While I live ec-1

by John Marsden

  I said to Gavin, ‘Can you check the vehicles? See if they took any? I’ll try to ring someone who might know where they are.’

  I believed Jeremy Finley to be the leader of Liberation, the Scarlet Pimpernel himself in fact. But I didn’t know how to contact him. Sure the phone system was working fairly well these days. But it wasn’t working very well. In particular, Directory Enquiries was putting in a shocker. I’d almost given up ringing them. They sounded like they were staffed by a bunch of semi-literate alcoholics who saw telephones as Satanic devices.

  But this time I had no choice. I dialled the number, and waited. And waited. At least before the war you got recorded music. I’d never appreciated it enough.

  Gavin came back. ‘The Yamaha and Homer’s Honda are gone,’ he said.

  ‘The Yamaha?’ I thought. ‘Well thanks, Lee, thanks for asking me. Just feel free to help yourself.’

  ‘Who are you ringing?’ Gavin asked.

  ‘Jeremy Finley.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You remember, he came here that Sunday night with Homer and two girls.’

  ‘Why would he know where they were going?’

  We could have had a three-hour conversation but suddenly an operator came on line. I was so not expecting a human voice that it took me a moment to realise. ‘Uh, I’m wanting a number in Stratton.’

  ‘What name?’

  ‘Uh, Finley.’

  ‘What initial?’

  ‘Um, I don’t know.’ Damn. If Jeremy’s mum had remarried, or gone back to using her maiden name, I was sunk.

  ‘What address?’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure actually.’

  ‘I’ve got six Finleys in Stratton. I’d need more information.’

  Click. The sound of a truck reversing. Beep, beep, beep.

  I slammed the phone down.

  I had a feeling Jess was involved in this too, like I’d said to Homer the night before, but there were two problems ringing her. One was that she had a common surname — Lewis — and it would mean another battle with Directory Enquiries, a battle I was most likely to lose.

  The other was that I wasn’t sure enough that she was involved. I could cause more problems than I solved by calling her.

  In the middle of that I had a sudden image of Homer or Lee lying dead. I clutched my stomach and turned away from the phone. Gavin, looking frightened, took a couple of steps towards me. I realised that I couldn’t give in to thoughts like that. Not yet anyway. I had to stay strong.

  We’d missed the school bus. I briefly thought of going into school and finding Jess and sussing out what she knew, but it would take half the morning. Reluctantly I came to admit the obvious: that I would have to wait here and see what happened. I was in the role I hated most: helpless, ignorant, passive.

  Furious with Homer, with Lee, with wars, with life, I went for a quick run round the cattle, to check on them and distribute a bit of hay. To be honest, if half the cattle had been down with bloat I don’t think I would have noticed. But while I was doing that I did at least decide on a timetable. I would wait till lunchtime. If they didn’t turn up I’d go into school and see if I could find out anything there. If that failed I’d have to go all the way to Stratton and track down Jeremy. At the very least Jess should be able to tell me how to get in touch with him. I was halfway certain that those two had something going between them.

  Back at the house I literally walked around in circles. Well, in rectangles. I did laps around the house. After a while I thought there was a good chance Gavin and I would send each other crazy. I had to do something. But I couldn’t think of a single thing that would not cause awful complications for the two boys if I guessed wrong. All I could do was curse them for not being more open with me the night before.

  It was just after ten when I heard a low buzzing sound like a very big and aggressive mosquito. It could have been a low-flying aircraft but I knew straight away it was a motorbike, our motorbike, the Yamaha. Except it was being ridden harder than I’d ever heard it ridden before. Dad would have chucked a fit.

  I ran outside. Gavin bolted after me.

  ‘What?’ he said as we panted up the slope, where we’d get the first view of it. ‘What? What?’

  ‘The Yamaha.’

  We saw it just a moment later. ‘Lee,’ Gavin said. He’s got astonishingly sharp eyes, Gavin. We hurried down to the track, where we could cut him off. I couldn’t tell whether he’d seen us or not, as he gave no sign, but at the last moment he hung out the back wheel and skidded to a halt.

  The first thing I noticed was the rifle slung across his back. He switched off the ignition and sat there, slumped over the handlebars. It was as if switching off the ignition took all the energy he had. He glanced at me and I was shocked at how thin his face looked, at the way his eyes had become dark sockets. All in not much more than twelve hours. I was frightened to see him. It was as though he was about to tell me very bad news.

  ‘They’ve got Homer,’ he said quietly.

  I was expecting the worst news, just from the look on his face, but I still wasn’t sure when he said ‘got’. What did ‘got’ mean? Dead? Was Homer dead? Or was it something else?

  I couldn’t speak, just watched him fearfully, waiting.

  ‘They caught him. We were coming down opposite sides of a hill. They didn’t even know I was there. But he was a bit further down than me. I think he might have walked right into a sentry. The first I realised was when

  I heard a lot of yelling and a minute later there were torches everywhere and I saw two guys marching him into their camp.’

  ‘Did they shoot him?’ I asked, trembling, holding my stomach.

  ‘Not while I was there. I couldn’t figure out what to do. I couldn’t attack the camp on my own. I waited quite a while, looking for a chance to get in, but the place was swarming. Then soldiers started coming out and searching the bush, to see if there were any more Homers I guess. At that point I thought the best I could do was come here and get help.’

  I shook my head and ran my fingers through my hair. ‘You better tell me what the hell this is all about,’ I said. ‘In fact you better come back to the house and get something to eat.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘There isn’t time. We’ve got to get back there.’

  ‘If you pass out through hunger and exhaustion it’s going to get us nowhere at all,’ I said.

  Gavin and I both jammed ourselves onto the back of the bike and got a lift to the house. In the kitchen I gave him my lunch, and then threw a couple more sandwiches together — the fastest, sloppiest sandwiches in the history of catering. I didn’t know if Lee would be too upset to eat, but he wolfed them down, at the same time trying to tell us the story.

  ‘It’s what you’d expect, one of these terrorist camps. The kind of place the people who killed your mum and dad would have come from. Homer and his Liberation are sure they’re holding a prisoner there, a man named Nick Greene, who got kidnapped a month or so ago.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘I don’t know a can of beans about him.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, we had some pretty good information. We had a map showing the hut where Nick Greene’s kept, supposedly. Liberation had worked out a plan. Very low-key. Pairs work best, according to them. They gave us stun-guns for the sentries. We were going to come in at 5 am, on either side of the hut, and try to get him out through one of the windows. But of course at the end of the day you’ve got to make your decisions according to what you find. Anyway, we didn’t get very far, and I left my stun-gun in the bush somewhere.’

  ‘So what are we going to do?’

  ‘I’m sure they put him in the same hut we thought Nick Greene was in.’ He shook his head. ‘We’ve got to get back there.’

  I was as anxious as he was to get going. But at the same time it seemed like we were heading into a frightening situation, in broad daylight, with no plans at all. I was trying to stay calm but it was hard when I was tor
n between wanting to rush in to save Homer and the feeling that if we didn’t think it through we’d all get killed.

  ‘So they never knew you were there?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m sure they didn’t.’

  ‘That’s one thing we’ve got going for us then.’

  He stuffed the last bit of sandwich in his mouth and stood up. ‘Come on, Ellie, we’ve got to go.’

  ‘Wait. Wait.’ I tried so hard to think. ‘What about the other members of Liberation? Would they help?’

  ‘I don’t think there’s time to get them. And I only know a couple of them. Homer’s the one who’s right into it. I’m not officially a member yet. This is the first time I’ve been on one of these raids.’

  ‘So who is the boss? Maybe we should at least contact him?’

  ‘Can you believe Homer wouldn’t tell me? I was a bit annoyed actually. Like he couldn’t trust me. But he said there was a good reason. I thought for a while that it might be him, like you said last night.’

  ‘It’s still possible I guess. How many people do you reckon are in the camp?’

  ‘Liberation thought it was around twenty.’

  ‘Could we get the four wheel drive close to the camp?’

  Lee wiped a tired hand across his forehead. He was having trouble thinking.

  ‘Not really. No, no. It’s rough country, just over the border. Not all that far from here, a bit over an hour. Maybe I should have come back earlier.’

  ‘What about the four wheel motorbike? Could we take that?’

  ‘Yeah, probably be OK.’

  ‘All right.’

  I’d thought of something. It wasn’t much of a plan; in fact it was barely half a plan, a quarter of a plan, but it might help a bit.

  ‘We’re going to have to take Gavin.’

  ‘What? Are you crazy?’

  ‘We’ll need him.’

  I ran out to the machinery shed, Gavin so hot on my heels that he really was like a shadow. I filled four drums with petrol, spilling litres of the stuff in my rush, then loaded them on the Polaris and tied them down. Then I went back into the house and got our. 222, its sling, and the ammo.

  We ran to the motorbikes. Gavin didn’t even ask if he was coming, just jumped on behind me. Lee shook his head at the sight. I didn’t blame him. But apart from the fact that we were going to need Gavin I couldn’t help thinking that there was a case for taking him anyway. How cruel would it have been to leave him behind? At the farm on his own, going utterly mad with fear, not knowing if he was ever going to see me or Homer or Lee again? After all, as far as I knew, he had no-one else in the world. It might almost be kinder to let him die with us than to leave him alive in a world of loneliness.

  C HAPTER 12

  It was past ten thirty when we got away. God, how could a week start this badly? A few hours ago I’d been thinking about catching the bus, fattening the calves, why the pressure pump was coming on more often than it should, how much of the Legal Studies assignment I could get done at lunchtime, whether I was still in love with Lee, if we were going to run out of milk for breakfast… Now we raced across paddocks, past the lagoon, heading for the bush and on into the hills, towards the border, not knowing whether Homer was alive or dead, not knowing whether we’d still be alive at the end of the day.

  Lee didn’t spare the horses. He seemed to remember the way pretty clearly. Good going, since the first time he’d come up here was at night. At least the trip home had been in daylight.

  Once we got off my place we started climbing. I didn’t know this area nearly as well as I knew the Razor’s Edge, and Mount Wombegonoo, which were in the opposite direction. It just wasn’t as nice, wasn’t as interesting, so I hadn’t been here often. Scrub that was green with the winter rain, quite a few patches that had been logged, a mob of about twenty kangaroos thumping away at three-quarter speed, a fox pawing at something in the grass then bolting when he realised two motorbikes were upon him.

  We were on an old logging track that I had a feeling would peter out eventually. The problem was that it hadn’t been maintained in a long time and there were fallen trees across it every few hundred metres.

  For the two-wheeler this wasn’t so bad, as Lee could usually detour round them through the scrub, even if it meant walking the bike at times, half lifting it at other times. For the four-wheeler it was a different matter. To detour into the bush I had to get a clear path, and sometimes that meant long, difficult treks. The grass was so high in many places that I couldn’t tell whether it was clear or not. I’d charge through the undergrowth, hit another fallen tree (usually part of the one blocking the road) and have to reverse and try another route. One of the cans of fuel was leaking I think, so there were constant petrol fumes that gave me a bit of a headache.

  We had three ways to get the four-wheeler past a fallen tree. One was to detour, one was to push the tree off the road, the other was to ride right over the top of it. The trunks were wet and slimy though, and they kept slipping out of our hands when we lifted them, and when I tried to ride over them the big fat wheels tended to slide all the way down the trunks and branches.

  Before long my arms were aching. I was tiring fast, and we seemed to be taking forever to reach the border. Lee offered to swap but I didn’t think it was fair: he was the one who’d been up all night.

  Then we got a good run of nearly a kilometre and suddenly we were there.

  I’d never actually seen the border before. At this stage it was fairly rough. Apparently the highways and other roads were different — it was well marked, as you’d expect. But here it was pretty casual. Our track had almost faded away and was getting hard to follow. But a couple of strands of barbed wire, a splash of paint on trees either side of the path, and we were about to enter the occupied zone.

  Apart from a trip to New Zealand during the war, this was the first time I’d left my own country. Except it was still hard for me to think of it as leaving my own country.

  Gavin held up the bottom strand of wire and we rolled the bikes through. I had a quick whispered discussion with Lee.

  ‘How far from here?’

  ‘Not far at all. If we take the bikes another five minutes, then we better walk.’

  ‘It’ll be hard with the petrol.’

  ‘Well, the walk’s not much more than ten, fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Twenty with the drums,’ I thought.

  We got going. Searching my mind, trying to find something that would help me feel better, trying to think of some advantage we might have, all I could come up with was that they mightn’t know of Lee’s existence. If they’d been searching the bush they should have given up by now. It wasn’t much to pin our hopes on, but it would have to do.

  The track became little more than a walking path, covered by thick green grass. It sure wasn’t used very much. Time and time again the four-wheeler barely squeezed between the saplings. I had to keep ducking to avoid low branches, and I could feel Gavin behind me doing some fast swerving as several branches nearly wiped him out.

  Lee glided to a halt under a big old gum tree and got off the Yamaha. He walked it into the bush and hid it. I got the drums off the back of the Polaris, then took it down the track another thirty metres and pushed it behind a tree. Without being told, Gavin covered it with bracken and branches.

  We slung the rifles over our backs. Lee picked up two drums and Gavin and I got one each. I didn’t know how long Gavin would last with his but every bit helped. I glanced at him as we set off. He looked calm but how could any of us be calm, walking into a gully full of killers? I’d rather be getting a family of snakes out of the woodheap.

  For the first few minutes we took no great care but then Lee signalled with a finger to his lips that we needed to get quiet. Gavin was falling behind but when I tried to take his drum he snarled at me and I snatched my hand back. I counted my fingers quickly, and he smiled. I felt proud of that — getting a smile out of Gavin was hard work sometimes.

  We side-sli
d down a gully into the bed of an old creek. A little water was running along it. That was good as it helped wash away any noise we made. My arms felt like they were going to drop off. I couldn’t imagine how Gavin was still carrying his drum. Lee, in front, looked as steady and calm as ever. I think he had the leaking can though, as the smell of petrol kept wafting back over me.

  The further we went, the slower Lee went. Soon he was stopping every five or ten metres to take a good look ahead. I realised in the middle of this just how quickly and easily I had slipped back into my wartime role. It was like the worries of my parents’ deaths and the financial hassles with the farm, even the really important things like the Legal Studies assignment I was planning to do this same lunchtime, all of it had dropped away. I was back with Lee, on our way to meet Homer, we were out there in the bush against a dangerous enemy, and in a weird sort of way it was comfortable. All my senses were functioning at maximum revs. I was wide awake. Somewhere along the way, during the last year or so, I’d become good at this stuff. Maybe I should join the Army.

  While I was congratulating myself on my brilliant military skills I nearly ran into Lee’s back. He was behind a tree and he looked around and frowned when I bumped his petrol can. ‘How about we leave the fuel here and see if we can get a look at the set-up?’ he whispered.

  ‘OK.’

  I pointed to the drums, made a ‘stop’ gesture at Gavin, and mouthed, ‘You stay here, look after the petrol,’ and he nodded calmly. ‘What does he do with his fear?’ I asked myself. Occasionally it showed, but not often.

  I knew he would be safe. He mucked around all the time when there was no pressure on, but he wouldn’t do anything stupid in a situation like this. And he’d be happy now that he had something important to do.

  Lee and I left the creek and, unslinging our rifles, went a bit higher. I could see that the gully was opening out ahead. We moved carefully through the bush. Lee led me about three-quarters of the way up the ridge. It was steep country but quite bare. I was trying to stay calm and focused but I couldn’t help thinking that it was rare for us to be doing anything like this in broad daylight. Pretty dangerous.