Incurable ec-2

by John Marsden

  However, it wasn’t that easy. I soon realised there was going to be no such thing as momentum. I could hear the car engine really grunting, and wondered again what else was in the bin. Say the car was packed with books and the dump bin with concrete blocks. We’d run out of fuel before we got to the end of the car park. But I started to realise that it wasn’t just the weight of the thing, it was the bitumen as well. If this was the middle of a hot day I’d have had no chance. We’d have been in bitumen soup. I had the horrible feeling that the dump bin was actually lifting and pushing the bitumen, like when you’re chiselling a long curly shaving from a block of wood. I could picture the bitumen piling up, getting bigger and gluggier, until it brought us to a halt.

  All of these thoughts were going through my head in the space of seconds, and at the same time the bullets were storming against the car. It was thang thang thang, like hail on a galvanised-iron roof, but about twenty times louder. Like popcorn popping against the lid of a saucepan, but a thousand times louder. We were getting up a little bit of speed, but I wondered how long the clutch would last. Grunt, strain, squeeze, thang thang thang, push, groan, thang thang, lurch. Every fibre in my body seemed to be strained like piano wire. If someone had strummed me I would have given off quite a note.

  Yet one thing was changing. There weren’t so many bullets hitting the car. I had time to wonder why. Maybe Homer and the others were taking pot shots at them, sticking their heads up in the dump bin. I hoped not, but I also knew they might have to do that for us to survive. The trouble was that I couldn’t see in the rear-vision mirror, because of the boxes in the vehicle, and I couldn’t see the dump bin in the wing mirrors. For all I knew the dump bin was now riddled with bullets and my friends were all dead.

  Perhaps we should have surrendered. Funny, that thought had never entered my head.

  But perhaps the soldiers were just running out of ammunition. They must have used thousands of rounds. God knows, we couldn’t have many left either. Up till now I’d been gazing at the steering wheel, the gear stick, the accelerator and brake. I guess I thought it might work a kind of magic and make the vehicle do what I wanted. Now I looked out and around, as much as I could. Amazingly, we were going faster than a man could run, although the creaking and banging and rattling of the chain and the dump bin suggested we wouldn’t get much further. I could see soldiers in the distance, but only to the left, and I think we had put a little space between the others and us.

  There was only one place I could aim for and that was the dirt track I had seen before, the one that led up to the building site. I had no idea where the boys’ motorbikes were, but the dirt road looked like it might lead to wildness of some kind. The official roads offered nothing but a suburban death, a journey that sooner or later would be halted by a roadblock or an army vehicle or a sniper. I had to go dirt.

  By now I’d actually got up to a speed of between forty and fifty. We were humming along.

  Wisps of white smoke drifting out of the engine put a stop to my optimism. I’ve always been one of those people who prefer not to look at something bad in case it turns out to be bad. My father always preferred to look because, he said, ‘It’s better to know! If you look and it’s good, you can stop worrying. If you look and it’s bad, you can figure out what to do about it.’

  Well, I wasn’t about to stop, get out and look under the bonnet. The way I see it, smoke is always bad. But I did force myself to look at the gauges, and immediately wished I hadn’t. I’ve never seen a temperature gauge in the red before. I’d certainly never seen one at the max, with the needle practically bowed, like it was about to release an arrow. For all the terrible things I’d done to our vehicles at home over the years, I’d never cooked an engine. My mother did once, but I never had.

  The wisps of smoke were strong now, getting more like a solid column. I hoped the owner of the car had insurance. The engine started coughing and heaving, like it was going to vomit. That’s how I felt too. I was pressing down harder on the accelerator but we were losing speed. It was exactly like that movie with the guy being chased by the truck and he’s trying to get up the hill but his engine’s giving him nothing any more. The only difference was that in the movie it took about ten minutes. In the car park it took about forty-five seconds. Suddenly the car was panting and dying.

  Still, we were nearly at the edge of the car park. But at that point I gave up. It was a question of whether we would get a few more metres with the Toyota or whether we would be better off on foot again. Assuming there was anyone else left alive to be on foot. I think that was one of the reasons I stopped where I did. I couldn’t stand the not knowing any longer. I had to see whether they were still alive. I had to see whether my idea and my decision had killed them or saved them or somewhere in between. This was one situation where it was better to look.

  Here’s a bit of historical trivia. When the United States Army invaded and won the Japanese island of Okinawa in World War II, they suffered nearly forty thousand casualties. But they also had more than twenty-six thousand men evacuated because of mental breakdowns. When General Finley told me that, in New Zealand during the war, it really shocked me. But as the war went on, it didn’t shock me much any more.

  When Homer and Lee and Jeremy and Jess came crawling out of the dump bin I thought, ‘My God, what have I done to them?’

  Their hair was frazzled like they’d had electric shocks, their faces were tight, but it was their eyes I noticed. I wondered how much longer they’d be members of Liberation. Would they be any good to the Scarlet Pimple after this? Their eyes reminded me of the cow I’d pulled from the dam. She was stuck so fast and was so worn out by her struggles that I’d given her a handful of illegal pills to get her moving. By the time she got onto the bank, her pupils were as big as frisbees.

  Even more disturbing was that I couldn’t work out whether these four looked like the traumatised cow before I gave her the ecstasy, or the crazed cow tripping after I shoved the pills down her throat.

  I shouldn’t try to be funny about it because there was nothing amusing in it for them, and I’m sure I would have looked worse if I’d shared the ride with them. But I saw at a glance that the sides of the dump bin were intact. Dented and marked, almost every flake of paint gone, but no holes. I felt a little surge of jubilation in my chest.

  At least they hit the ground running. Homer looked around briefly to orientate himself. ‘Quick, go!’ he gasped. He started stumbling towards the dirt track.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I screamed at him as we took off

  He looked around at me with a surprised expression. ‘I thought Jeremy must have told you.’

  ‘So I was heading the right way?’ I asked, pleased again.

  He didn’t bother to answer.

  At least I was reunited with my rifle. For a few moments the position of the Toyota and the dump bin had protected us from the firing. But as we got free from that cover, it started again. I’d already been pulling out any last rounds I could find in my pockets and cramming them into the magazine. The trouble is that when you do it too quickly you get in a mess and the rounds jam up with each other. ‘Patience in small things,’ my father used to say. I hardly had any bullets left anyway. It’s a feeling of lightness and relief when you take the last of them out of your pockets, because they weigh so much. It’s also a horrible feeling of panic, because once they’re used, you’re truly on your own.

  CHAPTER 8

  We were lucky that everybody was able to run. I’m not sure what the American troops on Okinawa did when they collapsed mentally. I’m guessing they fell down in little heaps and wept and could not move or speak any more. Or maybe they threw away their weapons and ran screaming at the enemy. Or maybe they dived in blind panic into the ocean, desperate to swim to Australia or Hawaii or California.

  We were lucky that none of us was in that condition.

  I realised when we were in the shadow of the first new wall that we were heading for a twin-cab ut
e. Somehow they’d stolen it and put it here ready for use. It had drums in the back that looked like fuel, which could be a bonus with the price of petrol these days. Homer grabbed the keys from off the front tyre and threw them to me, then went around to the other side. I took the driver’s seat. Jess and Lee both got in the back, from my side. When I noticed how badly they trembled I could only hope that dump bin syndrome didn’t last long.

  Jeremy was in the front, shaking so much that he bounced on the seats. Homer didn’t seem much better.

  I took off with a skidding slide that sent dust and gravel flying behind me. I was trembling pretty badly myself, but hanging on to the steering wheel helped. From the back seat Jess yelled at both of us, ‘Put your safety belts on,’ which was good advice, and a relief, because it showed she hadn’t completely shut down. I put mine on with one hand as I accelerated over the crest.

  Accelerating over a crest is probably always a bad idea. Many a story I’d heard at Wirrawee B amp;S’s about people being wiped out in head-on collisions as they flew over crests. There were so many stories that I didn’t know if they could all be true. But as a general principle, I did see that accelerating over crests was in no-one’s best interest.

  On this occasion I thought that it was in our best interest, but I wasn’t expecting to find a bulldozer. This building site was a mess, with materials and vehicles everywhere, so maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise to find a bulldozer casually parked in the middle of the road. It was just a regular-sized bulldozer but to me it looked like a mechanical T-Rex. Jess screamed, and Jeremy made a noise that’s as close to a scream as a boy can get, and I spun the wheel. We went into a massive slide that made the first one look like a delicate piece of ballroom dancing. At every moment I fully expected the ute to roll. Somehow it didn’t. If Jeremy had been trembling a bit before, now he was registering a force-ten gale.

  We took off again.

  The track faded fast, as we got away from the building site. We were heading towards a paddock, which looked like it was being marked out for a housing estate. There were no gates, so at least we didn’t have that problem. We did have a lot of other problems though. In the middle of all of them I managed to remember the biggest one. ‘Have any of you seen Gavin?‘ I yelled.

  Nothing but the thrum of the engine and the rushing of the wind through the windows. I felt despair. ‘No-one?’

  ‘There’s a couple of motorbikes coming after us,’ Lee said. I hated him when he was like this. At the same time I had to process the information. Motorbikes. They were more difficult to deal with than cars. They were so mobile, so hard to stop. It was like swatting mosquitoes. They could get into much more difficult country, use different tracks.

  ‘Did Gavin follow us?’ Jess asked. I loved her for this, as much as I hated Lee for his cold-heartedness.

  ‘How many bikes?’ I asked Lee. ‘Yes,’ I said to Jess.

  ‘Three,’ Lee said.

  ‘That’s terrible,’ Jess said. I loved her even more. Then I realised she was talking about the motorbikes.

  ‘How far behind are they?’ I asked.

  ‘Not far enough,’ said Homer.

  ‘About a hundred metres,’ said Lee.

  I glanced at the wing mirror, and saw one of them. Objects may be closer than they appear, but this guy looked pretty close. Closer than a hundred metres. I groaned, but only to myself. Outwardly I just swore. Life these days seemed to be nothing but problems, and a lot of the time there seemed to be only one solution. Death. I had the horrible feeling that someone was going to die here. How else could we stop the mosquitoes on motorbikes? I gritted my teeth, put aside my doubts and memories, and decided that if there had to be fatalities it wasn’t going to be me or my friends.

  But how to stop them? I couldn’t think and drive at the same time. If you think and drive you’re a bloody idiot. No, that wasn’t right. But already my brain was at maximum output. If they could breathalyse my brain for concentration I’d blow. 15. Here I was, at night, headlights on, weaving and dodging around rocks and ruts and fallen timber and ditches. The track was getting worse. Then I noticed we had a good lead suddenly. We’d opened up a break. It even looked like they’d stopped completely. Could we get that lucky? No, because soon they started to move again. But we had a good lead now. It wouldn’t last for long, but it was a welcome relief because it gave us a few more moments to be alive, and when you’re facing death moments become important. Like, if you were down to your last dollar, I guess you’d value every cent.

  I nearly lost the track and had to swing sharply left hoping that the faint line I’d seen out of the corner of my eye was a road. Those bush tracks are so deceptive. They’ll run along like a regular road while you listen to the music and enjoy the view, and then for no obvious reason they start to degenerate, and before you know it there’s not much more than a choice of paths, decorated with kangaroo droppings and rabbit holes, and you can’t be sure they’ve got anything to do with humans even. They look more like animal routes to the tastier patches of grass. And then you can’t pick up any radio stations and you think, ‘OK, what happened to civilisation?’

  Still, I thought I was on a man-made track. It seemed to be heading back towards a highway I could see in the distance, with regular traffic. We started going across the crest of a hill, but then the path turned again and went down the back of the hill. That’s when Lee called out, ‘Are those rocks up there?’

  ‘Yeah I think so.’

  ‘Hit the brakes when we get there. And stay ready. Don’t get out.’

  He and Homer had been talking in the back seat from time to time, but I hadn’t heard what they were saying and I hadn’t tried. Too busy keeping us alive. But I knew from our experience in the war that when someone like Lee tells you to do something, if it’s a time of real danger, you’d better do what he says. Every other time you can ignore him, and you’re probably better off if you do.

  As soon as we reached the rocks I stopped with a lurch. I knew now why he wanted to stop. It was because the motorbikes were out of sight for a minute. The three boys piled out. The vehicle rocked as someone got up on the tray. I heard the scraping of a drum across the metal floor.

  ‘What are they doing?’ Jess asked nervously.

  I glanced back at her but didn’t answer. At least she’d stopped trembling, more or less. How should I know what they were doing? It involved the spare drums of fuel, that’s all I knew. The ute lurched again as the boys jumped off the back. It felt lighter now, somehow.

  Lee’s face appeared at the window. ‘Get going,’ he said. ‘Stop up there somewhere after we’ve set it off

  Set what off? Lee turned to the other two boys and said, ‘You two spread it and I’ll light it. That way I won’t get any on my clothes.’ By the end of his sentence we were gone.

  We rocked and bumped on, going up a rise now. It was tough stuff. Smart of Lee to think of that detail. Otherwise he could have become a human torch. We turned right, still following a track. The motorbikes appeared again, coming pretty fast, making up the time and space they’d lost. I couldn’t see the boys. From one of the bikes came a familiar flash of flame. It was the mark of a gunshot. So they were still keen to kill us. And of course there could be no other outcome really. They couldn’t take us prisoner. They’d be too scared to try that in the middle of the night when we’d already proved how dangerous we were.

  I didn’t really understand how Lee would stop them with a small petrol fire. After all, the bikes could be manoeuvred around that. No big deal really. The three boys hadn’t even taken their guns, so it wasn’t like they were going to shoot the riders while they were distracted by the flames. Then I realised and I cried out.

  ‘What?’ Jess asked, looking scared.

  I stopped the ute and looked back down the hill. I wasn’t sure how good a view Jess had. Mine was pretty good. Of course Lee had volunteered to be the one who’d light the match. He was the only one who could do this. I couldn’t have
done it.

  Like a pack, the bikes came on. There were three, not two. I saw at least one pillion passanger. Maybe they’d paused when they did to pick up reinforcements. Now they probably had time to register that the car had stopped, up on the rise. They were in a bunch bunched together. Lee had chosen the spot well, considering he’d had so little time. The gradient on either side of the track meant they were forced together and the rocks caused them to slow down.

  I wondered if they smelt the petrol and had time to think about it for a moment. They lit up slowly, or that’s what it seemed like. Of course it must have all happened in a second. When I replay it in my head it seems like slow motion. I didn’t see the match. The first thing I saw was a glow that was almost phosphorescent. It rose like a dancer who was getting to her feet to start the performance. Funny how something so terrible can be so beautiful. It spread across some grass and almost instantly came to the first motorbike. It paused there. Everything seemed to hang. This bike, and one of the others, had a rider and a passenger. The rider threw up his hands as though he suddenly didn’t care about the bike; he was just going to let it fall, let him and his passenger be thrown into the flames. Suddenly all three bikes, all five men, became blazing statues. Lee’s timing had been as perfect as his choice of location.

  I turned away, sickened, unable to watch any more. Even above the engine of the ute I could hear screams. ‘Revenge for Shannon,’ I thought, trying to give it meaning, make it bearable. I put the car into reverse to get the three boys. I only had to back up about thirty metres before they arrived. This time they had the sense to use different doors, Jeremy and Homer on one side, Lee on the other. They reeked of petrol. I think the horror and enormity of what they’d done had sent them into supershock. But they had given us a chance to get out of here. I put my foot to the floor. We went on to the top of the rise. The track now took on a more definite direction again. In the distance I could see the highway again, with quite a few cars going along it. How strange, that normal life was going on over there, while behind us men were staggering around trying to put themselves out. Well, maybe sometimes we all had to be foxes and feel nothing for our victims. For some minutes my main concern was the petrol fumes in the car. It was terrible, even with the windows down and me driving as fast as I dared. I even used the word ‘terrible’ when I was yelling at Jeremy to wind down the window, which says something about me or about language or about both, because there was only one thing that was terrible during that time.