"Quick," Lee said. "Let's move it."
We rushed into the garage. At least this time we had some light, from our torches, unlike the last time I'd been in that garage, groping around looking for matches, and in desperate danger.
"I hope Robyn and Homer were well out of that," I said. There was no time for more talk. I threw open the door of the nearer car, clambered in, and turned the key. There was a weary grinding sound.
"Oh God," I said. "Flat battery."
Lee leaned into the other car, a ute, and tried that, with the same result.
As he stood up again Robyn came bursting into the garage, puffing and wild-eyed.
"Are you all here?" she asked.
"Not Homer. And the cars won't start."
"Oh help," she said, and disappeared outside again, to look for Homer, I imagined.
I tried the first car again but the weary noise got more and more tired, until it became just a faint murmur.
"It'll have to be the bikes," I said to Lee. We ran outside and retrieved our bikes from behind a shed, where we'd dumped them. I couldn't help stopping to look at the furious fires raging on the hill. There were lights on in every occupied part of Wirrawee, and we could see the headlights of many vehicles converging on Turner Street. And I could see two fire engines trundling out of the Showground.
"We've got one thing going for us," Lee said. "If we've wiped out a lot of their officers they mightn't have anyone smart enough to take charge or give orders."
I nodded. "Let's take advantage," I said. "What about Homer? Can we leave him a note?"
Robyn came over, out of the darkness, wheeling her bike.
"I'll wait for him," she said.
"No, Robyn, no, it's too dangerous. Please Robyn, don't do that."
She paused. Then we were all saved by a voice out of the night.
"Anyone for toast?" said Homer.
"Stay on your bike," I said quickly. "The cars are both stuffed. Where's Fi?"
"Here," came her little voice.
"Let's go, famous five."
Seventeen
Daylight came too fast, catching us when we were still a long way from my place and from the faithful Land Rover. We made an emergency decision, to swing off the main road and into the nearest property, the Mackenzies'.
It was only the second time I'd been here since a jet had destroyed the house, in our full view. We'd watched from the shearers' quarters as the house had exploded, so many weeks ago. Seeing it again, in the cold, grey, miserable light of dawn, made me feel better about blowing up half of Turner Street. I felt sorry for the owners of those houses, but I knew we'd probably done the enemy more damage there than in all our previous operations put together. And it was at least a little repayment for the way these people had smashed the lives of the Mackenzies, bombing their house and shooting their daughter: Corrie, their daughter, my friend.
The others went straight on up to the shearing shed but I wandered through the ruins of the house for a few minutes. Already some little weeds had taken root and were starting to spread. Angrily, I pulled them out. Maybe I was wrong. They were life, in their own way. There was little else of it around. Nothing among the ruins was undamaged. Every piece of crockery was smashed, even saucepan warped and bent, every piece of timber splintered and scarred. I looked in vain for something that was unmarked. At least my teddy bear Alvin, a little scrap of love, had survived the Harvey's Heroes' massacre.
I did find one thing though, as I turned towards my bike and started walking away from the house. Poking out from under a brick was something that gleamed silver. I pulled it out. It was a letter opener, long and thin and sharp, with a short crossbar as a handle. I pocketed it. Maybe one day I'd be able to use it. I thought of it as a weapon. It never occurred to me that one day I might use it to open letters. But I did hope that maybe one day I'd be able to return it to its owners.
"Ellie!" a voice screamed.
Startled, I looked up. Robyn was waving at me from the shearing shed. "Plane!" she screamed.
I realised then that there was a low buzzing noise in the background that I hadn't consciously noticed. Maybe I'd been too tired. But exhaustion was pumped out of my system by adrenalin as I ran for my bike, stumbling over bricks, feeling the ache in my knee becoming a sharp pain again.
I ignored the pain, fumbled to pick up the bike, wondered if I would lead the planes to the shed by riding towards it, but realised at the same time that there was no other cover, and so pedalled like mad straight at it. As soon as I was in its shadows the others grabbed me and hauled me into the old building. I lay on the floor sobbing for breath. The noise of the plane swept straight over our heads and kept going. I lay there, my face in the dust, wondering if it had seen me, if it was going to return. I thought of it as an evil creature with its own eyes and its own mind. I couldn't visualise the humans who were sitting at its controls, directing it.
The roar of the plane faded again and I let Robyn help me to my feet.
That was the start of a terrible day. We were proud of what we'd done, but before long we were scared too. We began to realise that whatever and whoever we'd blown up must have been bigger, more important than we'd ever dreamed, ever thought. Planes and helicopters prowled the sky constantly. Their endless buzzing, like angry chainsaws, seemed to seep inside my brain, till I didn't know if they were in my head or in the sky. After a couple of hours we were so nervous that we left the shearing shed, hid the bikes, and went up through the trees into the hills. Not until we were holed up in thick bush did we feel safer. We had no food, except for a packet of dry biscuits that Homer had brought, but we preferred to starve than go into the shooting gallery of the open country.
As we sat there we at last had a chance to tell our stories. It was exciting to compare notes, and it helped take our minds off the endless snarling of the aircraft. I told them my experiences first, then Robyn described hers. She'd taken the next house to me, which we'd thought was a less important office building. But she hadn't been able to get in.
"The door was locked," she explained, "so as soon as the sentry marched off at four o'clock I broke a window. I tried to do it gently but it was quite a way above my head, and the whole pane fell out and smashed onto something inside the house. The noise! It was unbelievable. I was starting to panic but I thought I still had time, so I tried climbing up to it. There was a drainpipe running down the wall that forked in opposite directions, so I got up on that. I started stretching to the window to grab the sill, and the pipe broke under me. That made even more noise than the window. I'm sorry, but I chickened out then. I got the shakes and convinced myself that I didn't have time to get in. Looking back, I think I probably could have done it, but all that noise had freaked me out. Then I realised the broken pipe was leaking water all over the ground. It just seemed like everything was against me. I propped the pipe up and set off for the place next door to see if I could help Ellie, but I ended up getting caught between the two sentries coming back, so it took me ages just to get away to the lane. So, I didn't do anything, I'm afraid. You guys can have all the credit."
Lee had also met a locked door. Maybe they'd locked the buildings they used as offices but not the ones they used as residences. But Lee had one advantage: Fi knew Dr Burgess's house almost as well as she knew her own, so she'd been able to give him a good detailed plan. When he found the back door locked he ran straight to the coal chute, opened it, slid down into the cellar, and from there up into the house.
"Dr Burgess was always talking about putting a lock on that," said Fi looking smug. "He was hopeless about security. Dad always said that's why he'd never get burgled."
Lee had found a gas stove and three gas heaters, so with those on full blast he would have caused quite a bang. I asked him if he'd had any problems getting away, and he just shrugged, looked up into the trees, and said "No." I didn't know what that meant. Why couldn't he look at me? I had a horrible feeling that there might be more blood on his hands, on those lo
ng graceful musician's fingers.
Homer had got into his house easily, but had found no gas appliances at all. When he left he decided to wait a few blocks away, to see if anything happened.
"You love doing that," Fi said. "You did it when we blew up the bridge."
"He's a mad bomber," I said.
"This was even better than the bridge," Homer said. "It was massive. There was one explosion, then another one, a huge one. Maybe they had explosives stored there. You should have felt the shock wave. It was like this gale suddenly hit me. Wow! And the noise! I can't believe it. There were a lot of secondary explosions too. We did something great this morning. We took on something incredibly hard and brought it off. We're heroes!"
I thought how strange it was that to destroy something, and to kill people, was a great achievement, and I thought how much easier it was to destroy than to build.
"How'd you go, Fi?" Lee asked.
"Oh, I just burrowed away through the garden like a little rabbit," Fi said. "I took forever getting to the house. And when I was finally about a metre away from the back wall I realised the sentry was asleep. So I could have walked in whistling and she wouldn't have woken up. I was a bit worried because it was ten to four, and I thought she'd miss the change of shift. But she had one of those watches with an alarm, so just when I thought I'd have to go over and wake her up, the alarm went off. The whistle was only a few minutes later. She staggered to her feet and marched away. I think she'd been drinking, because she had a bottle that she put in her pocket as she went. As soon as she'd gone round the corner I shot into the house. I did the gas stove in the kitchen and a heater in the breakfast room, but I was too scared to do any more. And I didn't check the timer, just plugged it in and hoped it was all right and left it there."
"So did I," I confessed.
It turned out that Lee was the only one who'd checked his timer.
"They would have been all right," Homer said. "We'd set them pretty carefully back at Ms Lim's house, and everything ran according to the timetable. The houses did all explode so close together, so maybe one set the others off, or maybe there was an ammo store, like I said."
In the middle of the afternoon a ground patrol came through the Mackenzies' property. They were in two four-wheel drives, a Toyota and a Jackaroo. I recognised the Jackaroo. It belonged to Mr Kassar, my drama teacher at school. He'd been proud of that car. Although we felt safe enough for the moment, in the thick bush, our great fear was that they'd find some clue to show we'd been there, and then they'd call in backup forces. We watched intently as they searched the area. The funny thing was that they were so nervous. They kept their rifles in their hands, they stuck close together in little groups, and they kept looking anxiously around them. "It's only us," I wanted to call out. "We're only kids. Don't get too carried away." But of course they didn't know that. For all they knew, we were professional soldiers, highly trained killers. For all I knew, we were. Maybe that's what we'd become.
One thing was for sure, if they ever caught us, and could identify us as the ones who'd done all this stuff, we were gone. We were dead. I don't mean that just as a saying. I mean that it would be the end of our being alive, of our breathing, of our seeing and thinking. We'd be dead.
The soldiers went on up to the shearing shed. They approached it just like in the movies, moving forward in little rushes, covering each other all the time, kicking the door open. It made me think how lucky we'd been to beat them so many times. We did seem so amateurish, compared to them. I don't know though, that could have been an advantage. Perhaps we had more imagination, more flexibility of thinking, than them. And they were just employees, carrying out someone else's orders. We were our own bosses, able to do what we liked. That probably helped a bit.
It reminded me of a daydream I'd had often when I was younger. It was the world-without-adults daydream. In my dream I'd never quite figured out where the adults went but we kids were free to roam, to help ourselves to anything we wanted. We'd pick up a Merc from a showroom when we needed wheels, and when it ran out of petrol we'd get another one. We'd change cars the way I change socks. We'd sleep in different mansions every night, going to new houses instead of putting new sheets on the beds. It'd be like the Mad Hatter's tea party, where they kept moving along the table to the next place, rather than doing the washing-up. Life would be one long party.
Yes, that had been the dream.
Now I would have been hysterically happy to hand over the reins of the world to adults again. I just wanted to go back to school, to study for uni, to mess round, to watch Ty, to do the bottles for the poddy lambs that I used to whinge about when I was feeling lazy or was on the phone talking to Corrie. I didn't want all this worry, all this responsibility. Most of all I didn't want this fear.
In my daydream we weren't chased all over the countryside. We didn't spend our time looking over our shoulders. We didn't have to kill and destroy.
The soldiers finished in the shearers' quarters and ambled back to their vehicles, looking more relaxed. I assumed they hadn't found any giveaway clues. But maybe that was just their trickery. Maybe they knew now that we were nearby, and they were just acting casual, to put us off guard. I don't know whether the others thought that too. We didn't discuss it. We just sat there all afternoon, staring through the trees, out across the paddocks. No one spoke. No one slept, either. We were all tired, tired in a bone-aching, sore-eyed way that made me feel a hundred years old.
At last the light started to fade. The rabbits came popping out of their burrows, looking around nervously, hopping a few steps, nibbling their first mouthfuls for the evening. I was shocked again at how many of them there were. It made me worry about the land, that no one was looking after it properly. I hoped the colonists had a few clues about how to do it. Better to have them look after it than to have no one.
As the rabbits spread out we began to talk. There was a little stirring of relief, that we looked like surviving the day, that we should be OK for another night. We talked quietly, without emotion. I think we'd run out of feelings for the time being. We talked about what we should do next, how to keep ourselves safe, how to act for the best. We were all very calm. We agreed that before we returned to Hell we should pick up more supplies. The more the better, as this could be our last chance for a while. We could try to replace things we'd lost when Harvey's Heroes were blown apart, and we could try for more food and clothes. As long as the heat from our Turner Street attack was on, we wouldn't be able to come out of Hell.
There was a property that we hadn't yet visited, about five k's south of Homer's place. It was a place called "Tara," that belonged to the Rowntrees. Mum and Dad didn't like the Rowntrees muchâMr and Mrs Rowntree had been more interested in parties than farming, according to Mum and Dad. They'd separated a year ago and were in the middle of a divorce. It was a big property, three times the size of ours, but I didn't think the colonists would be there yet. It was too far from town, and in some hilly country that would be hard to defend.
So, at ten o'clock, we cranked up the bikes and cranked up our legs and rode over to my place. We picked up the Land Rover there. We still had a Ford carefully hidden up on Tailor's Stitch, which we used occasionally, to keep it ticking over. But I preferred the Landie because I'd been driving it for so many years. It was like an old friend. As usual it coughed into life. It always sounded tired, but it always started. We chugged over to "Tara," going slowly, because I didn't know the road. There was a manager's house which we thought we'd check later, if there was time, and the main house, about a k away at the end of the drive. It was closer if you took a short cut across the paddocks, but again, because it was dark and wet, I didn't do that. Instead we crept up the drive, between the two rows of huge old pine trees, until we were halfway along it. Then Lee and Robyn walked on up to the house to make sure there were no intruders.
When they signalled us forward, with a wave of torches, we drove up and parked at the front door. It was quite fun, in a
strange sort of way, to stickybeak around other people's houses. I liked seeing how they lived, what they owned, how they arranged each room. So Fi and I had a good poke around. It was a nice place. They had beautiful furniture, all big old dark antiques. Must have been worth a fortune. The soldiers would be here one day with their removal trucks, no doubt about that.
Of course they'd been here already though. They'd been everywhere, except Hell. Drawers were open in the bedrooms, and things chucked around. In the sitting room the glass cabinets had been emptied and one of them was broken. There was glass all over the floor. Someone had gone through the grog cabinet, leaving it bare. The music system had been looted too, because the speakers were still there and you could see where the player had been. They hadn't bothered with our old record player, back at my place. Ours must have been worth all of twenty bucks. The Rowntrees' one would have been something special.
Food was our main interest, and we were rapt to find half a dozen big salamis in the pantry. We were always hanging out for a change of diet. There were two cases of Pepsi, loads of chocolate, and some chips that were getting a bit stale. The Rowntrees seemed to live pretty well. Not many cans, except for soup, plus three of salmon, which I don't eat. But there were plenty of odds and ends, like two-minute noodles and packets of smoked oysters; enough to fill a couple of overnight bags.
We searched the other rooms quickly, grabbed a few pieces of clothing and some sleeping bags, and Fi and I filled our pockets with expensive toiletries. My old daydream had almost come alive for a moment. Lee came back from the study with a pile of big fantasy novels, and it was time to go. I jumped in the driver's seat. Fi was sitting beside me; Homer and Lee were in the back seat; Robyn was stretched out in the back, having made a bed for herself with blankets and clothing we'd taken from "Tara." I had the feeling everyone would be asleep before I reached the bottom of the driveway.