Darkness Be My Friend (26 page)

This guy didn't have his hands above his head though. I suppose the only reason I thought of Timezone was that the innocent guys on those games are dressed in light colours and the baddies are always in black. And here was this man, in white boxers and nothing else, yawning and scratching his chest.

I've got to say, though, he had dignity. Even in his boxers. When he saw us he didn't fall apart or go into some wild reaction. He straightened up quite slowly and stopped scratching himself. He was a tall man, young, with black hair and a watchful expression, cautious, like he was thinking, "What's going on here, how do I take control of this situation?"

To be that young and such a big-time hotshot officer he'd have to be pretty good.

I didn't trust him one millimetre.

I'd flicked the safety off as I lifted the rifle, and now I pulled the bolt backwards and forwards, really fast, feeling the satisfying clunk of a round entering the chamber.

"Get your hands up," I screamed. He gave a little smile and started lifting his hands, but slowly. I didn't like the smile. I think he figured we were just teenagers, we weren't going to be a big problem for him. Sure they had teenagers in their army, but I guess by now they didn't have much respect for our fighting abilities,
compared to theirs. I knew I had to get his respect, fast. I was so scared that the rifle was shaking like crazy in my hands, but I swung it fractionally to the right and pulled the trigger.

Christ, the noise. It deafened all of us in that confined space. The damage to the wall wasn't as severe as I'd thought it might be. A hole suddenly appeared in it, and a couple of cracks spread quickly from the hole, that was all. It was the noise that was dramatic. Fi gave a scream behind me; probably a loud scream, except I was so deafened it didn't sound too loud to me. But the shot did have an effect on the man. He went very pale and staggered a little at the knees. I saw sweat appear suddenly on his face, above his eyebrows. I'm not surprised. The shot sure had an effect on me and I wasn't the one facing the barrel of the rifle. I thought, "I've got to take advantage of this, keep him on the back foot." I already knew what we had to do. It would be our biggest gamble ever, our most dangerous throw of the dice, but we had to make it work or we were dead. Really dead this time; they wouldn't let us get away from them again, especially after I'd just shot at one of their senior officers. I used the rifle to motion to the man: "Out the door." My ears were still ringing with the noise. It made my head hurt, badly, and my leg was still burning. I didn't dare look down at that. I hadn't even mentioned it to Fi.

The man paused for only a moment, then started walking to the door with his hands up.

"Wait!" I heard Fi call.

"What?" I asked, without looking around at her. I wasn't taking my eyes off this guy.

"Make him put his tunic on," she said.

I thought immediately, "Yes, yes, of course. Fi, you're a genius." The soldiers out there mightn't recognise him in his boxers, but they'd recognise his uniform.

I yelled at him, "Put your tunic on."

I hoped he understood English. He stopped but he shrugged his shoulders and said, in perfect English, "Arc you going to shoot me if I don't?"

For once in my life I lost my temper completely. Without caring too much whether I shot him I pressed the trigger. If I'd had it on automatic I'd have emptied the magazine. As it was I fired either three or four rounds. From then on we were all deaf I think and this time the damage to the house was fairly serious. Half the front wall came down. There was plaster and dust and splintered wood and smoke and broken glass.

But he put his tunic on.

We marched out of the house. Straight down the front path. Fi and I both had our guns trained on him and we kept as close to him as we safely could. Fi wouldn't have had much chance of hitting him, even at this range, and even assuming she knew where the trigger was, but I was hoping no one would realise that. By now he had his hands on his head instead of up in the air but I didn't mind him changing the script that much. The important part of my script for him was yet to come.

As we came down the path, half-a-dozen torches were trained on us but we used the man as cover. We got into the street. I checked the other way, to the right. No one was there. All the torches were coming from the left. So the two groups of soldiers had met at the four-wheel
drive and were, as far as I could tell, bunched there now. That was good. It meant we could keep using the officer as a shield.

But I felt we had to move really quickly, before they had time to think of a strategy. It wouldn't take them long to put two snipers in positions where they could shoot us both. We had to be gone before they did it. We had to hustle.

I yelled at the officer, "Left."

Still walking at the same pace he turned and we went towards the four-wheel drive. We walked ten metres then I yelled, "Stop!"

I took my biggest risk of all, then. I made Fi move a little more behind the officer, so they knew her gun was pointing right at his head. Then I came out in the open. It was necessary. I had to move them all away from the vehicle. I stood there completely exposed in the hot night air and I screamed at them, "Five seconds to get away from the car!" Again I didn't know if they spoke English, but I figured they'd know a few numbers. At the top of my voice I started counting, "Five, four, three..."

I pointed my rifle more firmly at the bunch of them as I counted and I could have smiled as they scattered. I didn't smile, though. I had to convince them I was super-tough, super-ruthless. But I'd created a new problem for us. With them quickly moving away in both directions I had no control over where they might go. We had to get to the car before they used the darkness to get around behind us. "Hurry," I said to Fi. I jabbed the officer with the rifle. In twenty rushed steps we were at the vehicle. Some torches followed us all the
way, and I heard a man shouting, but still no one seemed to be doing anything.

There was a big problem, though, when we got to the car. Fi couldn't drive, and I was scared the officer would realise how hopeless she was with a gun. I couldn't expect her to control him while I drove. You only had to watch her for a minute to realise that. There was only one solution. I yelled at the man, as loudly as I could, knowing his ears were probably still ringing as much as mine. "Get in the front."

He opened the door as I quickly opened the rear one on his side. We got in together and I shuffled across to the left. Fi got in beside me.

"Start it," I called.

There was a short wait while we stared at the glow plug, willing it to come on. When it did, he started the ignition.

"Go, go," I shouted. "Turn right, go to the end of the street. Then right again."

I felt like cheering as the big vehicle slowly moved forward and began to turn. But I wasn't going to let the man know how pleased I was. "Faster!" I yelled at him. I fired another shot past his head, which took out the windscreen, and blasted away into the darkness. I was so pumped up. I'd never been so close to out of control before. Normally I'd be embarrassed to be so full-on. Some of it was fear, but most of it was anger. Stronger than anger: rage.

If anyone had asked me, I think I would have said I was angry at our failure with the sugar and the aviation fuel, but the real anger went further than that. It was focused that night, like it never had been before. And
it was at these people. Fair and square, right at them, right in their guts. The way they'd taken over our town, our district and our country, and denied me everything in life I cared about. In particular, they'd denied me the right to grow up in the company of my parents. Unlike Fi I hadn't even had the chance to see my parents since the invasion. I was still jealous of Fi, but happy for her, too. I just wanted what she'd had. I wanted it for all of us.

Well, I wasn't thinking about that as we drove along, going a lot faster since I blew the windscreen out, but it was somewhere in the back of my mind.

I saw a couple of people running after us as we accelerated down the street, but in a kind of uncertain way. It seemed like our speed had worked for us. I'd say that no more than six minutes had passed from the time we went into that house, to the time we reached the intersection in the car and turned right. And less than three minutes from the time we'd come out of the house.

We were going in the direction of the airfield because our meeting place with the boys was on that side of town. We said we'd meet them at the racecourse, which was down a dirt road that didn't get used much. It was safe from the fire that we hoped would be raging across the airfield because the wind was in the opposite direction, and it was fairly safe from the enemy because we figured they'd have their minds on other things than scouring remote corners of Wirrawee in the dark. Or horse-racing, for that matter.

The total distance we needed to travel with the officer driving was four k's, I guessed. It shouldn't have been a problem now that he was co-operating but he
tried to be smart. We went past the back of the airfield OK, except that there were no blazing planes or buildings. There was no sign of fire anywhere. I tried to be optimistic. The boys could have been delayed—all the commotion we'd caused might have made things harder for them. I glanced at Fi anxiously. It was impossible to tell what she was thinking.

I couldn't look at her again because I dared not take my eyes or my rifle off the man in front.

We came towards the turn-off to the racecourse. In the other direction the road went to the Showground. I'd like to have gone there to rescue the prisoners but now wasn't the time. No time for even thinking about it. I yelled at the officer: "Turn left."

He started to swing the wheel, then kept swinging it and accelerated hard. I was taken by surprise. The car seemed to leap forward, straight at a patch of trees and at the same time, it fishtailed. He swung the wheel violently back the other way. The car tipped sideways. I thought it was certain to roll. Neither Fi nor I had safety belts on and I was thrown across onto Fi. At the same moment the car hit the first clump of trees, and hit them hard. We started to go over. The inevitable happened. The rifle I held still clutched in my hands went off. I guess my hand had gripped tighter, by reflex, and my finger kept squeezing the trigger. It was kicking around everywhere for a couple of seconds, lurching hard against me, until I could unlock my fingers. More violent bangs, more smoke, more terror in my heart and my guts as I thought, "We're going to die." I meant Fi and me, of course, I didn't care a lot about the guy in the front seat. The four-wheel drive kept tipping until it
reached a point where I thought it couldn't come back. It seemed to hang there for a minute as though making up its mind: to tip or not to tip. Second time that night it had nearly rolled. But this time it didn't recover. It went over. Fi and I were piled up against the left-hand door. We were both reaching up trying to find something to hang on to, but not succeeding. The driver didn't slide down though and I realised he had put on his seatbelt. Bastard, he must have been planning this all along.

There was a tremendous crashing smashing clanging noise as the car slid to a stop against another tree. Then there was the hiss of steam escaping from the radiator and creaks and groans from tortured metal, and bangs and rattles from behind us. I was scrabbling around trying to get my hands on the rifle again because I'd lost it in the last second of the crash. I was all the time watching the head of the man at the wheel. But he wasn't moving.

Then I saw the blood.

It was running everywhere. Down the backs of the seats, dripping onto the fragments of glass left in the shattered windscreen, leaking through the back of his seat. Trickles of it flowed past Fi and me and onto the side window. Big heavy globules of it, really thick, fell slowly from the left-hand side of the front seats. Some of it splashed on me and some went right through to the back of the vehicle. I looked at the man. His head was gradually tilting to one side. I saw for the first time the hole in the back of his seat. I felt sick but I admit I also felt savage pleasure that we had won. He'd tried to beat us but he'd failed. We had survived for a few more minutes of precious life. He had not. Tough.

"Fi, are you all right?"

"I ... I don't know. How do you tell?"

I laughed. Strange time to laugh, but that's what I did. "If you can make jokes you're all right."

"I thought that was your blood for a minute."

"I did cop a wound back in town but nothing here."

"Is he dead?"

"Very, I think. But we'll check."

I crawled up to what was now the roof. The door seemed undamaged. Pushing it open was hard because it was so much heavier when you tried to lift it from underneath. The funny thing, the amazing thing, was that the inside light came on when I opened the door. That was a tough little light. Before that, all we'd had was the moon, which wasn't bad, but not as good as this light.

I put my shoulder to the door but it was still difficult, because I couldn't get my feet on anything to push against. I climbed a bit higher and at last was able to lock my feet in an uncomfortable position between the two front seats.

"You're getting so much blood on you," Fi said.

The funny thing was that she was serious. I collapsed completely. I suppose it was more hysteria than anything. I got the giggles. Only Fi could worry about things being messy at a time like this. She'd never make a farmer. By the time I recovered I had more blood on me from falling against the seat as I laughed. Fi sort of joined in, but not very enthusiastically. The way people do when they realise the joke's on them.

But finally I got the door open. I hoisted myself up by whatever little strength I still had and crawled onto the
top of the car. Then I helped Fi up and out. I took a look inside, at the young officer. His career was over. I think the bullet had gone through the back of his seat and come out through his chest, because his chest had been ripped open like giant hands had grabbed each side of it and pulled it apart. It was all blood and bone and minced red stuff. His head had now flopped completely to the side, his eyes were wide open and staring and his face was without colour. Fi took one glance and turned away. I didn't look at it too much myself. It was pretty terrible.