John Marsden - Incurable

‘God, Ellie, did you know about those wires?’ was the first thing Jeremy said.

‘I thought I saw them, but I wasn’t a hundred percent sure.’

But I knew there was no use having a conversation about that.

‘What are we going to do?’ Homer asked. ‘We need a vehicle, but it’s pretty quiet around here.’

‘All we can do is keep going as fast as we can until we find something,’ Lee said. ‘If everyone’s feeling as stuffed as me, we mightn’t get very far, but the further away from here the better.’

No-one had a better suggestion, so we kept walking and jogging, talking a bit as we went. Jess said to me, ‘This is amazing. I never thought I’d be in anything like this. I can’t believe it. It’s so weird and wild and terrifying.’

I laughed. But I wasn’t feeling very funny. ‘Hey, welcome to my world,’ I said.

We passed a house about two kilometres further on, but there was no sign of life. I assumed they were out, or else they’d slept through the whole thing. A dog started barking wildly as soon as we got near, so we didn’t look for a car or a motorbike, just hurried on.

I was tired and really hurting. I was starting to pant and gasp for breath, and left the talking to the others as I had no energy for conversation.

We passed three more houses before we came to someone nice and messy. There are times when I love messy people, and this was one of them. There was a tennis court, but the wire in the fence was badly torn; they had half a truck on the front lawn with bits of engine all around it; and they had kids who didn’t put their toys away. We couldn’t do much with the truck, as the idea of assembling it, fuelling it and then driving it away didn’t seem too practical. But between us, as we tiptoed around in the dark, we collected two bicycles and a pair of rollerblades. It wasn’t much, but we didn’t dare go closer to the house to look for a car. Anyway, they were more likely to notice the loss of a car straight away. The chances were that the owners of the bikes and skates wouldn’t realise till a good while after breakfast.

In the distance I could hear another helicopter, so I figured they’d started looking for us. It seemed a good time to go, even if we didn’t have much to go with.

Homer and Lee got to do the pedalling, and Jeremy seemed attracted to the skates, so that left Jess and me to be dinked. There was an awkward moment when I was an equal distance between Homer’s bike and Lee’s and both of them were looking at me, expecting me to get on behind them. I chose Homer. Lee just turned his head away.

For a while I think we weren’t going much faster than if we’d been walking. Both of the boys were pretty rusty on their bike skills, and having a passenger didn’t make it easy. Jeremy got quite a way ahead, but once Homer and Lee settled into a rhythm they began to catch up, and soon we were together again. It was not the kind of glamorous getaway that people make in Hollywood movies, but it was all we had, and it worked fairly well. Three times we had to dive into bushes as headlights showed cars coming towards us, but we could see the headlights from a long way off, so we had time.

At about three in the morning we hit the road that I’d taken earlier. A simple right turn took us back to the border. By then the pedalling was pretty slow again, and clumsy, and we had to take a couple of rest breaks. We reached the border a bit after four.

At about five o’clock we were trudging up a hill, Lee pushing one bike and me the other. Jeremy had chucked the skates into a patch of scrub quite a bit earlier. He was a few hundred metres behind. Our heads were down and we were making very slow progress.

Things were so desperate that Homer had taken to telling bad jokes to keep us awake and moving. He’d just told us one about three girls telling their mother where they are going that night, and the first one is going out with Pete to eat, and her sister’s going out with Vance to dance, and when the next sister says she wants to go out with Chuck, the mother stops her. Jess laughed, I groaned, Lee didn’t react. Jeremy was the lucky one: he didn’t hear it.

At that moment a single shot came towards us, splitting the darkness and our group apart. It went right between Homer and me, like a knife cutting the night into two worlds. A knife made of flame. The noise was like a single stroke of thunder.

I nearly ruptured myself. I sort of jumped up and twisted around at the same time. I couldn’t help making a screaming sound as I dived to the right. I couldn’t see which direction the others were diving in, but I hoped that they were all right.

Then the next thing a little voice called out, ‘Sorry,’ except that the r’s sounded more like l’s.

I rolled over and sat up again. I’d grazed the right side of my face on a rock, and a stick had poked into my knee. I stood up and went forwards, ready to throttle the owner of the voice. I didn’t throttle him, although I probably should have. When I saw him I just shook my head and said, ‘Where have you been?’

Gavin, being deaf, couldn’t hear that, but he was pleased to see me. He threw himself at me, and hung on, tight hands digging into my back. He wasn’t even crying, just hanging on. Well, no wonder. He knew he had done the wrong thing in following the utes. He’d lost contact with the motorbikes, punctured both tyres on the yammy, and spent the night on his own. He was probably lost, although he didn’t actually admit to that, not after the terrible consequences of his being lost in the bush last time. And then firing at these vague human shapes coming towards him in the darkness, and realising an instant later that it was us, had been a bit much even for Gavin.

There was nothing for me to do except let myself be held, and to stroke his back and pat his head and put aside thoughts of strangulation. I couldn’t let myself admit the obvious, that as glad as he was to see me, I was that and more to see him. I did have the horrible thought that even though the bullet had missed us three it might have got Jeremy, coming along behind, but he came trotting up a few moments later, without any holes through him.

Everyone patted Gavin for a while, without making remarks about checking your target before you pull the trigger. That would have to wait for another day. In the meantime, we still had a long walk home.

We dumped the bikes, taking them well into the bracken and hiding them behind fallen logs. We hadn’t yet sat down to figure out the trouble we’d be in if the shoot-up at the mall was traced to us, but as long as we went out and got the utes and the Yamaha back, it was unlikely we’d be connected with it. We’d be just as likely to cop the blame for global warming or tasteless strawberries or World War II.

After covering up the bikes it was trudge, trudge, trudge, the familiar part of war, which I’d almost forgotten about but which seemed to form the majority of my experiences during the time of the invasion. Plod plod plod. Slog slog slog. Gavin kept so close to me that he kept getting his feet tangled up with mine, but I bit my tongue and reminded myself of what an awful night he’d had. Even if it was his own fault.

Plod plod plod. I kept thinking about home. Home is where you go and they have to let you in. Home is whoever loves you. There’s no place like home. All of that seemed true enough, but there was no-one at my home to let me in, and there was no-one there to love me any more. It seemed so empty with my parents gone. The house was too big now, and Gavin and I rattled around in there like a couple of grains of wheat in a silo. When I walked the corridors I heard echoes. There had never been echoes before.

When we did get within sight of the farm I was quite shocked to see lights on in the house. Like, someone’s broken in? This is the revenge attack already? But the others kept walking, and then I remembered Bronte and Pang.