I drove along the rows until I found a gap where the Jackaroo looked at home. I drove it in nose-first so that the wrecked rear was showing.
And at last I could let go. I was in worse shape than the Jackaroo, but I didn't have to run and fight and starve any more, not for a few minutes anyway. Maybe not for a few hours. I turned off the ignition and leaned forward, resting my forehead on the steering wheel. "Someone get the number plates," I said, closing my eyes. No other vehicle in the yard had number plates, so we had to get ours off. But I let the others do that. I just sat. I wanted to lie down somewhere and sleep but I was too tired to go find a place. I could hear them unpacking the car and talking to each other, just occasional mumbled comments, but I couldn't hear what they were saying not because they were talking too softly or because I was deaf, but because I was so tired I couldn't turn the sounds into words. The stuff was coming in my ears but not reaching my brain. The energy required to push the words the last millimetre into my brain wasn't there. I've never been that tired before.
I started lying across the front seats of the car: not exactly lying, just letting myself fall sideways. All the bruises and aches and pains were hurting hard now, now that I didn't have to ignore them, fight them off. But then there was a cold draft as someone opened the door.
"Don't," I whined, "don't." I huddled up a little tighter, trying to keep warm.
"Come on, Ellie," Fi's voice said. "You can't stay there."
But I didn't want to move, couldn't move. I was like that five-year-old again, wanting someone to carry her into the house after she'd fallen asleep on a late-night ride home.
"Come on, Ellie," Fi said again. She didn't even sound sympathetic, just bullying and irritated, too tired herself to have sympathy for me.
She tugged on my leg and I kicked out angrily and connected pretty hard with something. Fi squealed, in anger or pain or both, and I realised I'd have to move now. I'd put myself too far in the wrong. So without a word of apology to Fi, who was holding her side and scowling, I stumbled out of the car and along the row towards Robyn, who I could see in the distance.
They were setting up a rough camp in the back of a Nissan E20 delivery van that had been whacked severely right where the driver had been sitting. He would have got a hell of a headache: it was really a mess in that corner. But the rear section was whole/and dry. I didn't say anything to anyone, just dragged myself in there and lay-like an old sleeping bag. I was still very hungry but had no energy to eat.
It turned out that I didn't have the energy to sleep, either. I probably did sleep a bit but I didn't feel like I had. Fi and Homer squeezed in beside me after a while, but I ignored them. Lee and Robyn were doing sentry. I knew sooner or later a patrol would come around, but I had to trust the others to be ready for them, to take the precautions.
At least the patrol didn't come till the next morning. I slept a bit during the night. It was warmer with the bodies of the others to snuggle up to. I let them do all the sentry duties; no one asked me and I couldn't have got out of the van. Fi brought me some food quite early in the evening and again at dawn. I ate both times, and gratefully too. It wasn't until I was busting for a leak that I finally left the van, and even then I put it off until I was desperate.
At about eleven o'clock Robyn arrived at a run. "They're coming," she said.
We all came writhing out of the back of the E20, like a nest full of snakes.
"This way," Lee said to me. I followed him down to the back row of cars, and beyond them to an old overgrown collapsed fence. We climbed over that and ran on down to a patch of bush. We grovelled in there till we were well out of sight.
"How long do you think they'll keep looking for us?" I asked Lee, as we lay there. We were so close that we were nearly touching, but I wanted to keep his mind on other things.
"Until they find us," he answered grimly.
That seemed to kill off any romantic thoughts.
"Did the helicopters wake you?" Lee asked after a while.
"What helicopters?"
"There's been three this morning already. The first one was just after dawn."
"Looking for us?"
"I guess."
I couldn't think of anything else to say that wasn't too personal or too frightening. So I just lay there. Ten minutes later, Robyn appeared in front of us.
"Anti-climax, guys," she said. "They drove in, drove round the yard, and drove straight out again."
"They didn't see the Jackaroo?" I asked.
"No, they didn't go near it."
We went back into the yard, where I at last had enough energy to start taking an interest in my surroundings. I saw Homer, who was on his way to have a poke around the house at the end of Ralston's yard; presumably the home of the Ralston family.
"Do you want to come?" he asked.
"OK.'" I was really just tagging along for the ride, something to do.
"What happened to you in the water?" Homer asked.
"Not now, please," I begged. "I don't want to talk about it now. I don't want to talk about anything."
He shut up.
We approached the house from the back, which was on the gully side. Then we realised that it was actually the front; that it had been built with its back to the road. The effect was strange: it was facing nothing much. It was an old weatherboard place, with a galvanised-iron roof. A verandah ran right around it, and a grapevine ran along that, as thick as a telegraph pole in some places. There were no electricity poles, but there was quite a modern generator almost hidden around the back. The house really was a dump, though. It wouldn't have been much of a place when it was first built and years of neglect had made sure that it was more of a dump now The verandah was bowed in the middle, and swayed and sank as we stepped onto it. A row of starter motors was neatly placed along the wall to the left; a dozen of them at least. Half a bird's nest lay-near the front door, and the mat was fraying on all four sides. Stencilled on the mat in faded black letters was the message: TAKE YOUR BLOODY SHOES OFF.
Yet, after all that, we were surprised to find a big gleaming lock on the front door. It looked expensive, and tough to crack. The door itself was quite solid, so we didn't bother with either. I picked up a stick and went to break a window. "Hope there's not a burglar alarm," Homer said nervously. "Someone on the road might hear it."
I thought for a moment. "Doubt it. Why put in a burglar alarm when there's no neighbours to hear it?"
I smashed the glass out in one pane, then, when there was no sound of sirens and ringing bells, smashed out the other panes, too.
"Anyway," I said to Homer, "There's no power line. It'd have to run off batteries and they'd be flat by now."
I knocked out the rest of the glass and the crosspieces of wood, then swung a leg over the sill and climbed inside. It was dark and smelly, like going into a laundry full of over-used socks. Rain had leaked down one side of the wall and stained the wallpaper; it was all mildewy and musty.
"Imagine living here," Homer said behind me.
I went on into the kitchen, where it was too dark to see much. There was a fridge, but I wasn't going to open that, and an old meat safe with cans on the top that looked worth investigating. It was obvious that no looters had been here, probably because the house was so run down it didn't look worth the trouble. Homer went through another door into the back of the house and I had a look at the bathroom. There was an old claw-foot bath, a bit like the one at home. I peered into it and was disgusted to see two little grey furry things with tails sticking out of the plughole. It took a moment for me to realise what they were: mice that had died in there, probably so desperate with thirst that they'd stuck their heads down the hole looking for water.
Homer came in but before I could say anything about the mice, he said, with a sort of quiver of excitement: "Come and look what I've found."
Nineteen
I followed Homer through an old crimson curtain that served as a door. It was like we'd suddenly landed in an electron
ics showroom. I couldn't even recognise most of the stuff. There was a computer and a printer, a couple of video recorders and a monitor, and a fax machine. That was standard enough. But the whole of the far wall was communications equipment. There seemed to be a variety of radios, two microphones, and a lot of little gadgets, like a walkie-talkie and a mobile phone.
"Amazing," I said.
"Looks like a branch of Tandy," Homer said.
"Talk about a double life. Living in the nineteenth century half the time and the twenty-first century the other half."
"Yeah, toys for the boys," Homer said. "They say no matter how old guys are, they have to have their toys."
That sounded so funny coming from Homer that I had to struggle not to laugh.
"This one's like the rural firefighting sets," I said, walking over to a big radio unit in the corner.
"Yeah." Homer was looking thoughtful. "I think this guy's a real whatever-they-call-it—ham. Short-wave radios and all that stuff. I tell you, Ellie, we could probably talk to other countries using this gear."
"E-mail with voices."
"Exactly."
"You just want to play with these toys yourself."
"Yeah, maybe."
"What exactly are you thinking? Giving yourself the pleasure of some French practice?"
"New Zealand. If we could get in touch with the Kiwis, if they knew we were the ones who blew up Cobbler's Bay, they might, I don't know..."
I began to realise where Homer was heading. My mind began to jump at some of the possibilities.
"They might come and rescue us?"
"Well, they might."
"We'd need to start the generator. I don't think the noise of that'd be too good."
"Mmm. But we've got to take some risks. At night we could see them coming from a good way off."
"It's possible, I suppose. I do like the idea of a holiday in Milford Sound. But surely they'd have too much on their minds to worry about a few kids."
"Probably. But still..."
The thing was that once Homer put the idea in my head, I knew I was stuck with it. For months we'd had no glimpse of even the slightest hope. We couldn't see any end to this war in the near future; maybe not even in 'the distant future. So what was to become of us? Were we doomed to wander the countryside, having smaller and smaller areas where we could hide, until one day we were caught? That seemed our only choice. At one stage I'd even had a dream of making a raft and sailing to New Zealand, like ship-wrecked mariners in old adventure stories.
But at least if we could talk to someone, to anyone, really: well, at least they'd know we were alive. That would be comforting, even if they didn't send a VIP jet to rescue us.
"We'll have to ask the others," I said at last.
"Look," Homer said, showing me an old exercise book. "This is the key. It's all the call-signs and frequencies and things."
I took it and had a look. A lot of it didn't make any sense, just lists of numbers. But it was obvious that this guy could tune in to the emergency frequencies: he had numbers for police, ambulance, fire authority, different airports, air force, state emergency. I had a vague idea that it was illegal to listen in to some of these channels. Oh well. Not many of them would be broadcasting these days.
We climbed back out the broken window and went to find the others. Lee and Fi had joined Kevin and Robyn on sentry duty and they were talking earnestly. It turned out they were discussing the same subject that was starting to obsess us all: our futures. They'd been trying to recall the news Kevin had brought of the counter attacks: troops from New Guinea were holding an area around Cape Martindale; the Kiwis had recaptured much of the southern coastline: the Burdekin and the area around Newington. Trouble was, that was weeks ago; a lot could have changed since. What Lee wanted to do was to get through to Newington. It was a thought that horrified me.
"Lee, I don't know what a full-on war zone would be like—none of us do—but I can't see how we could possibly get to a place like that. I mean, surely there'd be tanks and rocket launchers and all that stuff If it was easy just to waltz through it all, the Kiwis would have done it."
"But they wouldn't be expecting anyone to come from the other direction," said Robyn, who seemed to be agreeing with Lee.
"I don't see that we have any choice," Lee said. "The one thing we all agree on is that we've got no future here. The war's not going to end in a hurry, and we're running out of options fast. We've got to make something happen, not sit around and wait to be caught. Take the initiative, do something decisive, that's what I reckon."
I mentally cursed all those videos that Lee had watched over the years. Stallone had a lot to answer for.
"But Lee, we can't take on an army. All we've done so far has been sneaky stuff. We've been like rats in the dark, keeping ourselves invisible. That's why we've been so successful—well, one reason, anyway," I added, not wanting to give up all the credit I thought we deserved. "We can't go into a battle zone. We just aren't prepared for that. They'd knock us over in thirty seconds."
"So what do you want us to do?" he said angrily. "Sit on our bums and wait? Start making white flags that we can wave when they come for us?"
"I don't know what to do! Stop acting like there's one right answer and all we have to do is find it and that'll be the end of our problems! This isn't a Maths test."
That killed off the argument a bit. Homer and I told them about our discovery, and that got everyone excited. We agreed it would be too dangerous' to start the generator in daytime, but there was no hesitation about having a go that night. Lee went off to check it out. Robyn and Kevin still had an hour of sentry to do, and Fi wanted to show me an old lube pit that she'd found. She had the clever idea of turning it into a bolt hole by covering it with iron and parking a vehicle over the top. We sweated for a while doing that. It was quite fun, and the result was perfect. After we'd covered it with galvanised iron we scattered dirt over it, and a few bits of exhaust pipes, a broken windscreen, and an empty soft drink can. Then we pushed an old Commer delivery van over the top of that, and brushed away the tyre tracks so it looked like it had been sitting there for twenty years.
Homer and Lee had taken over as sentries by then, but we challenged the other two to a game of hide and seek. We made it easy for them by telling them which row of cars we'd be in, then we ran down there, slipped into the pit through a little hole we'd left open, and pulled the galvanised iron in place above us. It was a dark little cubby but dry, and we sat in there quite comfortably, giggling at our own cleverness. After five or six minutes we heard Kevin and Robyn searching; Robyn opened the back door of the Commer and we heard her say "Not here." We gave them a couple more minutes, then crawled out. They were already four cars further down the row. We were delighted.' It wasn't a place where we'd want to spend six months of our lives, but it was a good retreat for emergencies.
Helicopters continued to be our major problem, though. We got buzzed twice more that morning, then in the afternoon one of them returned, and went over the yard really carefully. Backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, patient and relentless. The noise shook through me: there was no keeping it out. We were all in hiding but our problem was the Jackaroo. If they saw that, they could call up ground troops and surround the place, then pick us off at their leisure.
The helicopter spent more than ten minutes scanning the yard. Then it tilted and turned and moved off to the north. It started inspecting a set of sheds that we could see about a k away. We had to assume that this meant we were safe; that we had survived again.
If only we could relax.
Just before five o'clock, a formation of jets screamed past, but there was no other action in the air.
When it got dark, Homer went off to the old house to fiddle with the generator. Despite the danger, we were all looking forward to having a go on the short wave. We didn't know whether it would achieve anything, but it was probably worth the risk. We had an idea that any listening enemies might be able t
o trace us if we talked on it for too long. That was our biggest worry.
At half past ten we got ready for the big experiment. We had the notebook with the frequencies. All we could work out from it was that we probably needed to be in the VI IF 30 to 300 MHz frequency. That seemed to be where all the big operators were: 'the police and the airports and the ambulance. We weren't expecting to have a nice friendly chat with Constable Jones at the local cop shop, but' we were hoping to reach New Zealand, and we had to hope that they used a similar range of frequencies to us.
I didn't know what VHF 30 to 300 MHz meant, but it was easy enough to see on the dial where those figures were. We used a candle for light and turned the tuner to 300. Lee and Robyn were on sentry but Lee was just outside the back door and Robyn outside the window of the room, so they could listen in to whatever happened. Kevin was standing by at the generator and Homer was operating the radio itself. We were ready.
"OK, fire her up," Homer called. Kevin gave the cord a pull. It was a pull-start Honda generator, and it started on the third try. Pretty impressive. What we hadn't counted on—and what we should have checked before we started—was that half the lights in the house slowly started coming on too.
"Turn it off! Turn it off!" Lee shouted at Kevin.
A moment later we were back in silence and darkness.
Robyn jumped in through the window. "If there was anyone on the road they would have seen that," she said.
"Head for the lube pit," Homer ordered.
We ran like hares straight for it, and squeezed in one by one, leaving only Robyn outside, ready to follow if she saw anything.