay there wondering what he might say to her under the cover of darkness, imagining him half-naked on the bed above her. He’d been checking her out all night—she’d caught him more than once—but he’d made no attempt to flirt. Unless trash talking counted; there’d been plenty of that through six games. She didn’t even know if she wanted him to make a move. At the same time it was all she could think about.
It felt like a time-out: a stepping away from the urgency that had brought her here. A beat where she could be in the moment, wrapped in unfamiliar sheets in an unfamiliar house, daring herself to go with whatever might happen.
She’d waited, the current humming. Wanting and not wanting. Remembering Ryan’s voice in her ear during the flight and the way his thumb found the soft part of her hand when the plane shuddered; the effort it took not to unload the charge into him. Now there he was, centimetres away. She’d wondered if he was trying to figure out what to say to her, if he was imagining kissing her.
Then he started snoring.
Relief. Disappointment.
A minute later, annoyance: he was so loud. How did he not wake himself with that racket?
Jules knows he got a good rest last night—she heard it—but this morning he’s been slouching around like he hasn’t slept. And that was before his army-issue flexi-phone vibrated with a message. He read it and muttered something about the operation being on track. That was it.
Ryan is fiddling with the radio again, skipping from station to station. A blast of syncopated dance track…a country-pop chorus. A woman screaming over a harp. None of it’s working for Ryan and the snatches of music aren’t helping Jules find her calm. The time-out is officially over.
‘Did you say something about breakfast?’ she asks.
He flicks off the radio, his eyes on the bitumen. ‘Port Wakefield’s not far. We can grab something there.’
As promised, Ryan pulls in at a truck stop. It feels like they’re miles from water—there’s no hint of blue in sight, only low dusty hills—but Jules can smell the salt on the air, and seagulls squabble between the diesel bowsers. She hugs herself against the chill and follows Ryan inside.
They find a table near a man wearing a singlet and shorts despite the fact it’s only fourteen degrees outside. He’s hunkered over a plate piled with oversize chops and chips, his backside spilling over his seat. Ryan glances at the meal and away, shoulders tightening. His energy is dull and brooding, so different from last night.
‘Are you all right?’
He stares past her to the highway and unease swirls. There must have been more in that text.
‘What’s happened?’
Ryan doesn’t answer.
‘Is Mum okay?’ She taps a nail on the table like Vee does. ‘Ryan.’
‘What?’ He shifts his gaze and comes back to the table, finally registering the question. ‘She’s fine.’
‘What’s going on with you?’
‘Nothing.’
Jules raises her eyebrows at him. He lets his breath out through his nose. ‘It’s nothing to do with you or your mum or this job. Okay?’
She waits for the spike in his energy, some sign that he’s lying, but there’s nothing. Maybe his mood really is about going home.
‘Okay,’ she says.
Their food arrives and they eat in silence. They’re back on the road twenty minutes later, driving north, treeless hills on one side and a patchwork of brown paddocks on the other. Hectares of freshly ploughed dirt, the occasional crumbling stone farm shed. They pass a salt lake tinged pink and a string of small towns with sun-bleached wheat silos and fading red rooftops. Everything is dead or dying.
‘It looks totally different in winter when it’s all green,’ Ryan says as if seeing the countryside through her eyes.
They round a sweeping bend and there’s a change in the horizon: objects sprouting from low hills like splintered toothpicks. It takes another kilometre before Jules realises what she’s seeing: a trail of wind turbines, hundreds of them. The highway loops around until the towering structures are parallel to the road. Only half are turning; the others are frozen in place like petrified insects. The charge stirs, as unsettled as Jules in this foreign landscape. Nothing here is familiar: even the cloudless sky is smudged and streaky, and Ryan’s mood isn’t helping.
She slides lower in her seat and brings her knees to her chest, makes herself small. She’s never travelled with someone she doesn’t know. Even now, riding in a car with Ryan and knowing that he knows about her, Jules feels unstitched, like she might flutter apart without warning.
An uncomfortable truth is taking form: she’s less together without Angie.
Ryan drops his speed to sit behind an oversize semitrailer hauling two gleaming water tanks. He sticks out the car’s nose into the oncoming lane, prompting a tiny flare of panic.
‘You’re not thinking about overtaking?’
‘In this gutless heap?’ He checks the clock on the dash. ‘There’s no rush, we’re making good time.’ He doesn’t sound happy about it.
They reach a passing lane a few kilometres later and Ryan guns the engine and swings out. The sedan shudders and Jules’ pulse picks up—sudden acceleration does that to her—but the charge stays steady. By the time they crest the hill, they’re in front of the semi and rocketing along. Ryan stabs the radio button and crackling static fills the car.
Ryan searches until he strikes a thumping beat with funky banjos. It’s an old tune, one her dad used to play, and Ryan’s eyes light up. ‘Dan Sultan. Bonus.’ He cranks the volume and taps along on the steering wheel. His lips twitch as if he knows the words and he’s trying not to sing, but then the chorus hits and he’s
mouthing along about hanging with his cousins and texting for loving. The speedo creeps over a hundred and twenty. Jules’ pulse keeps time with the drums and her skin buzzes but it’s not anxiety driving the current: it’s exhilaration.
The next track is newer, a mess of driving guitars and rasping vocals. Ryan keeps tapping and now his left foot’s going. The smallest nod of his head. By the second chorus there’s barely a trace of tension in his shoulders. Everything about him is fluid.
They clear another hill. On the plain below is a smear of civilisation, a towering smoke stack rising out of it like a middle finger, and then the highway has flattened and they’ve passed the turn-off to Port Pirie. Beyond the sea of saltbush the smoke stack dominates the skyline, flanked by silos, industrial sheds and cranes, and a huge ship that looks docked on land.
Ryan points in the general direction of the stack. ‘If the Major hadn’t offered me a job, I’d have been lining up for one over there.’
‘At the port?’
‘Not if I could help it. Smelters would’ve been my choice.’
Everyone in the country knows that half the ships coming into Port Pirie carry radioactive waste. From this distance Jules can see a radwaste cask being offloaded onto a freight train—a giant cotton reel packed with spent fuel rods on their way north for ‘temporary’ storage at Port Augusta.
‘What about the farm?’
Ryan works his jaw. He’s about to say something and changes his mind. He shifts in his seat, straightens his left arm so his wrist hangs over the wheel and stretches his neck to one side. The tension springs back. ‘No future there.’
Like Angie, Jules is good at reading body language. Unlike her mother, she knows when to respect it.
She draws her knees even closer, stares out the window at the hulking industrial landscape and wonders how much darker Ryan’s mood will be when he actually gets home.
30
‘Why haven’t you taken credit for the Pax Attack?’
The kid with the bristled scalp shakes his head at Angie. ‘It’s hard to make a statement from behind bars.’
It’s not a denial, but it’s not an admission either. The kid—Ollie—has claimed the seat in front of her two days in a row and now he’s followed her to a picnic table at the rest stop, eager to talk.
The Agitator convoy is north of Dubbo and taking its first break since breakfast. The buses and Kombis are parked outside the toilets, hidden from the highway by a patch of gum trees, and the Agitators are clustered around concrete picnic tables and benches. Their main topic of conversation is the shootout at the motel across town last night.
Angie’s more interested in last Wednesday. ‘What was the point of blowing up Pax Fed Tower if not to get the credit?’
Ollie straddles the bench. He says he’s an Environmental Science grad. From a distance, with his small frame and freckled skin, he looks like he should be in high school. Up close, though, his eyes are sharp and full of secrets.
‘The outcome’s the point, Angie, not the credit.’
‘Which is?’
‘Chaos. Making the bastards nervous.’
Angie’s grip tightens on the bench. ‘Which bastards in particular?’
‘Pax Fed, the government, anyone selling off our future: they all need a wake-up call. Last week was only the start.’
Angie rips a splinter from the timber, tearing another fingernail with it. She hasn’t wanted to believe the Agitators were responsible. Hadn’t believed it.
‘You knew it was us, right?’
She squints against the glare to mask her bitterness. ‘I thought the group was being framed.’
‘You didn’t think we were capable of it?’
‘Agitators have never been killers.’
He scrubs his palm over his bristles. ‘People weren’t supposed to die.’
‘You blew up a gas main in Queen Street. What did you think was going to happen?’
‘That wasn’t the plan. We didn’t know—’
‘Who’s we?’
‘Us. The Agitators.’
‘Who planned the attack?’
Ollie’s eyes flick to Xavier. He’s beyond the buses, lotus-style in the dirt, watching a fuel tanker rumble down the highway. A girl—fair skin, short skirt and bruised shins—sits on her heels capturing the moment on a vintage SLR camera.
‘How long’s he been in charge?’
Ollie shrugs. ‘He was already running the group when I met him at the anti-GMO rally in Brisbane last July. We hung out and he got me on the team. I’m in charge of coordinating transport.’
‘Who’s funding this trip?’
‘Don’t worry, we’ve got money in the bank.’
Interesting. In Angie’s day, the Agitators were financed by corporate sponsors, crowd funders and like-minded businesses wanting to advertise on the group’s online channel. They were never flush, but there was enough to keep the site running and pay Angie a modest wage. Most of that income disappeared when Angie left. Jules was right: nobody’s going to touch the group now, not after Wednesday’s body count. If there’s money in the bank, it’s coming from another source.
Across the car park, Waylon lopes out of the unisex toilets with a hand to his nose. Angie told him long-drop toilets weren’t for city boys. He sees her with Ollie and frowns. Changes course away from them.
‘Why the gunmen?’
Ollie’s piercings catch a ray of sunlight. ‘That was a Pax Fed security team, had to be.’
‘Is that Xavier’s theory?’
‘It makes sense.’
‘And what does he think happened in town last night?’
Ollie shields his eyes. ‘You think that was about us?’
‘I have no idea. That’s why I’m asking.’
All Angie’s heard is the chatter around the campsite: that shots were fired at a local cop during a drive-by incident. A drive-by. In Coonabarabran. Thank God Jules isn’t here.
‘Maybe the feds want it to look like we’re causing problems so they can lock us up in the middle of nowhere,’ he says.
Angie scoffs. Her Agitators weren’t fans of law enforcement but they were never paranoid. ‘I doubt it.’
There’s movement at the rest stop. The protesters are breaking from their clusters and moving back to the buses. Angie stretches her legs and worries her torn nail, breathes in dry, dusty air. A crow caws mournfully on the side of the highway.
‘What’s the plan at Port Augusta?’
Ollie’s eyes flick to Xavier. Angie’s blackmailer hasn’t risen from the dirt, his gaze still fixed on the highway.
‘Are you here to lead or follow?’ Ollie asks.
‘That depends.’
‘On what?’
‘On whether I think the current leadership has a strategy, or this group is simply careening from one cock-up to the next.’
Xavier rises from the ground and Ollie is instantly on his feet.
‘I promise you there’s a strategy.’ His lips flatten to a hard smile and there’s nothing childlike about it. ‘It’s going to put us on the world stage, Angie. And you’ll be right beside us when it happens.’
He leaves her on the weatherworn bench, blood prickling where her fingernail should be and a thorny, unnamed fear vining around her gut.
31
Ryan turns off the highway and winds his way through bald, thirsty hills. They’re always brown in autumn, but after spending a year in Queensland he sees them for their ugliness. It’s not his landscape anymore.
Then they clear the pass and Mitchellstone appears below, a grid of iron roofs and dirt roads, and Ryan eases off on the accelerator. He’s coasting down the hill when he finally feels a tug for home that has nothing to do with the town or the farm. It’s the scribble of gum trees winding down from the hills and cutting through properties across the plain. He and Tommy have their own spot on the creek out the back of their top paddock. That’s what’s calling him now.
Ryan seriously considers avoiding
the main street—seeing the guys is going to be tricky enough without handing them the gift of what he’s driving—but he decides that’s a bit dramatic. Instead he pulls his cap low and slides down in the seat as far as his knees will allow, ignoring the sideways glance he draws from Julianne. It’s weird cruising through town in a stranger’s car, like returning to the scene of a crime in disguise. He passes the tennis courts and town hall, the servo and the butcher. The road that leads to the footy oval and netball courts. Then the pub, two churches—side by side—the cop shop and the CWA hall.
Ryan keeps his eyes on the bitumen but he can’t miss the dirt-caked ute out the front of McMahon’s store: his mum’s in town with the dogs. He nearly touches the brakes. It would be easier to see her here, away from the farm and his old man. But stopping would mean their conversation would be overheard and the whole district would know he was home, and he’s not ready for that either.
He keeps driving.
It’s a weekday so everyone should either be out in the paddock or—in Stevo and Trine’s case—over the range at the nuclear plant. The new power station’s not popular in most parts of Australia but it’s given a few of his classmates some cash in their wallets. Something they weren’t getting ploughing dirt and herding starving sheep.
Julianne’s been quiet since they turned off the highway. He likes that about her: she’s okay with silence. She’s taking it all in, head turning from side to side, eyes hidden behind her truck-stop-bargain sunnies. He’s curious what a city girl thinks of his one-pub town, but not enough to ask.
He turns into Creek Road and even in a lightweight sedan with skinny tyres he finds the sweet spot on the gravel. It’s barely rained since he was last here, and the surface feels the same through the steering wheel. Every corrugated bump, every section where the verge is too soft.
Ryan slows at the old plough and veers onto the dirt track. It heads up into the foothills, not much more than wheel ruts between two barbed wire fences. The paddocks here are thick with ghost gums and stubbled grass. The flock’s already chewed everything edible to the ground.
