John Marsden - Incurable

The voice was shouting a whole string of stuff but we didn’t understand a word of it except ‘Stop’, which the person repeated about six times as we were taking a sharp bend. Then the spotlight went out. My God that was a moment. My stomach lurched so hard I nearly threw up. I had to hit the brakes: there was nothing else to do. I hit them pretty hard too because I had no idea of where we were in relation to the road. If we’d had time to take a vote I think the seatbelts would have come in for a unanimous big thankyou. I flicked on our headlights. We were facing a solid row of gum trees. I reversed, spun the wheel and got a look at the road. It was tricky, looked like more curves ahead, but maybe those and the trees were forcing the chopper up away from us a bit. I wondered why they’d turned off the spotlight. Had they figured it was helping us too much?

We raced up through the next two corners, me driving pretty much solely from memory, Jess giving a sharp cry as a branch hit her side of the car with a hard bang. I turned the lights back on. A straight stretch. Good. Put the foot down. Racing insanely along in darkness, the wind rushing through the car, a sense of complete madness as though we were driving straight at the edge of a cliff at a hundred k’s an hour. Not that we were really doing a hundred. Maybe eighty. Maybe even ninety.

I’ve seen a rabbit bolting across a flat, bare bit of land when it realises a hawk is after it. It comes down to a simple contest of speed. Can the rabbit get to the edge of the bush before the hawk reaches it? The rabbit flat to the ground, ears pinned back, the hawk pouring on the power as it drives hard across the open paddock. It’s a right-angled triangle and the hawk follows the hypotenuse.

A helicopter has an advantage though. It doesn’t need to reach you and grab you in its sharp, cruel beak. It has bullets that fly through the space between you. As it roared in behind us it started to fire almost straight away. I saw its lights in my mirrors, not the spotlight, just its navigation lights, and I saw the spit of light and colour and flame. ‘They’re shooting,’ I yelled. Not that anyone could do anything about it.

I held my line. I knew from the war, if not from shooting rabbits, that we were safe enough for the first moments. It is too hard to hit a target like us from a helicopter that’s rocking and rolling and trying to find its target. But maybe this guy had new equipment or maybe he was a brilliant shot or maybe he was just plain lucky. Bullet holes tore through the ute like a huge metal-punch was suddenly and roughly slamming a simultaneous line of them from our rear to our front. The ironic thing was the guy was such a perfect shot that he missed everyone. The line was straight down the middle, and Lee and Jess were squashed together on one side, Jess trying to support Lee’s rifle so he could get a few shots in, and Homer hanging out the other side hoping to get a shot away himself. The holes were like a row of stitches. If he’d been off his line by about half a metre he would have scored at least two hits. How unlucky is that? For him I mean. We were lucky twice over because not only did he miss us all but he must have missed everything vital in the engine. It didn’t even hiccup.

For a moment I thought he’d somehow even managed to miss the windscreens but then the back one caved in with a terrible crack and a second later the front one went in sympathy. It was way different to the window in the Landcruiser. I’m sure the front one hadn’t been hit; it might have been something to do with the different air pressure in the cab when the back one went out. Windscreens O’Brien would have loved me if they had a branch on this side of the border. I’d promised myself I wasn’t going to let anyone shoot my car windows out again. That promise hadn’t lasted long.

Maybe the only good thing about the war is that it taught us not to panic if we can possibly help it, but I gotta admit this was testing the limits. I’m not sure about that theory anyway, because Jeremy and Jess had a fairly comfortable time during the war and they weren’t panicking now, no more than the rest of us. All I could think was, ‘I’ll panic later, but for now we need to get out of here.’ I yelled back over my left shoulder, ‘OK if I hit the brakes, you guys roll out, you might get a shot at him as he goes over.’

‘OK,’ I thought I heard Homer answer, although a second later I realised it could have been, ‘No way.’ There was so much noise that my hearing was suffering. I had to hope it was ‘OK’ so I yelled ‘Hang on,’ and slammed the brakes with everything, and I mean everything. Not only the foot brake, but the hand brake as well, and then for good measure dropped the gearstick down to low. The ute practically stood on its nose. ‘Hhmm, nice brakes,’ I thought, ‘must remember to write to Toyota.’ I wouldn’t have been surprised if we’d done a forward roll. I think the boys already had their doors open but we stopped so hard that they fell out instead of doing a graceful exit. Lucky their rifles didn’t go off in the process.

In one way it worked beautifully, because a few moments later the helicopter went right over the top of us at about zero altitude. If we’d had the radio on I reckon he’d have taken out the aerial. OK, slight exaggeration, but he was extremely low. If I hadn’t stopped when I did, I think we would have been dead meat, so that was the way it worked beautifully. In another way it didn’t work at all, because although I think Homer and Lee both managed to fire a few rounds they were too off balance and it had no effect on the chopper.

They piled back into the car and I accelerated gently away. The helicopter was now throwing enough light again for me to see the next bit of road. It was fairly straight, bit of a curve to the right a few hundred metres ahead. The helicopter was doing a tight circle so he could come back for the next round. I’d bought us a bit of time, if nothing else. I tried to go faster but we were driving in crazy swerving patterns, half the time because I didn’t know where the road went and half the time because I knew where it went but I didn’t want us to be shot.

‘Where is he?’ I yelled back over my shoulder at Homer.

‘Starting another run at us. Straight behind.’

‘Got any ideas?’

‘Not right off the top of my head, no.’

This all sounds like a calm intelligent conversation but it was done in jerks and bits and pieces as I slowed and accelerated and swerved and nearly stopped and zigzagged. I don’t know why we weren’t all carsick.

‘Here he comes,’ Jess yelled. ‘God this is exciting isn’t it?’

I looked at her in disbelief. Well, I didn’t actually look at her but in my head I did. I was running out of strategies. I didn’t plan to do this but at the last second my foot did it for me; I must have instinctively felt that it was a good idea. My foot went down on the accelerator, the ute hesitated for a long second, then took off. I guess twin-cabs don’t exactly have the power lift-off of a Porsche but this thing did get going at quite a rate. And that meant we were suddenly going flat out at a wall of darkness. It took me a second to remember I had headlights, another second to decide whether it was wise to use them, and another second to find the switch. I suppose it then took another quarter of a second for them to come on.

If I’m going to be strictly mathematical about this I’d have to add a few more units of time to register the fence coming up and then some more for my reflexes to start operating. When you panic, the reflexes are not as quick because they’re paralysed. By this time we were well and truly off the road, off the ground too I suspect, and although I finally got around to turning the wheel it was way too late. Jess let out a scream like Courtney when she got her first period. So much for her finding it all exciting. We hit the fence. ‘We don’t need the helicopter to kill us,’ I thought, ‘I’ll take care of the job all by myself An image of Chris appeared strongly in my mind.