Taylor Five (5 page)

“He’s like that dog in Peter Pan,” said Donny with a shaky laugh. “The one that’s a nursemaid. He’s looking after us.”

The fire roared on.

Donny shifted his damp T-shirt to say, “We’re not going to be back by dark.”

“No, but we haven’t broken any rules. Are you hungry?”

They had spare food, and spare lights.

“No.”

When Tay climbed out (scraping her ribs and feeling like a skinned rabbit in just her shorts and bra) to wet the shirts and her scarf again, the floor of the entrance cave was covered in crawling things: beetles and millipedes and stranger creatures. Bigger animals, maybe rats and mice, or snakes and lizards, moved in the shadows. She tried not to step on anything that was alive.

She and Donny weren’t hungry, but they drank some bottled water (Uncle sipped from their water bottle, he knew how to do that). At last, after several hours, the sound of the flames faded and the air cleared, but by now it was completely dark. Tay clambered out with the phone and stood under the cleft. She couldn’t climb up, the rock was too hot to touch.

No answer. No response at all.

In Kandah ordinary mobile phones only worked on the coastal strip, where the city was, and in a few other biggish towns. The refuge radiophones had a limited range. For anything more than talking to each other within a few kilometers, the staff used their satellite connection. But the phone ought to be working here, and no matter what they were doing, someone should answer. She ought to be getting
something.
. . .

“I think we’ll have to stay overnight,” she said when she got back. “It’s too hot out there, we’ll have to wait until the ground cools down.”

“What did Mum and Dad say?”

“I can’t get through. I think the battery’s dead.”

“You should have checked it. We’re always supposed to do that.”

“Yes,” said Tay. “I should have checked it.” The radiophone battery was not the problem, it was fine. But she couldn’t bear to tell him that, not yet. “I expect they tried to call us and they couldn’t get through. They’re trusting us to be sensible.”

“Yeah,” said Donny. “They’ll be here in the morning.”

And so they spent the night. There was no space to lie down, but neither of them wanted to get out and lie on the cave floor among the creepy-crawlies. Donny managed to fall asleep. Tay sat with her arm around him, full of fears that she dared not put into words, not even in her own mind. She felt a tugging at her wrist. The great ape took her hand and squeezed it; and that was a comfort.

Donny was bewildered. He hadn’t figured it out. But Uncle always knew things.

At first light Tay woke out of a confused doze. She woke Donny up: Uncle was already awake. The cave was full of dull daylight and empty of wildlife. All the other refugees had left the shelter.

“You two stay here,” she said. “I’ll see what it’s like outside.”

Feeling sick and scared, she climbed the chute that led to the cleft. The loose stones were hot under her hands and knees, but not hot enough to burn.

The outcrop had been covered in scrubby, orange-flowering bushes, the kind that the butterflies loved. Lower down there’d been graceful stands of bamboo and thorny pandanus palm. Everything was gone. There wasn’t a scrap of green on the slopes. The blackened skeletons of the butterfly bushes reached out twisted dead fingers over gray ash and baked stone. The path seemed to have disappeared because there was no undergrowth to mark the difference between path and scrub. The smoke had cleared, but there was no freshness in the morning. The sky was gray as ash, and the sultry air smelled foul. She tried the phone again, without much hope. Same result.

But below her the trees were standing. The red-brown trunks were burned charcoal black, and the low branches were smoldering, all around the outcrop. But the fire had passed by, and the trees were standing! And the high canopy was still green.

Her spirits rose a little. “It’s okay!” she called. “It’s over, and the damage doesn’t look terrible. Something’s wrong with the phone, but I think we’re going to be all right.”

The great ape clambered out first, and then Donny. The three of them stared at a devastated landscape. It was hard to believe that everything had been normal twenty-four hours ago. Uncle hopped from foot to foot. He touched the ground with one of his big, graceful hands and brought his fingers back to his mouth, making a long lip to kiss them several times: Ouch, ouch.

“He can’t walk on this,” said Tay. “What can we do with him? We have to get back.”

“I kn-know,” said Donny. His teeth were chattering, not from cold but from the strain of the night. “We can t-tear up my T-shirt, to make shoes he can wear.”

They didn’t tear up Donny’s T-shirt, Tay thought that was a bad idea; but they managed to make Uncle four snowshoes (or fireshoes). Donny’s rucksack became two shoes—after they’d stuffed everything that was in it into Tay’s bag. Their notebook, which luckily had board covers, made the two others. They tied them to his foot with strips of the plastic bag that had held their biscuits. Uncle sat patiently on Tay’s rucksack while the children fitted these odd slippers onto his long-fingered feet and hands.

“Maybe you’ll start a fashion,” said Donny. Uncle looked disgusted but grateful.

They followed the path, which was clear underfoot although invisible from a distance. If you stepped off it, you raised clouds of hot, choking ash. Even on the path they could feel the heat through the soles of their boots. It was better once they were among the trees, except for the smoldering branches that had fallen on the path. They got along as best they could. Uncle struggled with his ridiculous footgear (but they didn’t feel like laughing). Tay wanted to hurry, she wanted to run: but at the same time she could hardly make herself put one foot in front of the other. . . .

Everyone must have been fighting the fire all night. Everyone must be exhausted. That must be why no one had come to find them—

She didn’t try to use the radiophone again.

They reached the jeep track, and then the perimeter fence. The gates were wide open and leaning, warped out of shape. The fire had been through the refuge clearing. Most of the buildings were standing: charred black, like the scrub bushes on the outcrop, like the trunks of the trees. But there was nothing moving. No sign of life.

“Mum!” cried Donny, his voice breaking. “Mum and Dad!’

“It’s all right, Donny, it’s all right. It looks bad but they won’t be—”

They won’t be dead. Mum and Dad can’t be
dead
.

Slowly, very slowly, as if they were blindfolded or sleepwalking, they went into what had been their home. There were no flower beds. Some of the beautiful trees were sullenly burning, with flames and smoke instead of flowers in their branches. Smoke and ash hung in the air, and everything seemed
wrong
. It was as if they’d landed on an alien planet. Tay couldn’t get her bearings. Where were the staff cottages? Was that the generator house . . . ? Where had the helicopter pad gone? What had happened to the clubhouse?

She picked up a charred book that was lying on the ground in a spray of shattered glass. It was a copy of Shakespeare, a pocket edition that Tay and Donny’s gran had sent to Tay for Christmas two years ago . . . She’d never even tried to read it, the print was too small. She was standing under her own bedroom window. The book must have been on the windowsill, it must have been blown out when her window was shattered by the heat. She stuffed it in the pocket of her rucksack, from a confused feeling that she must salvage things. . . . All my clothes will be ruined, she thought. Suddenly she spun around, hunting for a familiar outline. The bamboo stand where the gibbons lived had vanished.

“Oh no,” she whispered. The numbness of terrible fear released her, and tears stung her eyes. They are gone, they are gone. They won’t sing their dawn chorus ever again.

“Where
is
everybody?” said Donny in a small, thin voice.

Inside the central square something different had happened. There were churned-up vehicle tracks everywhere, showing through the ash. The bungalow was scarred by fire like the rest of the buildings: but on the other side of the open space, where the observation studio and telecoms suite with its big dish aerial ought to be, there was only wreckage around a gaping hole, like a meteor crater.

“The fire didn’t do that—” muttered Tay, staring.

Uncle had found something. He was crouched down, making anxious
nnh!
noises. Tay went over to see what was wrong. There was a burned body lying on the ground.

She knelt, feeling very dizzy and strange, and forced herself to turn the body over. It was Lucia Fernandez. Tay knew her by the locket she always wore, which the fire hadn’t touched. She was dead. She was burned black. But how, why? Why hadn’t she run from the fire? Unless she had died some other way and the fire burned her afterward . . . Tay tried to think clearly. She knew she must think, work this out, decide what to do. But here was someone she knew,
dead
. She couldn’t take it in. In her mind she heard Lucia’s teasing voice at the airport, saying:
You two, you jabber like monkeys—

She stood up.

“Mum!”
she shouted. “
Dad!
Please! Where are you!”

No answer.

Donny came and stood beside her, looking down. He clutched her hand. “Shouldn’t we say something?” he whispered, as if Lucia was asleep and he might wake her. “We ought to say a prayer. That’s what people do, isn’t it? When someone’s dead?”

“Okay, I’ll try. Please, God . . .” But nothing more would come, no words.

They just stood there.

“Donny,” said Tay at last. “The rebels did this.”

“Yeah. I think so too.”

“Look at all these tracks. The rebels came here, they killed Lucia, they started the fire. I think they must have taken everybody else away.”

“M-Mum and Dad and everybody’s been kidnapped? Oh, Tay, what’ll we do?”

“I’m thinking.” She felt the faintest glimmer of hope. The rebels must have come to loot the refuge, and taken the staff away hoping that Lifeforce would pay a ransom.“We have to get help, Donny. We have to tell someone what’s happened, but our phone doesn’t work and the ground station is wrecked. We’ll have to get to Kandah City.”

“Yes. We’ll have to do that. But how?”

“I’m not sure. We’ll walk out to the main road. Maybe we can get a lift. . . . Look, whatever we decide to do, we’ll need supplies. Let’s go to the kitchen and see if any food stores are left. And water. We’ll need water.”

Donny nodded, relieved to have something to do. “All right.”

“We’ll get help, Donny. Everyone’s depending on us. We can do this.”

If she told herself that often enough, maybe it would come true.

The kitchen house was the oldest building in the clearing. It was traditional-built, like the wardens’ home bungalow, with a high-ridged roof and massive double-timber walls for coolness; and raised on stilts above the ground. The fire seemed to have swept over it and round it, leaving it almost intact. The steps to the doorway, beside the blackened lumps that had been Minah’s hen coops, were charred but not broken.

The electric light wasn’t working, and the windows were so blackened by smoke that they had to switch on their torches, which they’d been carrying to back up their headlamps. The food in the big fridge and in the freezers was spoiled. Even some of the plastic utensils hanging on the walls had flowed into strange shapes. But the larder door had been shut, and the dry stores in there were safe. They found a bigger rucksack on a shelf and began sorting things to pack, discarding nonessentials like Tay’s camera.

“As much water as we can both carry. Food too, because we might be stranded for days, but we must have plenty of water—” said Tay. It was a long way to Kandah City if they had to walk, and the fire might be in their path. They might have to detour through the forest, and they’d better avoid the villages because—

Suddenly Donny grabbed her.

They stared upward. They’d both heard something move, up in the storage loft.

“Who’s there?” shouted Tay. No answer.

The loft ladder was lying on the floor. It was big and heavy, but they managed to get it into place. “You stay here,” whispered Tay. “I’ll go up.”

“What,
unarmed
?” breathed Donny.

They looked around for weapons. But Uncle, who had followed them into the kitchen, silently pushed them aside, grabbed the ladder and was in the loft in a couple of swings. They heard him make an eager sound of welcome.

“It’s Clint!” gasped Tay. “Oh, it’s
Clint
! That’s his Clint noise!”

The children rushed up the ladder. In the half dark, between the sacks of rice and stacks of cardboard boxes, they saw Uncle crouched beside someone who was sitting propped against the wall. They shone their torches. Clint didn’t get up or speak as they came over. His face and hands were scorched black, and the left leg of his trousers was glistening with something Tay guessed at once must be blood.

“Howdy, pardners,” he said when they were near him. “I’ve been waiting for you.”