by Chris Ryan
‘Ease the nose up,’ said Kelly, ‘and keep her level.
’ At last. Butterflies were dancing a fandango in Ben’s stomach. He eased the stick back, keeping his eyes firmly on the horizon. The slightest deviation in straightness and he would be ready to make a correction.
As the wheels left the ground, the rattling disappeared and the ride became smooth as silk. The horizon slipped away. The plane soared into the air.
‘Keep this speed,’ said Kelly, ‘and climb to a thousand feet.’ Already she was looking down at the map on her knee. ‘But well done. That was pretty good.’
Ben felt a warm glow spread through him. He’d actually got a plane into the air all on his own. A little voice in his mind was saying ‘Wow’, over and over again.
But Kelly wasn’t about to let him rest on his laurels. ‘Keep straight.’
Ben started to correct when suddenly he looked down at the pedals.
Something was moving in the foot well. Something like a grey hand.
‘Don’t look down there,’ scolded Kelly. ‘You’re meant to be climbing. You can’t relax yet – this is a critical stage.’
Ben looked ahead and tweaked the nose up, just to make sure. Then, once again, he felt something tickle his leg. He looked down—
His leg jerked violently before he’d even got the scream out. The microlight wobbled and the wings tilted. Ben’s shoulder hit his door with a thump.
Kelly tried to hold onto the seat. She pumped the pedals to bring them straight and yelled, ‘Have you gone nuts?’
‘There’s a spider as big as my hand!’ Ben couldn’t look anywhere but the foot well. The spider was big and furry, with long, long legs.
‘Oh, grow up. This isn’t some Indiana Jones movie.’ Kelly tried to straighten the plane up but her bandaged hand pulled the stick too far. The microlight rolled violently the other way. She pushed the stick and stamped hard with the pedal to stop them going right over, then lifted her foot to release it.
At that moment the spider crawled onto Ben’s boot. He tried to shake it off and his foot shot forward. On the other side, Kelly pressed down on her pedal, making Ben’s snap down on his foot, pinning it.
She screamed in fury. ‘Get your foot out of the way!’
With his foot imprisoned, the spider got a good purchase and started to climb up his leg. Ben jerked his feet away from the pedals but that didn’t dislodge it.
The microlight rolled from one side to another. ‘We’re losing airspeed!’ Kelly tried to pull the throttle up with her elbow, then turned and took the stick crudely between her wrists. To do so, she had to twist round in her seat, and found herself staring straight at Ben’s thigh.
The spider had a big brown furry body like a mouse, black glinting eyes and long spindly legs. A dainty pair of incisors curved downwards like a Victorian moustache. It was barely half a metre away from Kelly’s face.
Despite herself, Kelly recoiled in horror, jerking the stick and making the microlight dive once again. She shrank back against her door and shifted the stick back again with her elbow. ‘More throttle, quick!’
Ben increased the throttle, never taking his eyes from the spider. It felt heavy as it walked further up his leg, and he felt every movement of its eight legs through the thin fabric of his flying suit.
Kelly screamed hysterically, shadow-boxing the air with her bandaged paws. ‘Get it out! Just get it out!’
‘How?’ Ben shouted, equally hysterical. He jerked his leg, hoping to shake the spider loose, but it wouldn’t shift. Did it have suckers on its legs?
‘Just do something!’
Careful to keep his body absolutely still, Ben put his hand out of the window. The catch on the door was fiddly but he managed to open it. The door swung back and smacked against the nose of the plane. The red ground yawned outside.
Kelly’s voice shrieked in his headset. ‘Are you nuts?’
Ben jerked his leg towards the open door but the spider remained stuck fast. If he touched it there was the risk that it might bite him. ‘Get off me, you ugly devil,’ he told it through clenched teeth.
Kelly’s hand waved in his face as she adjusted the stick with her left elbow.
Ben grabbed her arm and used her bandaged hand to bat the spider away. If it attacked, he figured its fangs weren’t long enough to bite through all the bandages. Kelly screamed and the spider flew out of the door, became a black blob in the bright sunshine and vanished to a pinpoint.
‘Happy landings,’ said Ben with feeling.
He let go of Kelly’s hand and reached to pull the door shut. It had swung right open and was flapping to and fro. He had to brace his hand on the door frame and lean out. His fingers caught the door, got a purchase and pulled it shut.
He sat back, catching his breath.
Kelly’s voice came through on the headset, hoarse and strained. ‘Do you mind sorting out this plane before we crash?’
As Ben took the controls, he saw that the ground looked alarmingly close: sure enough, when he checked the instruments, he found they were at 360 feet. He nudged the stick forward and swooped down a little way to get a good burst of speed, then opened the throttle and soared upwards. He watched the altimeter, kept the craft straight, and made sure they were cruising to textbook standards before relaxing and turning to Kelly.
She was sitting back in her seat and cradling her hand.
Ben winced. ‘Did I hurt you?’
‘No, I don’t think so. Those painkillers must be pretty good.’
But while Kelly didn’t mind Ben grabbing her arm too much, she did have a few other things to get off her chest. She sat up straight and fixed him with a furious glare. ‘The next time something like that happens, don’t panic like that. You do not ever start jerking your feet around in a light aeroplane. I thought you were having an epileptic fit!’
Ben was stunned. Now she was blaming him? ‘Whereas you were a picture of self-control, I suppose?’ he muttered resentfully.
Kelly didn’t seem to hear him. She had more to say; plenty more. ‘We nearly rolled over – if you do that in a microlight, you’ll snap the wing off. We were flying dangerously low and the speed we were going we could easily have crashed. That was a very immature way to react – and by the way, you never, ever, ever – under any circumstances – open the door.’
She gestured towards the door and nearly biffed him on the nose with her pristine white bandage – now marked with a big yellowy smudge.
‘You’ve – er – got a bit of something on your bandage. I think it’s spider entrails,’ Ben told her.
Bel walked along a shopping street. The windows were grimy and dark. In a clothes shop, a dummy lay across the doorway. Its hair and face had melted. At first Bel thought its body had been painted green, then realized that the clothes it was wearing had melted too.
Had she seen this dummy before? she wondered. Was this the shop near the green where she’d fallen over among all those insects? Was she going around in circles? She felt so disorientated. Wisps of smoke and steam rose from the ruined shops, as though the fires inside were not truly vanquished but sleeping, like dormant volcanoes.
The asphalt under her feet had softened in the heat. The heavy fire engine wheels had pushed it up to the edges of the kerb so that it looked like a fallen soufflé.
She was no longer wet. The heat radiating from the scorched streets had dried her clothes in no time. They felt stiff with sweat and dirt, as though they had been starched. There hardly seemed to be anyone else about. Had they all been picked up in rescue vehicles?
Approaching a junction, she noticed a burned-out car that had rammed into a lamppost. There was nothing left of its interior: the seats and controls were vaporized, leaving only bare metal – though its back window remained intact; it was covered in stickers. Although they were blackened, the lettering showed in a different texture so they were still readable. Bel recognized them because they were from environmental campaigns she had played a part in: NUC
LEAR POWER, NO THANKS. AGAINST GLOBAL WARMING. The car had belonged to people like her. Maybe she even knew them. There was another sticker, less familiar to her. She looked closer and tried to trace the lettering: OZ PROTECTORS FOR A HEALTHY PLANET.
If the car had had any tyres left she would have kicked them. These were the people who had kidnapped Major Kurtis, locked her up and left her to burn. Now their car was wrecked. Well, that was poetic justice.
But then a cold feeling stole over her. The car had crashed into that lamppost. She imagined the scene: had the petrol tank gone up and consumed the occupants in flames? Had Major Kurtis been in the car too?
What a horrible way to die, to burn to death in a car. She felt sick to her stomach. She’d wanted revenge, but in some civilized way; she’d wanted them to face justice.
No, they must have got out, she decided. If they hadn’t, there would still be some human remains, surely. And the car might not belong to the same people who grabbed her. Any environmentally aware person might display stickers like that. Still, if she ever crossed paths with Oz Protectors again …
She did not know that she already had; that they had suffered only a slightly less dreadful fate, choking to death on the chemical fumes in the swimming baths.
Down a street to the left she saw a group of fire-fighters and an engine. Thank God! At last – people. She ran towards them.
They were working on the cinema. The three-storey frontage had collapsed, along with the ground floor, and blackened concrete beams spanned a big hole into the basement. Three firefighters were directing their hoses down into it. But the water wasn’t blasting out at high pressure; it was trickling out gently, as if they were cleaning something fragile. There was something very eerie about the whole scene.
Bel found her eye drawn into the hole. She saw shapes below the section of wall, a jumble of light and dark, slick with water. It reminded her of a shoreline after an oil disaster. Everything looked different after a fire had done its work. Was that a metal chair? A café table? The more she looked, the more she recognized. Water was trickling down from the hoses above, washing away some of the soot so that the bright metal of the tables and chairs showed through.
The trickling water revealed something else as well. Pale rods protruded out of the black slick. They were bones from toes. A human foot.
Before she could look away her brain made sense of more shadows – part of a leg.
‘Ma’am.’ Bel suddenly noticed a firefighter standing in front of her. A girl. Her face seemed familiar – the oriental features smeared with black stripes, the fire-fighting clothes bulking out her rangy frame, making her look like an American footballer. Had she spoken to her earlier that day? Or maybe it was shock that made her imagine that.
She pointed into the basement. ‘There’s somebody down there.’ Her voice came out in a whisper – she felt terribly shaken. She had often seen dead bodies when she visited disaster zones but it was something you never got used to; particularly when they had been burned.
Even as she said it, she realized the firefighters must already know the body was there. That’s why their hoses weren’t on full blast.
‘Ma’am,’ said the firefighter, ‘you can’t stay here. You must move on.’
Bel looked into the firefighter’s face and saw weariness. She was just a kid. She could only be a few years older than Ben. What terrible things must she have seen today? And yet she was being so calm. Disasters made people grow up so quickly. Bel felt ashamed of her own moment of weakness. She made an effort to pull herself together. She let the firefighter escort her away from the yawning pit and towards the truck. Hose lines snaked out of the back, throbbing with the water that was travelling down them. The sound of it pulsing towards the wreckage drew Bel’s gaze back there again.
She saw a tongue of flame flickering up the side of the building. The firefighters responded immediately: suddenly the water came out in a strong white jet and they lashed the walls. In less than a minute the flames were beaten back to smoke.
Then they reduced the flow to a gentle trickle once more and turned back to their patient work down in the basement.
‘Is there somewhere safe where I can go?’ said Bel.
Wanasri took her to the fire truck and opened a hatch in its metal side. She brought out the spare fire jacket and put it around Bel’s shoulders, then went back and fetched a bottle of water.
‘Wait here and you can ride back to the station with us,’ she said. ‘But it looks as though we’ll be here for hours yet.’
Bel felt the weight of the jacket and slipped her arms into the sleeves. She wanted to say thanks, but tears of relief welled up in her throat instead. She nodded and sat down against the chrome bumper of the engine. Wanasri hurried back to rejoin her colleagues.
Engine 33’s crew were working on the cinema as a break from active firefighting. The teams could only work in flames and smoke for so long, so they had been sent to work at a low-risk site – a job that was actually no less harrowing than fighting fires. They were recovering badly burned bodies.
Petra, Andy and Darren were gently hosing the bodies down to cool them off – stopping them from burning and deteriorating further, which would make identification impossible. Wanasri’s job was to prevent the public seeing the bodies.
They decided they needed to move a section of debris and Wanasri went back to the engine to fetch some lifting equipment.
The woman she had left sitting against the fender was on her feet.
‘Are you feeling better?’ asked Wanasri.
Bel fastened the jacket briskly. ‘I feel fine now, so I’ll be off,’ she said. ‘There are some trucks down at the end of that road – I’ll go down there and hitch a ride. It’s better than sitting here for hours – I’ll get in your way, and anyhow, I’ll go mad if I just sit here. Thanks again for your help.’
‘Are you sure?’ said Wanasri.
But Bel was already marching away, her arms swinging determinedly.
Chapter Eighteen
While Ben flew, Kelly pored over the map. She had taken a reading off the GPS – the global positioning system – and was lining it up with the grid reference on the map. Her big paw-bandages traced the grid lines.
While trying to get rid of the spider, neither of them had noticed the plane’s bearing. They had gone way off course.
When she found the reference, she wasn’t exactly pleased. ‘We are literally in the middle of nowhere,’ she said. ‘This place is just empty. It just says “Great Victoria Desert” on the map and there’s nothing else at all. No roads, no water features, nothing.’
Ben had done a bit of orienteering. ‘What about lining up on contour lines?’
Kelly waved a white fist in the direction of the window. ‘Do you see any hills? There are no hills so there are no contour lines. We are in the middle of a big empty space.’
‘Could be why they call it the outback,’ said Ben. ‘But we don’t need the map, do we? We’ve got the GPS.’
‘The GPS could go wrong or it could run out of battery power. You should always use a map too. I really don’t like it when I can’t see where I am on paper.’
Ben got the feeling that the real reason she was fretting so much was that she was worried about her father.
‘I’m trying to find the Ghan track,’ said Kelly after a while.
‘But the police stopped the Ghan. They weren’t on board.’
‘My dad wouldn’t make a mistake,’ said Kelly. ‘The kidnappers must have taken them off the train before the police searched it.’
‘If they were ever on it in the first place.’
Kelly sat in silence for a few moments. ‘They had to be,’ she said at last. ‘Otherwise they’d still be back in Adelaide. And the doctor at Coober Pedy told me that Adelaide’s on fire.’
‘What do you mean, Adelaide’s on fire?’
‘The whole town,’ said Kelly. ‘They think it spread down from the vineyards.’
‘The
vineyards?’ repeated Ben. ‘But that was hours ago! It can’t still be burning. Why didn’t you tell me before? What if my mum’s still there?’
Kelly glared at him. ‘Listen, don’t start getting snippy with me. All I know is that it’s a big emergency. And there’s nobody there because the army is evacuating the place. Just chill.’
Ben seethed. He had just as much right to worry about his mum as she had to worry about her father. But he decided to keep his feelings to himself. Another argument wouldn’t help them.
‘We need to follow the track back to Adelaide,’ he said. ‘Maybe if they were taken off we’ll see some sign.’
‘They’re a couple of tiny needles in one mother of a big haystack …’ mused Kelly, looking down.
Certainly the terrain below was bleak – mile upon mile of featureless red earth like the surface of Mars. At least it should be straightforward to fly over, with no thermals from hills and valleys. All the same, Ben would have been glad to see a hill. All this Martian flatness was a bit unsettling. Nothing changed. It was as if they were hanging stationary in mid air.
Kelly looked at the instruments and tutted. ‘You’re taking us in the wrong direction. Turn in a big circle.’
Ben eased the stick over.
Kelly gave a weary sigh and looked down at the map again. ‘We’re never going to get back to Adelaide if you let us drift off course like this.’
Ben wasn’t finding turning as easy as he’d expected. The rudder didn’t want to work – yet the microlight was normally so responsive. Now it was like trying to steer a supermarket trolley.
‘Kelly,’ he said, ‘try your left rudder.’
He felt her press the pedal. That did nothing either.
‘It’s the wind,’ she said. ‘We’re in a really strong gale. More throttle!’
Ben increased the throttle. The engine noise grew higher and faster and he expected the airspeed indicator to climb quite quickly, but it hardly moved. ‘Nose down?’ he asked Kelly.
