John Marsden - Tomorrow 1

by When The War Began

  We jumped back into the Acco, and started the engine, which throbbed into immediate life. To my astonishment the warning beep and the flashing light stopped within seconds.

  ‘Air brakes,’ I said to Fi, annoyed with myself for not having thought of it earlier. ‘They have to build up pressure or something. I’ve never driven anything with air brakes before.’

  I had more trouble finding first, having to pump the clutch a few times to get it. I was sweating heavily and Fi was trembling. The engine sounded so loud in the quiet night air. Then I eased the clutch out. The prime mover jerked, took up the strain of the trailer, and crept forward. I brought it well out into the yard, clear of the other vehicles, so I had plenty of room to make my turn. Then I swung it round and aimed at the gates.

  It’s really quite frightening to crash a vehicle directly and deliberately into something. At the last moment my nerve failed me and I slowed right down, bumping too gently into the gate to do any damage. I was really annoyed with myself. With my typical arrogance I’d been worried about Fi’s nerves, but I should have been more worried about my own. I cursed, nearly destroyed the gearbox trying to find reverse, found it, and was startled by the loud warning beeps that immediately began at the back of the vehicle. Seemed like this truck beeped at any excuse. In my impatience I then backed up too fast. The trailer slewed and hit a stanchion, nearly jackknifing. Fi went white and grabbed the back of the seat.

  ‘Ellie!’ she said. ‘It’s petrol in the back, not water!’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

  This time I rolled it smoothly and firmly into the gates, which strained for a moment, then sprang open like a bursting dam. I gave Fi a quick grin, and made another wide turn to get into the street without hitting anything. The trailer followed beautifully. To keep the noise down I put the gearstick into neutral and coasted down to a clump of trees, parking under them. Fi was already trying to call the boys on the walkie-talkie, but there was too much interference from the truck engine.

  ‘I’ll go down to the corner and check that it’s clear,’ she said, ‘and call them from there.’

  ‘OK.’

  She slipped out of the cab and set off for the corner. I watched her through the windscreen I always admired so much about Fi, but now it was her courage I was admiring, instead of her grace and beauty. She looked like a breeze would blow her over, but here she was going alone through the deserted streets of a town in a war zone. Not many people would do it; still fewer people who’d had the sheltered life she’d had. I saw her get to the corner, take a long careful look in each direction, give me a thumbs up and then start talking into her transmitter. After a few minutes she waved me forward; I hit reverse again, but then found first, and rolled the truck down to pick her up.

  ‘Did you get through?’

  ‘Yes. They’re fine. A couple of patrols have been past, but no convoys. Oh Ellie,’ she said, turning suddenly to me, ‘do you really think we can do this?’

  I tried to give her a confident grin. ‘I don’t know, Fi I think maybe we can. I hope we can.’

  She nodded and faced forward again. We drove towards the next corner. ‘I’ll walk from here on,’ she said, ‘and call you from each corner. It’ll be just as quick. Turn the engine off while you’re waiting each time though, do you think? It’s pretty noisy.’

  ‘OK.’

  We made two blocks that way, but at the next I saw her take one look down the street to the right then draw back and come sprinting towards me. I jumped down from the truck and ran to meet her. She gasped just one word: ‘Patrol’, and together we went over a low fence into someone’s front garden. There was a huge old gum tree right in front of us. I was so nervous that it seemed to be the only thing I could see. My eyes and mind focused entirely on it; nothing else existed for me at that moment. I climbed it like a possum, scratching my hands but not feeling any pain. Fi followed. I got about three metres up before I heard voices from the corner, which slowed me down, made me quieter, more cautious. I inched out along a branch to take a look. I didn’t know if getting up here had been a mistake or not. I remembered Dad, one day when he’d put a big ugly patch on a hole in the eaves that possums had made, saying ‘The human eye doesn’t look above its own height’. At this moment in my life I sure hoped he was right. The trouble was that if they did see us we’d be, not like possums up a tree, but like rats up a drainpipe. There was no escape from here.

  We waited and watched. The voices continued for a while, then we heard them grow in volume as they turned towards us. I felt intense disappointment. This marked the end of our Grand Plan. It could mark the end of us, too, because once they saw the tanker their first reaction would be to seal off the area and search it. I was surprised they hadn’t seen it already. They’d stopped talking now, but I could hear the scuffle of their boots. My mind was racing; too many thoughts going through it too quickly. I tried to grab one of them to see if it might be any use in suggesting a way out of here, but I was panicking too much to get a grip on it, on anything except the tree. Fi, I slowly realised from the steady pain in my left leg, was gripping onto me as though she were a possum on an insecure branch. She had her talons dug in so hard that I was sure I’d end up with bruises. I saw a movement now, through the foliage, and a couple of moments later the soldiers slowly came into view. There were five of them, three men and two women. One of the men was quite old, at least forty, but the other two looked about sixteen. The women were maybe twenty. They were dawdling along, two on the footpath and three on the road itself. They’d stopped talking to each other and were just gazing around as they walked, or looking down at the ground. They didn’t look very military. I guessed they were conscripts. The tanker was on the other side of the road, about fifty metres from them. I couldn’t believe they hadn’t seen it yet, and braced myself for the sudden cry of discovery. Fi’s fingers had now cut off the circulation in my leg; it was only a matter of time before my whole limb, from the shin down, dropped off into the garden below. I wondered how the soldiers would react if they heard it drop, and almost let out an hysterical giggle. The patrol kept walking.

  And they kept walking. They went right on past the truck as though it didn’t exist. It wasn’t until they were a hundred metres past and Fi and I were out of our tree and peering at their distant dark backs that we allowed ourselves to believe that we were safe. We looked at each other in surprise and relief. I was so happy that I didn’t even mention the bruises on my leg. I shook my head.

  ‘They must have just thought it was another parked vehicle,’ I said.

  ‘I guess if they hadn’t been along this particular street before ...’ Fi said. ‘I’d better call Homer.’

  She did so, and I heard his soft reply quite quickly.

  ‘We’ve been held up for a bit,’ Fi said. ‘Ellie wanted to climb a tree. We’ll get under way again in about five minutes. We’re three blocks away. Over.’

  There was a snort from the receiver, not of static either, before she signed off.

  We waited nearly ten minutes, to be safe, then I turned the key, and heard the shrill beep of the brake warning before the engine rumbled into life again. We made two more blocks; when Fi signalled me from the last corner I switched the engine off and tried coasting silently downhill towards her. This was a big mistake. The brake warning began beeping and flashing redly at me again and I realised I wouldn’t have any brakes. A moment later the steering wheel gave a shudder and locked itself into position, so I didn’t have any steering either. I tried for a gear, to clutch start it, but missed the one I wanted and got only a crunching sound that set my teeth on edge. The truck lurched over the gutter and began to veer further and further left, aiming for a row of fences. I remembered Fi’s warning: ‘That’s petrol in the back, not water’, and felt very sick. I grabbed at the ignition key, turned it, and got nothing, turned it again and, with the fences now just metres away, got the beautiful sound of the beautiful engine. I swung the wheel. ‘Not too hard, yo
u’ll jack-knife.’ That was my voice. The trailer sideswiped something, a row of somethings, fences or small trees or both, nearly sideswiped Fi, then juddered to a halt just a metre from the corner. I switched off the ignition, then pulled on the handbrake, wondering what would have happened if I’d thought of doing that before. I leaned back in the seat panting, my mouth open to get air into my tight aching throat.

  Fi jumped into the cabin. ‘Gosh, what happened?’ she asked.

  I shook my head. ‘I think I just failed my driving test.’

  Our plan had been to park further across, behind some trees in the picnic area I didn’t know whether to do that, which meant taking the noisy risk of starting the engine again, or to stay where we were, out on the open side of the street. Finally we decided to move. Fi slipped across to where she had a view of the bridge and watched until all the sentries were at the far end. It was twenty minutes before that happened. Then she signalled to me and I moved the truck into the dark shadows of the trees.

  We contacted the boys by radio, and made our preparations. We climbed the ladder to the top of the tanker again and loosened the lids of the four tanks. Then we fed the rope into one tank until it was submerged, all but the end of it, which we tied to a safety handle beside the lid. We climbed down again.

  Now there was nothing to do but to wait.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Oh, how we waited. We talked softly for a little while. We were well away from the truck, for safety’s sake, sitting up among the trees looking out over the gas barbecues. It was very quiet. We talked about the boys mostly. I wanted to hear as much about Homer as I could, and I certainly wanted to talk about Lee. Fi had become totally infatuated with Homer. It amazed me how she felt. If anyone had told me a year ago, or even a month ago, that this would happen, I would have asked for their Medicare card. They would have been headed for a long stay in a private ward. But here she was, elegant, Vogue, designer label, big house on the hill Fi, completely in love with rough as guts, King Gee, one of the boys, graffiti king Homer. On the surface it looked impossible. Except that it was no secret now that there was more to both of them than I’d ever realised. Fi seemed delicate and timid, and she even claimed herself that she was, but she had a determination I hadn’t recognised before. There was a spirit to her, a fire burning inside her somewhere. One of those Avgas fires maybe, that burn invisibly. And Homer, well, Homer was the surprise of my life. He even seemed better looking these days, probably because his head was up and he walked more confidently and carried himself differently. He had such imagination and sense that I could hardly believe it. If we ever did get back to school I’d nominate him for School Captain – then hand out smelling salts to the teachers.

  ‘He’s like two people,’ Fi said. ‘He’s shy with me but confident when he’s in a group. But he kissed me on Monday and I think that broke the ice a bit. I thought he’d never do it.’

  Right, sure, I thought. I was embarrassed at how far Lee and I had progressed beyond our first kiss already.

  ‘You know,’ Fi continued, ‘he told me he had a crush on me in Year 8. And I never knew. Maybe it’s better I didn’t though. I thought he was such a reptile then. And those kids he used to hang round with!’

  ‘He still does,’ I said. ‘Or at least he did before all this happened.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fi, ‘but I don’t think he wants to have much to do with them any more. He’s changed so much, don’t you think?’

  ‘God yeah.’

  ‘I want to learn all I can about farming,’ Fi said, ‘so when we’re married I can help him heaps and heaps.’

  Oh my God! I thought. You know they’re beyond help when they talk like that. Not that I hadn’t had nice little fantasies of Lee and me travelling the world together, the perfect married couple.

  But it occurred to me as I listened to Fi, that the real reason I felt attracted to Homer lately, attracted in powerful and puzzling ways, was that I was jealous of losing him. He was my brother. As I didn’t have a brother and he didn’t have a sister, we’d sort of adopted each other. We’d grown up together. I could say things to Homer that no one else could get away with. There had been times, when he was acting really crazily, that I’d been the only person he would listen to. I didn’t want to lose that relationship, especially now, when we’d temporarily or permanently lost so many other relationships in our lives. My parents seemed so far away; the further away they got, the closer I wanted to bind Homer to me. I was quite shocked to have such an insight to my feelings, as though there was an Ellie lurking inside me that I didn’t have much knowledge or awareness of. Just like there’d been Homer’s and Fiona’s lurking away inside them. I wondered what other surprises the secret Ellie might have for me, and resolved then and there to try to keep better track of her in future.

  Fi asked me about Lee then and I said simply ‘I love him’. She didn’t comment, and I found myself going on. ‘He’s so different to anyone I’ve ever known. It’s like he’s coming out of my dreams sometimes. He seems so much more mature than most of those guys at school. I don’t know how he stands them. I guess that’s why he keeps to himself so much. But you know, I get the feeling that he’ll do something great in life; I don’t know what, be famous or be Prime Minister or something. I can’t see him staying in Wirrawee all his life. I just think there’s so much to him.’

  ‘The way he took that bullet wound was incredible,’ Fi said. ‘He was so calm about it. If that had happened to me I’d still be in shock. But you know, Ellie, I’d never have picked you and Lee as a likely couple. I think it’s amazing. But you go so well together.’

  ‘Well how about you and Homer!’

  We both laughed and settled down to watch the bridge. The hours ground slowly on. Fi even slept for twenty minutes or so. I could hardly believe it, although when I challenged her she denied furiously that she’d even closed her eyes. For me the tension grew as the time passed. I just wanted to get it over with, this mad reckless thing that we’d talked ourselves into doing.

  The trouble was that there was no convoy. Homer and Lee had wanted to come in behind a convoy to guarantee themselves a period of grace before the next lot of traffic came along. But as the time got close to 4 am the road stayed frustratingly empty.

  Then suddenly there was a change in the pattern of activity on the bridge. The sentries were all down the Cobbler’s Bay end but even from our distance I could see them become more alert, more awake. They gathered in the centre of the bridge and stood looking down the road, in the opposite direction to us. I nudged Fi.

  ‘Something’s going on,’ I said. ‘Might be a convoy.’ We stood and looked, straining our eyes to peer down the dark highway. But it was the behaviour of the sentries that again told us what was happening. They started backing away, then their little group broke up and they split, half going to one side of the bridge, half to the other. One ran in little circles for a moment, then started running down the road towards Wirrawee, then changed his mind, and he too fled to the side.

  ‘It’s the cattle,’ I said. ‘It’s got to be.’

  We sprinted for the tanker, leaving the silent, useless walkie-talkie behind. There was no time to wonder about a patrol coming down the street. We leapt into the truck and started the engine. I put it in gear and looked up, and although speed was now vital to us, I couldn’t help but lose a second as I caught the wonderful view on the bridge. A hundred or more head of beef, prime Hereford cattle, beautiful big red beasts, were steaming onto the old wooden structure like a mighty train of meat. And they were steaming. Even at this distance I could hear the thunder of the hooves on the timber. They were going like wound-up locomotives.

  ‘Wow,’ I breathed.

  ‘Go!’ screamed Fi.

  I pressed the accelerator and the tanker lumbered forward. We had about five hundred metres to go and I was pumping adrenalin so hard I felt immune to danger, to bullets, to anything. ‘Go!’ cried Fi again. As we came in under the bridge I slid the t
anker as far across to the left as I could get it, so that it was nestled under the lowest section of the superstructure. The trick was to do it without sideswiping the pylon and causing sparks, which might have finished Fi and me off quickly and horribly. But we got in there nice and close, leaving less man two metres clearance between the top of the tanker and the bridge. That was the first time any of us had thought of the possibility of the tanker not fitting under the bridge at all; it was a little too late by then to consider that problem. We’d been lucky. Fi couldn’t get her door open because she was so close to the pylon, so she started sliding across to my side. I half leapt, half fell out of the cab. Above my head the bridge shook and thundered as the first of the stampeding cattle reached our end. I was going up the ladder to the top of the tanker as Fi came out of the truck and without looking at me sprinted for the motorbikes. This run, which I too would have to do in a moment, was our greatest risk. It was across clear ground for about two hundred metres, to where we’d hidden the bikes in the bushes. There was no cover, no protection from any angry bullets that might come buzzing after us. I shook my head to clear the frightening thoughts, and ran along the walkway on top of the trailer, crouched over to avoid hitting the bottom of the bridge. When I reached the rope I glanced up. Fi had disappeared and I had to hope she’d made the bushes safely. I started pulling out the rope, coil after sopping coil, throwing it to the roadway below. The fumes were terrible in that confined space. They made me giddy and gave me an instant headache. Another thing we should have thought of, I realised: a sinker to tie to the end of the rope that had to stay in the tank, to stop it being pulled out when I ran off with the other end. Too late for that now. All I could do was jam the lid down as tightly as possible and hope that would hold it in.

  I scrambled back down the ladder. It seemed to have taken forever to get the rope out. All that time I’d been oblivious of the thunder just centimetres above my head, but now I noticed that it was starting to lessen. I could make out individual hooves. I broke out in an instant sweat, found the loose end of the rope, grabbed it and ran. I had petrol all over me, had been breathing petrol, and felt very odd as a result, as though I was floating across the grass. But it wasn’t a pleasant float, more the sort of floating that made me seasick.