Tomorrow 5 - Burning for Revenge

by John Marsden

  Almost at the same second I heard it. The roar of truck engines, in low gear. At first I thought it was just one truck, then I realised it was more than that. Homer and the others disappeared inside the hut. They seemed to fall backwards into it, in one move, like circus clowns. If there’d been time for jokes I could have turned that into one. But there was only time for fear. I leapt at the hut myself. It was stupid to put ourselves in such a deathtrap but we had no choice. Around the hut was clear ground. The near­est cover was scrub, sixty or eighty metres away. If we’d run for that we’d have been seen before we got halfway.

  As it was I didn’t know if they’d seen my back and heels when I dived into the little galvanised-iron shed. I would have been in their line of sight. And move­ment stands out so strongly. It always catches the eye. I’d got there as fast as I could; I just didn’t know if it was fast enough. I fell on top of the others, knocking Homer and Fi half over. But no-one wasted words dis­cussing those little problems. As soon as we’d sorted ourselves out we got in positions where we could see what was happening. Already the trucks were going past the shed: that’s how close it had been.

  My position was down near the floor. I was look­ing out of the corner of the little shed, through a gap in the iron. It was enough of a view to get a fair idea of what was going on. I counted three big trucks but I thought another three had probably gone past before I found my peephole. I saw two big dump­sters and a furniture van. These guys were making a serious visit. This was probably their major outing for the week. It might have been all the garbage from Wirrawee. It seemed too much for little Holloway.

  The last truck stopped just past the hut, out of my line of sight. I tried to tell from the sounds what was happening. I think they were queuing to dump their loads. Homer was pressed up hard against me. I became aware of his elbow jammed in under my rib. I moved a little to get rid of the pressure.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Fi whispered desperately.

  No-one answered. We were all in such total shock. One minute we’d been mucking around, no pressure on us, having a good old casual time at the tip, and the next minute we were looking down the throat of death. I could see its tonsils. We’d been close to death before. I realised though that this might really be it. I’d had this funny idea for some time that when we got caught (these days I thought in terms of when, not if) it would probably be in some stupid, casual way; not dramatically or spectacularly, not while blowing up a bridge or taking a hostage or attacking a convoy, but while we were asleep, or sitting on the dunny. Or we’d turn a corner on a path somewhere in the middle of the bush, the place where we felt so safe, and there’d be a thousand soldiers with guns pointed at us.

  And here it was, happening. It had been such an innocent situation, but suddenly we were completely trapped. A drop of liquid fell on me: it was Homer’s sweat. It felt hot. I couldn’t do anything about it; it didn’t matter anyway. At last though someone answered Fi’s question. Surprisingly it was Kevin.

  ‘Just stay here.’

  It wasn’t much of an answer. If a soldier came into the hut we were gone, we’d had it.

  None of us reacted to Kevin’s comment. But it seemed we were going to get an answer from outside. A soldier came walking into my line of vision. He walked slowly, casually, like he was bored. A roll-your-own was sticking out the side of his mouth. He was coming straight towards us. It was so obvious what was happening. He had decided to check out the hut.

  He was five metres from the door when I heard someone yell. The man stopped, looked towards the voice, then shrugged and turned around, and just as slowly went away again.

  There was a rumble of a truck in low gear, and the sharp piercing beeps of it reversing. I could hear other engines revving too. I guessed they were mov­ing up in the queue as each one finished. The soldier coming to check the hut had probably been ordered to shift his truck forward.

  Suddenly one of the trucks appeared in my view. I figured it was the first empty one. It stopped right opposite my peephole, with a squeak of brakes and a grinding noise. It was another furniture van, but a very long one.

  And again a driver came towards us. The man from the furniture van got out, stretched, and walked towards the hut, a little more purposefully than the other guy. I was rigid. What were we to do? We couldn’t kill him. The others would be onto us straight away and it would be all the worse for us if they found we’d killed one of their buddies. The best we could hope for was that they wouldn’t kill us on the spot. If they took us into Wirrawee they’d work out fast enough that we were the ones who’d killed the officer there, even if it had been an accident, sort of.

  They might pin a lot of other stuff on us too, if they did some investigating.

  Yet the best we could hope for was to be taken to Wirrawee, because at least we might have a chance to escape on the way.

  The driver kept walking straight towards the door. He wasn’t a young man – about forty maybe – and he wasn’t in uniform. I guessed he wasn’t a soldier. No reason why they’d need soldiers to drive the garbage to the tip.

  He passed from my view, because my peephole didn’t give me much of an angle. I was so tense I couldn’t breathe. There was a weird pain in my lungs. I was staring at the door, expecting it to open. But it didn’t. A minute later the man walked back towards his truck. Now he was carrying a whole pile of hess­ian. I remembered seeing a heap of packing by the shed door, out of the weather.

  The man climbed into the back of his truck. He was in there only a moment, then out he came, and walked towards us. Once again he got a big armload and took it to the van.

  This time, while he was in there, Lee slipped over to the door, pressed himself against the wall, and took a tiny glance outside. Then he whispered: ‘They’re all busy, unloading a truck by hand.’

  No-one said anything. Lee seemed to be waiting for one of us to speak. When no-one did he said: ‘I think we should try to get out of here, next time this guy’s inside his van.’

  I felt Homer move, but he still didn’t say anything. His sweat rained down on me.

  ‘Where would we go?’ Fi asked.

  ‘Around the other side of the truck. Then try and get into that bit of scrub against the fence maybe. Or over to those wrecked cars.’

  ‘But ...’ Kevin said.

  ‘Sshhh,’ Homer said.

  The man was coming back. His third trip. As soon as he returned to his truck with another armload Homer joined Lee at the door. It seemed like the two of them had made the decision for us, something that always made me mad.

  But this was no time for arguing. I followed them to the door, and I could feel Fi and Kevin pressing up close behind me. When the man climbed the step into the van, Lee opened the door. He took another quick glance to the left. Apparently the men at the other end of the tip were still busy, because he took off straight away. Homer went after him, without even looking, which I thought was pretty amazing. I sure looked. Only for a moment, but I did look. There wasn’t much to see. Just a truck with a long tray backed up to the dumping area, and a couple of blokes chucking stuff off it. From behind, someone – Fi or Kevin, but I’d bet on it being Kevin – gave me a shove. I felt a surge of anger, but again there was no time for emotions. I put my head down and ran.

  Like the two boys I went around the front of the truck. I found them on the other side, leaning against the long body, trying not to pant. They both stared at me with huge eyes. They looked like chihuahua eyes, they were so big and out of proportion. My eyes prob­ably looked the same.

  Fi and Kevin suddenly arrived in a rush beside me. We all pressed ourselves into the metal side of the van, hoping no-one had seen us, hoping the driver hadn’t heard us. I got down on the ground and had a look underneath, trying to see what was hap­pening. Sure enough, a second later I saw his feet. He was walking along the other side, then he veered away, towards the hut. We had a moment to plan our next move. I stood, and used sign language to show the others what was ha
ppening.

  They just stared back, looking terrified, all with those huge wide eyes.

  And I realised as I looked around what the others had already figured. We’d struck a big problem. The scrub against the fence was too far away. Like, fifty metres. We’d be in full view of the other drivers for forty-nine of the fifty. And the car bodies Lee men­tioned were no better. They were as far as the fence but in an even more dangerous direction, back towards the truck being unloaded.

  There was no other cover anywhere.

  I could hear footsteps so I dived down and took another look under the van. The driver was return­ing. He took his load up the step again. I could hear him moving around inside. His boots echoed through the aluminium body. Then out he came, and back to the shed.

  This time I stayed on the ground and kept watch­ing. I saw his feet go straight to the door of the building and straight into it.

  I knew what we had to do.

  ‘Inside the truck,’ I hissed at the others.

  They stared at me in horror.

  ‘He’s finished loading the felt,’ I said, although it was a huge gamble to say that. I didn’t really know if he’d finished. I just assumed he had, now that he’d gone into the hut.

  ‘Quick,’ I added.

  Taking a leaf out of Homer’s book I forced them to follow by going ahead on my own. I pushed past the two boys and sprinted around to the back of the vehi­cle. The door was still open, thank God. I went up the step and inside, knowing that someone, I didn’t know who, was following.

  Inside it was like a church, dark and silent. But the smell was musty and hot. It made my skin prickle. Or maybe it was the fear that did that. I don’t know.

  Chapter Four

  The guy had obviously been thinking like a good removalist, stacking up felt he could use to protect his loads. Tied in each of the front corners was a neat pile of blankets and hessian, and more felt. The stuff he’d collected today wasn’t tied; just dumped in piles on the floor. Maybe he was taking it back to wash it. I hoped he was, for the sake of any future customers. Some of it was pretty grubby.

  I burrowed in under a heap of felt. There was so much of it and it was so dark in the truck that if he glanced in he might miss us.

  At least one thing was for sure: Lee had made the right move getting us out of the hut. The way the dri­ver walked straight in: we’d have had to overpower him and run for it, or give up. And giving up was still unthinkable. Even though there were moments when I almost wished we’d be caught – just so the whole thing would be over and done with – when it came to the crunch, I’d do anything to avoid capture.

  Someone burrowed in next to me. Someone light, probably Fi. I could feel her boots touching mine.

  I was feeling hot and prickly and sweaty. The stuff was so dusty I was afraid I might sneeze, like I had in the fuel depot in Wirrawee, the night we’d tried to sabotage the jet fuel. This time I thought I could con­trol it, but what if someone else sneezed? Was Fi allergic to dust? Her whole family was allergic. Her little sister got asthma pretty badly.

  After a few minutes came the sound that would decide our fate. The sound of footsteps. There was a pause. I remembered a lady in New Zealand telling me about her little son, who had pins and needles in his legs. He complained: ‘Mum, I’ve got lemonade legs.’ Well, I had lemonade everything, right now. My skin fizzed. It felt like lice were crawling through my scalp, then I got the horrible idea that maybe the packing material was full of lice. It wasn’t impossible.

  There was a creaking noise, then a slam, and sud­den darkness. He had shut the door.

  I started breathing again. The itching in my hair stopped, so I assumed that maybe I didn’t have lice.

  I sat up, throwing off the covers. It was too dark to see what the others were doing, but gradually my eyes got more used to it. I realised Fi was next to me, like I’d thought, and she too was sitting up.

  The truck shook as the driver got in and slammed the door, then it shuddered as he started the engine. We moved forward, but only about fifty metres, and sat there for another five minutes, with the engine running. I thought he was probably waiting for the other trucks. No-one dared speak. We couldn’t be sure how thin the wall was between us and the dri­ver. Above the throbbing of the engine I heard the whoop of a truck horn. It seemed like this was the signal, because a moment later our truck lurched into gear – I don’t think he had a lot of synchromesh in his gearbox – and away we went.

  In peacetime, BTW, the airlines offered mystery flights, to fill their empty seats. You’d arrive at the airport and only then would they tell you where you were going. It was at the big city airports that they offered it of course, not at Stratton, and certainly not at Wirrawee, but Mr and Mrs Mathers had gone on a few of them.

  And now we were on our own mystery flight.

  My mind headed into full-on panic. I knew the first thing was to get control of my mind, control of myself. I breathed deeply and tried to concentrate. It took a while, but at last I felt calmer and able to think. I wriggled over to the middle of the van. By grabbing any limbs I could find I got the others to meet me there. And so we held our strangest ever meeting, whispering to each other as we lay in a star shape on the hot jolting floor of the truck.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Fi asked.

  It was one of Fi’s standard questions. No-one answered.

  Finally, however, Homer said: ‘It’s pretty easy to open the door from the inside.’

  ‘Can you do it quietly?’ I asked.

  ‘I think so. It didn’t make much noise when he shut it.’

  ‘But we can’t open it as we go along, because the trucks behind will see us,’ Lee said.

  He’d obviously had the same idea as Homer, that we could jump from the moving truck, but he’d also realised that it was hopeless.

  ‘All we can do is hide again under the felt when they stop,’ I whispered, ‘and hope the driver doesn’t come in the back here.’

  ‘And then what?’ Fi asked.

  ‘Wait for a while and then try to get out. Maybe wait till dark.’

  ‘There’s one thing I noticed when I got in,’ Lee said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s a little hatch between this part and the driver’s cab. So if we knew the driver had got out we could get through that and into the front while he was coming round to the back.’

  I was silent. It was a useful piece of information. It mightn’t save us – nothing might – but it did give us an extra glimmer of hope. I was grateful for any glim­mer at that stage, however slight.

  The truck kept going. It was quite a straight road and it was bitumen. That could mean Wirrawee, but there was no certainty about it. It could equally mean Risdon, or West Stratton. The only thing I was sure of was that we weren’t on the main road to Stratton itself.

  Lee took a look through a crack in the door and came back to report that he could see at least one truck behind us. That finally closed the option of jumping out. Even if it hadn’t, did we have the guts to do it? I doubted it. At best we’d break nine ankles between the five of us. The truck was doing a good speed.

  ‘We’d better get any weapons we can find,’ said Homer. ‘Or anything we can use as a weapon.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘But hide them in the felt. If we’re caught, we want to look innocent. Don’t have anything in your pockets that they could call a weapon.’

  I don’t know what the others came up with but I didn’t have much: a fruit knife, a box of matches, and a fairly heavy torch that maybe I could bounce off someone’s skull. I moved the torch into the side pocket of my pack, the matches into my jeans pocket, and then, despite what I’d said to the others, I slid the knife down inside my sock. I figured if we were busted I’d try to dump it fast.

  It was such an impossible situation. We could be on the road for ten minutes or ten hours. I was get­ting fairly desperate to go to the loo, but I had to tell myself firmly that there was no way. It was just nerve
s, I knew that.

  My mind started to wander, like it always does. It’s very annoying sometimes. And dangerous. I remem­ber when I was leading the New Zealand soldiers up the track to Tailor’s Stitch and on into Hell. I’d spent half that time daydreaming, and then realised I could have had them killed by being so casual.

  Dad used to yell at me across the paddock all the time: ‘Ellie, are you still in the land of the living?’

  Still, there wasn’t much danger in daydreaming now. There was nothing we could do to help ourselves for the moment. No way out of this dark and musty cell. I tried to picture what the country outside would look like. End of November, moving fast into December, it’d be pretty busy out there. Irrigation’d be in full swing, milkers letting down milk by the tanker-full, and summer crops like soybean and sunflower going in. On our place we’d be dipping the sheep.

  I wondered if they were still doing those things. I guess the trees would still produce their fruit and the sheep would definitely be mating and having babies, that wouldn’t stop, war or no war. I never tired of the sight of new lambs. They were one of the best things about life on the land. They looked like they were made from pipe cleaners, tottering around, trying to pretend they could do gymnastics when all they could manage was to stand up straight.

  One thing I wondered about was the irrigation. BTW – before the war – you were allowed to take a certain amount of water from the river, or from the irrigation channels. It was strictly limited, so people further down the river didn’t run out and the dams didn’t go dry. Everyone had meters on their pipes, for the Commission to check that farmers only took what they were allowed. If no-one was checking any more it’d be a huge mess, with some people having great crops and others having droughts.

  Our place was quite a way from the irrigation properties, but we had fairly good rainfall. Four years ago was the last bad dry spell. We usually averaged 500 mm a year.

  This season looked good so far. There was a lot of good spring pasture around.