Lachlan Walter - The Rain Never Came

I came back to life and kicked the branch away, surprising myself. I shuffled out of her reach, scrambled to my feet, found my rifle, flicked the safety off, took aim.

‘Bill, hold on a sec.’

I looked at the girl. She drank and drank, oblivious to everything else. She finished the canteen, looked up at us, her eyes sad and hollow. Please, they seemed to say, may I have some more?

‘Good man,’ Tobe said as I lowered my rifle.

And then he threw the other canteen to her. As she fumbled to catch it, he walked over and punched her in the face. Even though he was holding back, she toppled like a felled tree.

‘Now what do we do?’

We ummed and aaahed a bit, that’s what we did. While we worked out our next move, I drank enough water to cramp my stomach and then stripped down so I could change into something more suited to the heat. Tobe snickered as I undressed. I ignored him, pulling a pair of shorts, a floppy hat, and a dun-coloured shirt from my pack.

‘Are you done?’

I didn’t answer as I finished getting dressed. The girl had barely moved, a pitiful sight. I was all in favour of leaving a couple of our canteens with her and getting back on the road. She looked like a survivor, it was doubtful that she needed our help.

‘And besides,’ I said, ‘she’s dangerous.’

Tobe snorted. ‘Pull the other one, mate. She was scared, Bill. And no wonder. By the looks of her, we’re probably the first people she’s seen in ages. Poor girl.’

I knew it wasn’t right, whatever had happened to her. But I was still shaken.

‘We could take her with us,’ Tobe suggested.

If my mouth hadn’t been so dry, I would have spat at his feet. ‘Are you going to carry her? We’re already pretty weighed down…’

Tobe shuffled his feet, shrugged his shoulders. ‘We can’t just leave her here.’

‘She seemed to be doing fine until you punched her in the face.’

His face reddened. ‘Fuck you.’

Tobe squatted next to the girl, reached out and brushed her lank hair from her face. He shook her by the shoulder and pinched the soft skin on the inside of her elbow. She didn’t move.

‘She’s coming with us.’

‘But…’

‘Bill, mate, how do you live with yourself?’

Tobe’s words rained down hard. I shut up, horribly ashamed.

‘Okay, here’s what we’ll do…’

He took a rag from his pocket and started to bind the girl’s hands. He took out his twine and tied her ruined shoes together. I marvelled at his care. He gestured at me, asking for help. I shuffled the bumper along until it lay next to the girl; Tobe manhandled the roo until it too lay flush with the bumper. Red and Blue slinked up, sniffed at the roo, tried to take a bite. Tobe roared at them; they ignored him and tried again. He roared some more. This time they obeyed.

He threw a second ball of twine to me, told me to tie the roo’s front legs in the same way that he had tied its back legs. While I worked, he started lashing the girl’s wrists and ankles to the shining metal.

Red and Blue sat behind him, sniffing the blood in the air.

Time passed, the sun grew higher, the world grew hotter, and then we were done. The girl and the roo lay side by side, the length of the bumper between them. Tobe shuffled over to me, checked my knots, and grunted in satisfaction.

‘You ready?’

I nodded, pulled on my pack, slung my rifle over my shoulder. We squatted, Tobe with his back to me. The metal of the bumper was red hot, reflecting the sunlight.

‘One, two, three.’

We lifted. Something popped in my back. I ignored it. The bumper started to sag in the middle, bending slightly. The twine held. The girl didn’t move.

‘You right back there?’ Tobe yelled.

I grunted. It was an awkward load to carry; the combined weight of the girl, the roo, and the bumper refused to settle.

‘Come on!’ Tobe shouted.

Red and Blue stood up, their tails wagging.

‘And again. One, two, three.’

We took a few hesitant steps and slowly found a rhythm. Red and Blue trotted with us, walking directly under the roo, looking up at it expectantly. The tick-tick-tick of their claws on the blacktop kept a steady beat. I bowed my head, kept on, and watched the dusty highway unfold beneath my feet. It took everything I had to shoulder my share of our burden. Occasionally, one of Tobe’s disparaging comments would float over his shoulder, ‘weak’ or ‘soft’ or ‘whinger’. Every few hundred yards, I would groan or curse the heat. I didn’t look up to see how Tobe was coping, but I could guess—his cheerful whistle gave fair indication. I cursed under my breath, hoping that the end was near, both literally and metaphorically, struggling to keep it together.

Somehow, I tramped on.

And then Tobe threw a particularly vicious insult at me, something grossly obscene, the straw that cracked my back.

I raised my head, trying to think of something equally vicious to say in return. An unlikely scene greeted me—the dead roo was crawling with flies; the girl was curved into a U, her head thrown back; the bumper was twisted, sagging in the middle, blinding to look at. It was too much, too strange—I started laughing hysterically. It kept coming, louder and louder. I couldn’t stop. And then Tobe was laughing with me, our grim march the funniest thing in the world.

We kept laughing, somehow kept walking. And then the girl opened her eyes.

‘Hold on,’ I yelled, stopping, almost pulling Tobe off his feet.

He steadied himself, kept hold of the bumper, didn’t bother turning to look at me. ‘What?’

‘Uh, the girl, she’s woken up.’

‘So?’

‘Should we do something?’

‘Like what? I’m not cutting her down and taking the chance that she’ll either run off or have another go.’

The girl hadn’t said anything, hadn’t even made a sound. She stared at me, barely blinking despite the fierce light.

‘Sorry,’ I whispered.

No reply.

‘Come on,’ Tobe said, ‘we’re almost there.’

In my walking-dead daze, I had somehow managed to forget about the burnt-out plains. They were the same as they had always been, though the heat coming off them now was staggering. Just another day in our great brown land, made worse by the vast emptiness that stretched in every direction. It soaked up the sun and shimmered with haze, superheating the air around it.

I felt hotter and thirstier. I looked back at the girl. ‘Sorry.’

Still no reply. I looked away, unable to handle her baleful glare.

Slowly, I began to understand what Tobe had meant by ‘almost there’. Something was growing in the distance, a grey smear on the horizon. I wondered if it was blurry because of my eyesight or because of the distance.

‘See what I mean?’

‘No worries.’

A renewed energy flowed through me. To be done, finally done.

‘What are we waiting for?’ I asked.

‘And on three…’

I looked back at the girl and shrugged pathetically. She rolled her eyes. It was almost unbelievable.

‘One, two, three.’

We walked on, somehow picking up our pace. I expected the girl to wriggle or fight against us, but she didn’t. If anything, she looked bored.

‘What is it?’ I asked Tobe, the smear on the horizon slowly becoming more defined.

He didn’t answer, and he seemed to lack the astonishment I was feeling. In fact, he seemed as bored as the girl.

‘You smug bastard, don’t leave me hanging.’

‘It’s just the Borough, that’s all, nothing special. And there’s no need to get nasty.’

I decided not to play his game. We kept on. The smear steadily filled the land to the west, the highway heading straight into the middle of it.