‘Dammit!’ I exclaimed. Beside me, Sergio was fumbling with his weapon. I can only assume that he wanted to take a few pot-shots at the car before it was too late, though I’m not sure what his target would have been. Reuben was almost certainly aiming at a rear tyre. His second shot hit the sedan just above its bumper bar.
Nothing happened, though. The sedan kept bowling along, picking up speed as it retreated.
‘The van!’ I cried. ‘Quick!’
‘No.’ Reuben shook his head. Then he raised the shotgun to his cheek one last time, squinting along its barrel.
By now his target was almost invisible behind a cloud of dust.
‘Don’t you have the keys to the van?’ I asked Reuben, who ignored me. He squeezed the trigger.
bang!
Unfortunately, it was a hopeless attempt. The sedan was much too far away.
I don’t know why Sergio couldn’t see that. After scrambling over the fence, he began to give chase like a dog. Reuben lowered his gun, scowling.
‘Don’t you have the keys?’ I repeated. ‘Where are they? We should get them, quick!’
‘We’re not taking my van,’ Reuben replied, then raised his voice. ‘Sergio! Come back!’ he bawled. ‘You’re wasting your time!’
‘Why can’t we take the van?’ I couldn’t understand his reasoning. ‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘We’d never catch up in a heap like that,’ he said. ‘Anyway, it’s borrowed. I don’t want it getting trashed.’ He turned to peer back up the slope towards the pool. ‘What we need is Danny’s truck,’ he insisted, before cupping one hand to his mouth. ‘Oi! Danny! Coo-ee!’
‘He’ll never hear you.’
‘I hope he’s okay.’ Reuben wedged the butt of the shotgun into his armpit, so that its barrel was pointing at the blood-red dirt on which we stood. ‘I shoulda checked the whole house for spare car keys,’ he went on. ‘God I’m a fool. They musta hidden an emergency set somewhere, the sneaky bastards.’
‘Where are you going?’ I demanded, because he was beginning to retrace his steps.
‘I’m getting the keys to Danny’s ute,’ he told me, with the air of someone stating the obvious.
I couldn’t believe my ears.
‘But that’ll take ages!’ I protested. ‘We’ll never catch up!’
‘It’ll take even longer if we stand around flapping our gums,’ Reuben snapped – just as Sergio hailed us from the side of the house.
‘Hey!’ Sergio called. He was squatting right where the sedan had been parked. ‘Guys! Look at this!’
‘For Chrissake, kid,’ Reuben warned, ‘don’t hold the bloody gun like that!’
But Sergio wasn’t listening. ‘It’s petrol!’ he exclaimed. ‘Right here! On the ground!’ Straightening his knees slightly, he shuffled backwards a few steps. ‘It’s a trail!’ he added, pointing. ‘Along here . . . and all down the track . . .’
That’s when I smelled it. There’s no mistaking the stink of petrol. It wafted past my nose, borne on a puff of hot wind.
Reuben’s whole face suddenly brightened, though not in a pleasant kind of way. His eyes flashed and he bared his teeth.
‘You little beauty!’ he snarled. ‘I musta hit the tank!’
‘You musta hit the tank!’ echoed Sergio. He was very excited. ‘Can you believe that? You hit it and it didn’t explode!’
Clearly, he had never watched Mythbusters. ‘Bullets don’t make petrol tanks explode,’ I remarked. ‘They’ve proved it.’
No one, however, was the least bit interested in what I had to say. Sergio was already hastening towards us, clumsily heaving his rifle around like a bundle of curtain rods. Reuben was squinting at a cloud of white dust as it moved off into the distance. He looked like an eagle watching a rabbit, or a wolf gloating over a wounded fawn.
‘That’s right, scumbag,’ he murmured. ‘We’ll get you now, my friend.’
Then he spun around and headed for the pool.
Danny didn’t hesitate. As soon as he heard what was going on, he dropped everything – including Lincoln. I was vaguely startled to see that Lincoln was still awake and breathing. I suppose that, somewhere at the back of my mind, I’d been expecting to find him smeared all over the pool on my return. But Danny had managed to restrain himself.
Or perhaps he’d just run out of time.
‘The dogs’ll stand guard,’ Danny insisted, as he sprang up the ladder. Looking down at Lincoln, who was sitting with his hand pressed against his blood-smeared cheek, I realised that he wouldn’t be able to escape even if he did kill every dog in the pool. Because once Danny had raised the ladder, there was no way out. Not for a man on his own. Not with the hatch bolted shut from inside the tunnel.
‘He’ll be fine,’ Danny promised. I wasn’t so sure. On the one hand, Lincoln certainly wasn’t going anywhere. On the other hand, he was at the bottom of a tiled pit, with nowhere to shelter from the blazing sun. How long could he possibly last without water?
Then I realised that the dogs were down there too – and that Danny wouldn’t dream of leaving his dogs to die of heatstroke. So I didn’t feel that I had to ask any awkward questions on my way back to the house. Instead I concentrated on keeping up with Danny, who was amazingly fast on his feet for such an old guy. Especially when you consider that he was wearing his heavy raincoat, which billowed out behind him as he ran.
Of course, he wasn’t wearing much underneath his raincoat, except his boots and his boxers. But still . . .
I was out of breath by the time we reached Danny’s truck. So was Reuben, who volunteered to ride out back with the shotgun. Sergio didn’t agree with this; he wanted to carry the shotgun himself. So there was a short, sharp, vicious exchange as seats were assigned and weapons redistributed. For some reason, Sergio was forced to give the rifle to me, even though I hadn’t asked for it. I mean, I couldn’t even find the safety catch! But Reuben insisted, telling me to ‘keep an eye out’. He didn’t say for what.
When we finally set off, Danny was driving, Reuben was standing in the back of the truck, and Sergio was squashed into the cabin between Danny and me. I don’t think that Danny should have been allowed to drive. Not after drinking all that beer. But he’d refused to hand over his ignition key, so Reuben had decided not to waste time arguing. ‘Fine,’ Reuben had said. ‘Since there’s nothing you can possibly hit out here, I guess it won’t matter much.’
I can’t say I entirely agreed with him. For one thing, Danny was nursing the pistol in his lap. Every time we hit a bump (and believe me, we hit a lot of bumps), I had a horrible vision of that stupid gun sliding off his knees and discharging a bullet into somebody’s foot. It wouldn’t have been Reuben’s foot, either: oh, no. Reuben was safe in the back of the truck, armed with a ten-gauge shotgun. I was the person who had to sit near someone who was driving under the influence with a loaded automatic bouncing around in his lap.
If Sergio hadn’t been Sergio, I might have suggested that he take the gun, just to be on the safe side. Sergio, however, wasn’t the type of kid that you could really entrust with a firearm. Instead of shooting someone in the foot, he probably would have trashed a lung or a kidney.
‘Can’t we put that gun on the floor?’ I finally asked, my voice wobbling as we juddered over the corrugated surface of the road.
‘Nope,’ Danny replied.
‘Then can you point it in some other direction, please?’
Danny grinned. But he did move the pistol, without even sparing me a glance.
He was too busy scanning the road ahead.
‘Is this the only way out?’ was my next question.
‘Yep.’
‘What are we gunna do if we can’t find him?’
‘We will,’ said Danny, with absolute confidence.
‘And then what?’ When he didn’t answer, I drew my own conclusions. ‘If you do something crazy, I’ll call the police. I mean it. I won’t even wait for my mum.’
Danny snorted. ‘Give i
t a rest.’
‘I mean it, Danny!’
‘Yeah, yeah.’
‘Is there any water?’ Sergio suddenly inquired. I don’t know if he was genuinely thirsty or if was trying to head off an argument; all I know is that I gave up, at that point. I was too hot and tired to make a big fuss. And even though I had the rifle, I didn’t feel entirely safe.
So I decided to shut my mouth and have a drink of water. Sergio and I shared a metal flask between us, our teeth clanking on its mouth whenever the truck swerved or jolted. The road was like a dry creek bed, all rocks and dips and meandering channels. As for the truck, it sure could have done with some new shock absorbers, though even they wouldn’t have helped much – not while Danny was driving. That guy just planted his Blundstone boot on the accelerator and kept it there. Our heads would hit the ceiling and he still wouldn’t slow down.
I don’t know what it was like for Reuben out the back. He must have felt as if he were in a tumble dryer.
‘Is that him?’ Sergio suddenly piped up. He pointed through the windscreen at the white strip of road that was unfolding before us. There was a dark speck at the end of it.
‘That’s him,’ Danny said. Then he cursed as the truck bumped over another ditch. Bom-crash! It was a miracle that we weren’t shedding a trail of loose auto parts.
‘Are you sure?’ I wasn’t convinced. ‘It could be someone else.’
Danny sneered. ‘Like who?’ he growled. Then Reuben banged on the cabin roof.
‘Vehicle ahead!’ he shouted. We managed to hear him, despite all the clanging and chugging, because every window was wide open. Danny’s truck wasn’t air-conditioned, so the flies and the dust had free access.
‘Don’t do anything stupid!’ I begged, when I saw Danny fondling the gun on his lap. ‘It might not even be him!’
‘It is,’ Sergio assured me. ‘That’s Gary, all right. I recognise the car.’
‘It’s the wrong colour,’ I objected. ‘That’s not his car, it’s too pale.’
But Danny dismissed my doubts. ‘It looks pale because it’s covered in dust,’ he declared – and he was right. As soon as we were close enough to read its numberplate, I had to concede that the car was Gary’s.
It was parked in the middle of the road, stranded by the leak in its petrol tank. Around it lay an endless stretch of outback, devoid of cover. Grey stones were strewn across red earth, none of them big enough to hide a baby, let alone a full-grown man. The saltbush was all knee-high. The scattered mulga trees were skinny and stunted.
When Danny turned off his engine, the silence was as vast as the landscape. It was a silence so smothering that every little noise seemed impossibly loud: the creak of springs, the slamming of doors, the crunch of footsteps. I wanted to speak, but I couldn’t. I’m not sure if I was intimidated by the silence or by the car, which sat there looking ominous, as if it was about to explode. There was no one in the driver’s seat.
We all stood for a moment in a semicircle, about six metres from the sedan’s rear bumper. The stink of petrol was overwhelming; I could see drops of it on the road.
Danny plucked his rifle from my hand.
‘Gimme that,’ he said. I was glad to. And I was even more delighted when he didn’t try to press his pistol on me. Instead, he shoved it into his waistband.
‘Danny?’ said Reuben. He was holding the shotgun, his finger resting lightly on its trigger guard. ‘Has that car been searched?’
There was a pregnant pause. Then Danny hissed through his teeth.
‘No,’ he finally admitted. ‘Unless you checked it out?’
‘No.’
‘Crap.’ Danny was disgusted with himself. ‘What a bonehead!’
‘If there was a gun inside, he woulda used it already,’ was Reuben’s reasoning. ‘He woulda fired at us back at the house.’
‘Maybe.’ But Danny wasn’t taking any chances. ‘You kids stay right here. Okay? Don’t move.’
He didn’t have to tell me. I wasn’t going anywhere. Sergio, however, looked very disappointed. He scowled as Danny and Reuben advanced towards the car, guns raised.
I have to admit, my heart was pounding away like mad. I felt certain that Gary must be hiding in the car, because there was nowhere else for him to hide. Even if he’d tried to run, we still would have spotted him. It was probably no more than ten minutes since his car had died, and in that brief period he couldn’t possibly have run far enough to become invisible. Not in that country. It was so flat and featureless, you could see for about fifty kilometres in every direction.
And there was no jogging figure on the horizon, whichever way I looked.
‘Nup,’ said Danny. He yanked open one of the car doors, which wasn’t locked. ‘Nothing in here.’
‘What about the boot?’ Reuben asked.
Danny sauntered towards the back of the car as Reuben examined the rear footwells. ‘Okay!’ Danny warned in a loud voice. ‘I’m gunna shoot this lock out! Anyone in the boot better say so now, before they get a bullet in ’em!’
‘For God’s sake, Danny!’ Reuben sounded cross. ‘The key’s still in the bloody ignition! You don’t have to start blasting away at the goddamn thing!’
‘Oh,’ said Danny. ‘Right.’ He backed off so that Reuben could open the boot.
But it was empty.
‘I don’t get it,’ Danny muttered. He straightened up and gazed around. ‘Where the hell did he go?’
‘Maybe he’s gone too far,’ Sergio offered. ‘Maybe if we drive a bit further we’ll see him.’
‘Nuh.’ Danny was adamant. ‘He can’t be that quick. I don’t believe it.’
‘He’s out there somewhere,’ said Reuben, shading his eyes as he scanned the surrounding wasteland. ‘In a ditch. Or behind an anthill. Flat on his belly, like a lizard.’
‘We gotta find ’im before somebody else comes along,’ Danny announced. Then he jabbed a finger at us, one after the other, as if he was counting heads. ‘North, south, east,’ he said. ‘Split up and fan out. I’ll go west.’
‘But—’
‘I won’t need this,’ he continued, tossing me his rifle. ‘All I need is a tyre jack.’
He then gave Sergio his automatic, while Reuben looked on with a frown, not entirely won over. ‘Maybe we should do this in pairs,’ Reuben objected. But Danny waved a dismissive hand.
‘They’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘They’re bloody werewolves, they can look after themselves.’ Having squelched Reuben, Danny addressed me. ‘You’ll smell ’im before you see ’im. Once you’re clear of this petrol stink, you can use your noses. It’ll be like an early-warning signal.’
‘But what if he has a gun?’ I quavered.
‘If he did, we’d all be dead by now. He’da picked us off like bottles on a wall.’
‘You should still be careful, though,’ Reuben interrupted. ‘He could have a knife or something, so watch where you’re putting your feet.’
‘He’s like a landmine,’ Danny finished, ‘because he could blow up in your face any second.’
And that was all the advice he gave me. Next thing I knew, I was trudging out into the desert with no supplies except for a loaded rifle. I didn’t even have any sunglasses, let alone a hat. The sun beat down, the flies descended, and the ants kept running up the legs of my jeans. They had big jaws, those ants, and they bit like tigers. I remember thinking, What the hell? This is crazy. I don’t belong here. How did this happen? It occurred to me that I might be going mad – that I might actually be home in bed, hallucinating. But the sudden jab of an ant bite reassured me. It was far too painful to be a figment of my imagination.
I couldn’t see Gary. I couldn’t smell him, either. The scene ahead of me was devoid of human life; the further I went, the more isolated I felt. The stink of petrol faded away. The silence pressed down, as dense as the heat. The air filling my lungs had a hot, wild, dusty, peppery scent to it.
When I glanced back, I saw how far I was from Danny’s truck. Th
ough the others were still visible, I couldn’t make out their features. They were just stick figures in a landscape, and they didn’t interest me. I preferred to stare out at the limitless horizon, pretending that I was all on my own.
Maybe I should just walk off out of here, I reflected. But of course I couldn’t have done that. A walk into the wilderness would have killed me. I had to go back, even though I didn’t want to. Even though Sergio had flipped, and Danny was dangerous, and Reuben was paranoid. I could see that quite clearly now; the sudden taste of freedom had cleared my head. I knew I had to call someone: Mum, the police, it didn’t matter who. I realised that the first thing on my agenda, once I returned to the house, should be a thorough search of the every bed, drawer and cupboard. Because Lincoln had to have a satellite phone. And it had to be somewhere in that house.
Unless it was in his car?
I looked over my shoulder again, towards the sedan – and that was when I saw Gary. At least, I assumed it was Gary. Though I was too far away to see his face, he wasn’t hard to identify. Who else would have been scrambling out from beneath the rear axle?
I couldn’t believe my eyes. I had to rub them vigorously, worried that I’d been fooled by a mirage.
But, no; there he was. Running for the truck.
‘Hey!’ I yelled. ‘Hey! Hey! Stop!’
My shout alerted the others. They heard my voice, even if they couldn’t figure out exactly what I was saying. And when the truck door slammed shut, they drew their own conclusions.
‘Goddammit!’ I cried, as I raced back towards the road. I had a horrible feeling that Danny must have left his key in the ignition, though how on earth Gary could have worked that out, I had no idea. And how the hell had we missed Gary, for God’s sake? Why hadn’t we seen him skulking under the car?
It turned out, in fact, that he had been quite clever. As his car ran out of puff, he’d parked on a bit of road with a large pothole in it. Then, after rolling around in the dust for a while, he’d wriggled and slithered into this pothole – which was twice as long as it was wide. From a distance he’d been impossible to see, because the back of his head had been level with the surface of the road. That was why we hadn’t bothered to hunker down and examine the car’s underside. We just hadn’t thought it necessary.