The Third Day, The Frost (15 page)

Yet, after all that, we were surprised to find
a big gleaming lock on the front door. It looked expensive, and
tough to crack. The door itself was quite solid, so we didn’t
bother with either. I picked up a stick and went to break a window.
‘Hope there’s not a burglar alarm,’ Homer said nervously. ‘Someone
on the road might hear it.’

I thought for a moment. ‘Doubt it. Why put in
a burglar alarm when there’s no neighbours to hear it?’

I smashed the glass out in one pane, then,
when there was no sound of sirens and ringing bells, smashed out
the other panes, too.

‘Anyway,’ I said to Homer, ‘There’s no power
line. It’d have to run off batteries and they’d be flat by
now.’

I knocked out the rest of the glass and the
cross-pieces of wood, then swung a leg over the sill and climbed
inside. It was dark and smelly, like going into a laundry full of
over-used socks. Rain had leaked down one side of the wall and
stained the wallpaper; it was all mildewy and musty.

‘Imagine living here,’ Homer said behind
me.

I went on into the kitchen, where it was too
dark to see much. There was a fridge, but I wasn’t going to open
that, and an old meat safe with cans on the top that looked worth
investigating. It was obvious that no looters had been here,
probably because the house was so run down it didn’t look worth the
trouble. Homer went through another door into the back of the house
and I had a look at the bathroom. There was an old claw-foot bath,
a bit like the one at home. I peered into it and was disgusted to
see two little grey furry things with tails sticking out of the
plughole. It took a moment for me to realise what they were: mice
that had died in there, probably so desperate with thirst that
they’d stuck their heads down the hole looking for water.

Homer came in but before I could say anything
about the mice, he said, with a sort of quiver of excitement: ‘Come
and look what I’ve found.’

Chapter
Nineteen

I followed Homer through an old crimson
curtain that served as a door. It was like we’d suddenly landed in
an electronics showroom. I couldn’t even recognise most of the
stuff. There was a computer and a printer, a couple of video
recorders and a monitor, and a fax machine. That was standard
enough. But the whole of the far wall was communications equipment.
There seemed to be a variety of radios, two microphones, and a lot
of little gadgets, like a walkie-talkie and a mobile phone.

‘Amazing,’ I said.

‘Looks like a branch of Tandy,’ Homer
said.

‘Talk about a double life. Living in the
nineteenth century half the time and the twenty-first century the
other half.’

‘Yeah, toys for the boys,’ Homer said. ‘They
say no matter how old guys are, they have to have their toys.’

That sounded so funny coming from Homer that I
had to struggle not to laugh.

‘This one’s like the rural firefighting sets,’
I said, walking over to a big radio unit in the corner.

‘Yeah.’ Homer was looking thoughtful. ‘I think
this guy’s a real whatever they call it, ham. Short-wave radios and
all that stuff. I tell you, Ellie, we could probably talk to other
countries using this gear.’

‘E-mail with voices.’

‘Exactly.’

‘You just want to play with these toys
yourself.’

‘Yeah, maybe.’

‘What exactly are you thinking? Giving
yourself the pleasure of some French practice?’

‘New Zealand. If we could get in touch with
the Kiwis, if they knew we were the ones who blew up Cobbler’s Bay,
they might, I don’t know ...’

I began to realise where Homer was heading. My
mind began to jump at some of the possibilities.

‘They might come and rescue us?’

‘Well, they might.’

‘We’d need to start the generator. I don’t
think the noise of that’d be too good.’

‘Mmm. But we’ve got to take some risks. At
night we could see them coming from a good way off.’

‘It’s possible, I suppose. I do like the idea
of a holiday in Milford Sound. But surely they’d have too much on
their minds to worry about a few kids.’

‘Probably. But still ...’

The thing was that once Homer put the idea in
my head, I knew I was stuck with it. For months we’d had no glimpse
of even the slightest hope. We couldn’t see any end to this war in
the near future; maybe not even in the distant future. So what was
to become of us? Were we doomed to wander the countryside, having
smaller and smaller areas where we could hide, until one day we
were caught? That seemed our only choice. At one stage I’d even had
a dream of making a raft and sailing to New Zealand, like
ship-wrecked mariners in old adventure stories.

But at least if we could talk to someone, to
anyone, really: well, at least they’d know we were alive. That
would be comforting, even if they didn’t send a VIP jet to rescue
us.

‘We’ll have to ask the others,’ I said at
last.

‘Look,’ Homer said, showing me an old exercise
book. ‘This is the key. It’s all the call-signs and frequencies and
things.’

I took it and had a look. A lot of it didn’t
make any sense, just lists of numbers. But it was obvious that this
guy could tune in to the emergency frequencies: he had numbers for
police, ambulance, fire authority, different airports, air force,
state emergency. I had a vague idea that it was illegal to listen
in to some of these channels. Oh well. Not many of them would be
broadcasting these days.

We climbed back out the broken window and went
to find the others. Lee and Fi had joined Kevin and Robyn on sentry
duty and they were talking earnestly. It turned out they were
discussing the same subject that was starting to obsess us all: our
futures. They’d been trying to recall the news Kevin had brought of
the counter attacks: troops from New Guinea were holding an area
around Cape Martindale; the Kiwis had recaptured much of the
southern coastline: the Burdekin and the area around Newington.
Trouble was, that was weeks ago; a lot could have changed since.
What Lee wanted to do was to get through to Newington. It was a
thought that horrified me.

‘Lee, I don’t know what a full-on war zone
would be like – none of us do – but I can’t see how we could
possibly get to a place like that. I mean, surely there’d be tanks
and rocket launchers and all that stuff. If it was easy just to
waltz through it all, the Kiwis would have done it.’

‘But they wouldn’t be expecting anyone to come
from the other direction,’ said Robyn, who seemed to be agreeing
with Lee.

‘I don’t see that we have any choice,’ Lee
said. ‘The one thing we all agree on is that we’ve got no future
here. The war’s not going to end in a hurry, and we’re running out
of options fast. We’ve got to make something happen, not sit around
and wait to be caught. Take the initiative, do something decisive,
that’s what I reckon.’

I mentally cursed all those videos that Lee
had watched over the years. Stallone had a lot to answer for.

‘But Lee, we can’t take on an army. All we’ve
done so far has been sneaky stuff. We’ve been like rats in the
dark, keeping ourselves invisible. That’s why we’ve been so
successful – well, one reason, anyway,’ I added, not wanting to
give up all the credit I thought we deserved. ‘We can’t go into a
battle zone. We just aren’t prepared for that. They’d knock us over
in thirty seconds.’

‘So what do you want us to do?’ he said
angrily. ‘Sit on our bums and wait? Start making white flags that
we can wave when they come for us?’

‘I don’t know what to do! Stop acting like
there’s one right answer and all we have to do is find it and
that’ll be the end of our problems! This isn’t a Maths test.’

That killed off the argument a bit. Homer and
I told them about our discovery, and that got everyone excited. We
agreed it would be too dangerous to start the generator in day
time, but there was no hesitation about having a go that night. Lee
went off to check it out. Robyn and Kevin still had an hour of
sentry to do, and Fi wanted to show me an old lube pit that she’d
found. She had the clever idea of turning it into a bolt hole by
covering it with iron and parking a vehicle over the top. We
sweated for a while doing that. It was quite fun, and the result
was perfect. After we’d covered it with galvanised iron we
scattered dirt over it, and a few bits of exhaust pipes, a broken
windscreen, and an empty soft drink can. Then we pushed an old
Commer delivery van over the top of that, and brushed away the tyre
tracks so it looked like it had been sitting there for twenty
years.

Homer and Lee had taken over as sentries by
then, but we challenged the other two to a game of hide and seek.
We made it easy for them by telling them which row of cars we’d be
in, then we ran down there, slipped into the pit through a little
hole we’d left open, and pulled the galvanised iron in place above
us. It was a dark little cubby but dry, and we sat in there quite
comfortably, giggling at our own cleverness. After five or six
minutes we heard Kevin and Robyn searching; Robyn opened the back
door of the Commer and we heard her say ‘Not here.’ We gave them a
couple more minutes, then crawled out. They were already four cars
further down the row. We were delighted. It wasn’t a place where
we’d want to spend six months of our lives, but it was a good
retreat for emergencies.

Helicopters continued to be our major problem,
though. We got buzzed twice more that morning, then in the
afternoon one of them returned, and went over the yard really
carefully. Backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, patient
and relentless. The noise shook through me: there was no keeping it
out. We were all in hiding but our problem was the Jackaroo. If
they saw that they could call up ground troops and surround the
place, then pick us off at their leisure.

The helicopter spent more than ten minutes
scanning the yard. Then it tilted and turned and moved off to the
north. It started inspecting a set of sheds that we could see about
a k away. We had to assume that this meant we were safe; that we
had survived again.

If only we could relax.

Just before five o’clock, a formation of jets
screamed past, but there was no other action in the air.

When it got dark, Homer went off to the old
house to fiddle with the generator. Despite the danger, we were all
looking forward to having a go on the short wave. We didn’t know
whether it would achieve anything, but it was probably worth the
risk. We had an idea that any listening enemies might be able to
trace us if we talked on it for too long. That was our biggest
worry.

At half past ten we got ready for the big
experiment. We had the notebook with the frequencies. All we could
work out from it was that we probably needed to be in the VHF 30 to
300 MHz frequency. That seemed to be where all the big operators
were: the police and the airports and the ambulance. We weren’t
expecting to have a nice friendly chat with Constable Jones at the
local cop shop, but we were hoping to reach New Zealand, and we had
to hope that they used a similar range of frequencies to us.

I didn’t know what VHF 30 to 300 MHz meant,
but it was easy enough to see on the dial where those figures were.
We used a candle for light and turned the tuner to 300. Lee and
Robyn were on sentry but Lee was just outside the back door and
Robyn outside the window of the room, so they could listen in to
whatever happened. Kevin was standing by at the generator and Homer
was operating the radio itself. We were ready.

‘OK, fire her up,’ Homer called. Kevin gave
the cord a pull. It was a pull-start Honda generator, and it
started on the third try. Pretty impressive. What we hadn’t counted
on – and what we should have checked before we started – was that
half the lights in the house slowly started coming on too.

‘Turn it off! Turn it off!’ Lee shouted at
Kevin.

A moment later we were back in silence and
darkness.

Robyn jumped in through the window. ‘If there
was anyone on the road they would have seen that,’ she said.

‘Head for the lube pit,’ Homer ordered.

We ran like hares straight for it, and
squeezed in one by one, leaving only Robyn outside, ready to follow
if she saw anything.

With exaggerated caution we decided to wait in
there a full hour. Homer was raging. ‘I can’t believe we didn’t
check those bloody switches,’ he kept saying. He made me feel
guilty, though I don’t know why it should have been my job.

Finally I said: ‘It’s done, Homer. Shut up
about it.’

We sat in the dark, sweating to think of some
enemy patrol about to descend on us. But after a while I think we
all dozed off. I know I did, and apparently Homer did, too. I’d
been going on nervous energy for many hours and it suddenly seemed
to run out. And the others decided to let us sleep. We were meant
to have gone on sentry duty at 5 am but they split it up between
them and let us sleep till dawn. Sure it was a cramped
uncomfortable sleep but it was better than nothing, and it was a
lot better than sentry.

I crawled out of the hole at about seven and
found the others sitting around drinking tea that they’d boiled on
a little fire in a sheltered corner of the junkyard. Although
they’d put the fire out and buried it, the billy was still hot
enough to make me a cuppa.

‘You should have woken me,’ I said, but
without much conviction.

‘We were going to, then Lee figured out about
the time difference,’ Robyn said.

‘The time difference?’ I asked, still not
functioning above twenty per cent.

‘If we’d tried to call New Zealand at
midnight, it’d be about two o’clock their time and they’d all be
asleep,’ Lee explained.

‘Oh yes.’

I drank my tea.

‘So what are we going to do?’ I asked, when my
mind was starting to rev up properly.

‘Try again, and do it about now,’ Robyn said.
‘We can’t leave it much later. Today’s the most likely day for them
to come looking for us. So we should go into hiding pretty
soon.’

She went to wake Homer while I threw out the
tea leaves and followed the others to the house. Although Lee swore
he’d checked that the lights were off this time I couldn’t help but
double check, which must have annoyed him out of his mind. Still,
he was tactful enough not to say anything. I was so flat and tired
I could hardly move. I was thinking about those action war movies
Lee liked, where the hero goes from a martial arts fight to a ski
chase to a gun battle to a wrestle with piranhas, and all that time
he never seems to slow down or need a rest.

Every time we did anything dangerous I took
ages to recover – not because of the physical effort, which
sometimes wasn’t much, but I think because of the emotional
backlash. The episode at the river – I call it an ‘episode’ because
it helps me not to think of it as killing or murder – overwhelmed
my mind so much that it left me an emotional paraplegic for a long
time.

So checking the light switches was about the
most energetic thing I did. For once I was content to take a back
seat. Homer came in looking shocking and rubbing his eyes,
shivering in the cold of the early morning. But he was desperately
keen to make the transmission and no one else seemed to mind, so we
took up the positions we’d been in the night before. I found myself
shivering too: from the cold, from the risk we were taking, but
most of all from the exciting feeling that we might be about to
talk to a friendly adult again – a rare opportunity in our
lives.

Kevin pulled the cord, the generator started
first go, the lights didn’t come on, but, when the output reached
240 volts and Homer threw the switch, things lit up all around the
room. The computer made a birrrkkking noise, the video recorder
flashed zeros, the printer went baddup baddup, and several radios
emitted static that sounded like rain on the roof. Robyn and I went
around quickly pulling plugs out, until the only thing left
functioning was the short-wave transmitter. Homer was intent on its
dial, slowly turning the tuning knob. The main sound was static,
but occasionally we heard foreign voices mixed in with it: nothing
but unintelligible mutters constantly interrupted by crackling
noises. Some of the bursts of static were so loud and unexpected
that they sounded aggressive: they made me jump.