The Third Day, The Frost (2 page)

Chapter Two

For three weeks there’d been no more aircraft
overhead. The wasps and hornets that had prowled up and down the
sky, buzzing angrily as they waited for us to break cover, had
returned to their nests. Perhaps they thought we’d left the
district. They might have suspected that we lived in these
mountains, but they couldn’t be sure – and even if they were, they
couldn’t know of our exact whereabouts.

Within a few days of their disappearance we
all started to relax a bit, sensing that they had given up.

Lee was the first to say something about us
becoming active again. If he hadn’t said it, someone else would. I
was starting to turn a few ideas over in my mind, feeling a bit
guilty about sitting around for so long. There was the fear of
doing something and the fear of not doing enough. The fears battled
each other all the time. But Lee wanted us to go beyond Wirrawee;
all the way to Cobbler’s Bay. It was a wildly terrifying idea.

Cobbler’s Bay was a wonderful harbour but in
peacetime it was too far from the city to be used regularly by big
ships. It had been popular with fishing boats, tourist charters and
yachts wanting shelter for a night or two. But the enemy had used
it a lot since the invasion. So much damage had been done to the
major ports that Cobbler’s had turned out to be very important to
them. Frequent convoys poured down the highway to and from
Cobbler’s, carrying troops, supplies and weapons.

We’d destroyed the Heron Bridge in Wirrawee,
forcing those convoys to make a long detour, and we’d attacked one
of the convoys in

Buttercup Lane

. Now Lee suggested we go to the very source
of the convoys.

‘But what would we do when we got there?’ Fi
asked.

‘I don’t know. Make it up as we go along.
That’s more or less what we’ve done everywhere else.’

‘We’ve been so lucky.’

‘It’s not all luck,’ I said, even though I
believed in luck myself. Sometimes, anyway. ‘Don’t forget, we’re
free agents who can do what we want, when we want. That does give
us an advantage. All they can do is guess what we might do, or
react after we’ve done it. It’s almost like, I don’t know, they go
by rules and we don’t. They’re confined and we aren’t. You imagine,
if you’re playing hockey and one team follows the rules and the
other team does whatever they feel like. It’s a bit like that. We
can pick up the ball and throw it to each other, or we can bash
them in the shins with the hockey sticks, and it’s not until we’ve
done it that they can react.’

‘Yes,’ said Homer slowly. ‘I’d never thought
of it like that. But you’re exactly right. If we’re going to have a
go at Cobbler’s we’ll have to be as radical as we can be. Totally
unpredictable. Make the most of the advantage that Ellie’s talking
about.’

‘So are we going to have a go at Cobbler’s?’
Robyn asked, in a small voice.

There was a pause; everyone waiting for
someone else to commit themselves. Finally I heard my own
voice.

‘It’s a nice place for a holiday.’

I don’t know why I talk like a hero sometimes.
Blame it on peer pressure. I never never never feel like a hero.
But I think we would have all agreed to go take a look at Cobbler’s
anyway. No one could have stood being cooped up in Hell much
longer, and no one had any better ideas.

We left two days later. It was a Sunday
morning, as far as I could tell – we all had different theories
about the date.

We carried enormous packs. We didn’t know how
far the district had been colonised while we’d been hiding in Hell.
Everything seemed to have been proceeding at such a speed that we
had to expect the worst. So we took a lot of stuff. Being winter,
most of it was for warmth: jumpers, mitts, balaclavas, woollen
socks. We took sleeping bags but not tents – we still didn’t have
proper tents, since we lost them in the Holloway Valley. We hoped
we could find shelter in sheds or caves. But we did carry a heap of
food, not knowing what we’d be able to scrounge or steal.

‘Steal!’ Homer said angrily when I used that
word. ‘This is our country. Stealing is what they’ve done; it
doesn’t apply to us.’

Our main project before leaving was to
relocate the chooks. We knocked up a new feeder and filled it to
the brim. That would keep them going for many weeks, but the
problem was water. Eventually we solved that problem by rebuilding
their yard so that the creek now flowed through a corner of it.
‘Lateral thinking,’ Robyn said proudly. It had been her idea, and
she’d done most of the work. The chooks certainly seemed to like
it. They clucked around happily, murmuring to each other as they
explored their new territory.

It was ten in the morning when we left. The
last thing I’d done, just after breakfast, was to make a little
bouquet out of leaves and grasses – it was the wrong season for
flowers – and take it to Chris’ grave. I wasn’t surprised to find
someone had been there before me, and left a wooden flower, a
flower clumsily carved out of wood. It could have been anyone:
Homer, Fi, Lee, Robyn, any one of them could have done it.

The weeks of hiding, and the depressions that
we’d been through, had taken the edge off our fitness. The heavy
packs seemed to have doubled their weight before we reached the
first of the giant rock steps that the path threaded around on its
way out of Hell. At least the weather was on our side. It was cold
but not raining; a moist winter day, when our breaths made us look
like chainsmokers. I never tired of blowing the little white clouds
and watching them evaporate. Above us was nothing but cloud, the
whole sky grey and flat. You knew, just looking at it, that it
would be cold all day and there would be no sign of the sun. But it
was OK for what we wanted; I had no complaints.

At the top we rested for a while, annoyed and
disappointed at how hard we’d found the climb.

‘It’s the packs,’ Fi said. ‘They’re the
biggest loads we’ve ever carried out of Hell.’

‘It’s the lives we’ve been living,’ Homer
said. ‘Just lounging around watching TV all day. I knew it’d catch
up with us.’

We walked along Tailor’s Stitch. A lot of the
features around the Wirrawee district were named after old trades:
Cobbler’s Bay, Tailor’s Stitch, a hill named Brewer’s Mark, and a
rock formation called the Old Blacksmith. We kept our eyes and ears
open for aircraft, but there were none. About halfway to Mt Martin
we turned left down the rough old four-wheel drive track that would
take us into the valley. We went right by the Land Rover, hidden in
thick bush near the top of the ridge. We’d agreed that it’d be too
dangerous to use it until we knew more about what we’d find around
Wirrawee. But at least the walking was now downhill.

My place was the first one we came to.
Approaching it from the Tailor’s road we were in good cover until
about a k from the house. By then it was midafternoon. As we
reached the edge of the line of trees I signalled to the others to
stop while I sneaked forward, searching for a good lookout. I found
a huge old river gum and installed myself in it. It was perfect,
except for the stream of bees pouring in and out of a large hole in
the trunk, about thirty centimetres above my head. I hadn’t seen
them when I chose the tree. But at the same moment that I noticed
them I also noticed a movement out in the paddock we call Bailey’s,
and I instantly forgot about the bees.

For the first time since the invasion I saw
strangers in our paddocks. There was a ute over by the western
fenceline and I could see two men working on the fence itself. One
of the old pine trees that Grandma had planted must have come down
in a storm, and fallen across the fence. One man was holding a
chainsaw and the other was dragging away some of the lighter
branches. As I watched, the bloke with the chainsaw gave the cord a
pull and started it up, then moved in to continue cutting.

It would have been a normal bush scene except
for one thing: the soldier with the rifle across his back who was
watching from fifty metres away. He was sitting astride a
motorbike, a cigarette in his mouth. He looked about fourteen years
old.

I studied them for a few minutes. At least the
man with the chainsaw seemed to know how to use it; lucky, as it
was a big one. We’d all been raised on horrific stories of people
slicing arms or legs off with chainsaws. In our district they cause
more accidents than tractors and firearms combined.

I went back to the others and told them what
I’d seen. In the thicker bush, where they were, the chain-saw
sounded like a distant mosquito. But it was blocking our progress
and it would keep us there for another hour or more, by the time
the men put the fence back up. We agreed to take another siesta;
the alternative was doing a serious bushbash to get around them.
None of us wanted that much sweat.

While the others settled back on their packs,
using them as cushions, I took a walk around the treeline so I
could get closer to the work party. I had mixed feelings about them
being on our land. I was angry and upset, of course, to see
trespassers there, but I was relieved too that someone was at last
looking after the place. We’d all been shocked, on our previous
expeditions, to see how quickly things were degenerating. Fences
were down, sheep were fly-struck, horses were foundering, rabbits
and foxes were everywhere. The houses, too, were showing signs of
wear and tear. A few more years of this and the whole country would
be a wilderness of blackberries and Scotch thistle.

In time I got quite close to the men working
on the pine tree. I could hear them easily. They’d turned the
chainsaw off again and I realised that as they worked they were
having a go at the boy with the rifle.

‘Hey Wyatt, Wyatt Earp!’ one of them called
out.

‘What?’ I heard the boy answer. His voice was
much softer than the men’s, but sounded reluctant, almost
sulky.

‘I hope you know what you’re doing, sitting
under that tree.’

‘What for?’

‘Well, this time of day, middle of the
afternoon, that’s when the drop bears get active.’

‘That’s right,’ the other man said. ‘Shocking
area for drop bears, this.’

‘I wouldn’t sit under that tree for a million
dollars,’ the first man said.

‘Terrible what those drop bears do. I’ve seen
them take a bloke’s face off. Those claws, Gawd, they’d give you
the horrors.’

‘And you never see the one that gets you.’

‘That’s the truth.’

‘What for, drop bears?’ the boy asked.

I’d worked around a bit further, to where I
could see his face. He was fidgeting anxiously, but trying to look
untroubled.

‘You don’t know what drop bears are? Fair
dink, don’t they teach you blokes anything? Fancy sending a bloke
to a place like this and not telling him about drop bears.’

‘They told you about sharks, didn’t they?’ the
second man asked.

‘Sharks, yes.’

‘And crocodiles?’

‘Crocodiles, yes.’

‘And hoop snakes?’

The boy hesitated. ‘Hoop snakes, yes,’ he said
after a moment.

‘Well, I’ll tell you what mate, I’d rather go
fifteen rounds with a crocodile than have a drop bear land on my
head.’

‘What for, drop bears?’ the boy asked again.
He was showing real nervousness now, standing up straighter against
the motorbike and with increased alertness in his voice. The men
stopped working and spoke to him directly.

‘Mate,’ the first one said, with great
seriousness, ‘it’s none of my business if you end up wearing a drop
bear for a hat, but if you want to keep that good-looking face
attached to your head, I wouldn’t recommend you spend any more time
under trees.’

The young soldier looked around awkwardly,
then peered up through the branches. Finally he said: ‘That enough.
We go now.’

‘Well, whatever you say,’ the first man said.
‘You’re the boss. But it’s pretty early to knock off.’ To his mate
he said, quietly, ‘I guess he just doesn’t want to lose face.’

Both men sniggered. The boy, flushing red,
said angrily: ‘Enough. We go.’

He flourished his rifle, then kicked at the
starter of his motorbike. But he was off balance from waving his
rifle, and he fell sideways, sprawling across the ground and
dropping the bike. The men just grinned at each other and walked
casually to the ute. They got in and started it, putting it in gear
as the boy, humiliated, struggled again with the starter of the
bike. By the time he got it going the ute was a hundred metres
away, bumping slowly across the paddock towards the gate. The boy
tore off after it, his rear tyre sliding around as he accelerated.
I wondered if the men would make him open the gate. I was smiling
as I walked back to the others. Seemed like there was more than one
way to skin a pussycat.

Chapter
Three

My smile didn’t last long. As we made our
cautious way from property to property we were shocked by the speed
with which the invaders had moved. A disease of colonists had
infected the countryside.

‘You know what it must seem like to them?’
Homer said. ‘It must feel like the old days, when the whites first
arrived, and all they could see was this huge country with no one
in it who they cared about. So, after living in pokey little towns
or on ten hectare farms in England, they could suddenly spread out
and help themselves to thousands of square k’s each. You remember
that unit we did in history: selectors and squatters? Well, a
couple of centuries later, here’s history repeating itself.’

We were all silent, a depressed, pessimistic
silence.

It took us a few days to work out how things
were organised. As far as we could tell there were two or three
families who’d moved onto each farm. As well, some places had mini
prison camps, thirty or forty people, who were used as slave labour
in that particular area. They were locked up each night in sheds or
shearers’ quarters or workers’ cottages – whatever was available.
Most of these mini camps were guarded at night by four sentries,
one on each corner, and were lit by improvised floodlights. It
wouldn’t have been so hard to stage a breakout, but I guess the
problem for most people was where to go after they broke out. Not
everybody had a convenient bolthole called Hell, with a stockpile
of food and other stores. It was just another fluke, the way it had
worked for us. I still couldn’t decide if it was a good fluke or a
bad one.

One odd thing was that we didn’t recognise any
of the prisoners. As we spied on them from different vantage points
we thought that most of them seemed like experienced cockies: they
moved stock confidently and handled tools well. They were even
shearing at a couple of places. But we didn’t see anyone we knew
and we decided not to take the chance of talking to strangers. It
might have made us feel good but the risk wasn’t worth it.

Perhaps that, more than anything else, showed
how much we’d changed. We’d toughened to such an extent that we
chose not to ask about the welfare of our families if it meant any
possibility of danger to ourselves. If someone had told me six
months earlier that’s the kind of person I’d become ... Of course
these prisoners, who we thought were from another area, quite
likely wouldn’t even know our parents, but there had been a time
when we would have asked anyway.

On our third day we were just about out of the
Wirrawee district, hiking through some scrubby, very poor country,
between Wirrawee and Fletcher East. By staying in the uncleared
stuff we were able to make good progress. There was nothing to
attract colonists there, just cockatoos, galahs and kangaroos. And
an echidna that I nearly trod on as it grovelled in the dirt,
trying to dig its way to China. We had glimpses of both farmland
and the pot-holed bitumen road that wound through the valley like a
confused snake. At about lunchtime we saw something that had
already become familiar: a group of prisoners at work, with a
couple of sentries. It took us a while to figure out what these
prisoners were doing. One of them was operating a front-end loader
and had dug a big pit; the others were wheeling loads to the pit
from a large low brick building a hundred metres further away. We
were due for a meal so we stopped and ate our scanty lunch while
watching them hard at work.

After a couple of minutes Homer suddenly said:
‘I’ve figured it out.’

‘Figured what out?’

‘What they’re doing.’

I pressed my Vita-Weats together to make the
Vegemite come squiggling through the holes like little black worms.
‘OK, what are they doing?’

‘It’s a piggery and they’re taking out the
bodies of the pigs. Or what’s left of them.’

‘Charming.’ I squinted my eyes and peered
harder. ‘Yes, you might be right.’ I tried not to think what a
stinking mess an abandoned feedlot for pigs might be. And I didn’t
feel so good about the look of my Vita-Weats.

‘Oh!’ said Fi, instantly sympathetic. ‘You
mean they starved to death in there? The poor things. That’s
awful.’

‘The last ones wouldn’t have starved for a
long time,’ Homer said cruelly.

‘How do you mean?’ Fi asked, not noticing the
tone of Homer’s voice.

‘Don’t ask,’ I said, too late.

‘They would have eaten each other when they
got desperate,’ Homer said.

‘Oh!’ Fi said, outraged.

‘There goes lunch,’ Lee said.

‘Lucky we weren’t having ham sandwiches,’
Robyn said.

‘Are they cannibals?’ Fi asked.

‘Not exactly,’ Homer said. ‘It’s just that
they eat everything. They’ll eat their keepers quite happily. There
was a guy in Peppertown, no one’s quite sure what happened, but
they think he might have fainted in his pigpen. Anyway, by the time
they found him ... well, they didn’t find him, if you see what I
mean.’

‘Yuk,’ Fi said. ‘You always know the most
disgusting things, Homer.’

‘Rats eat each other,’ Lee said. ‘If you put
too many of them in a cage, for example.’

‘Just like humans,’ Robyn said.

Throughout this conversation I’d been casually
watching the prisoners toiling away at the piggery. Now suddenly I
stopped eating, a Vita-Weat halfway to my mouth. And not because of
the conversation the others were having.

‘That bloke just coming out now,’ I said
quickly, urgently. ‘The one with the broom. Tell me I’m
dreaming.’

They looked, they stared.

Homer jumped to his feet, dropping his
half-eaten biscuit in the dirt.

‘You’re not dreaming,’ he said.

‘No, you’re not,’ Robyn agreed, speaking like
someone hypnotised.

‘Oh God, I don’t believe it,’ Fi said.

Lee had the worst eyesight of the five of us,
and he alone had to ask to make sure. ‘Do you mean ... are you
saying ... you think it’s Kevin?’

‘I don’t think, I know. That’s Kevin. You can
bet your sweet bippy on it.’

We gazed, in a kind of trance. I don’t know
about the others, but I was thinking of the last time I’d seen
Kevin, driving away in a big beautiful Mercedes that we’d
requisitioned. We hadn’t expected it to become an ambulance, but
that’s what it had become. When my first best friend Corrie had
been shot in the back by a bullet from out of the dark, fired by a
soldier they never even saw, Kevin drove her into Wirrawee, to the
hospital. The hospital – in fact the whole town – was occupied by
the enemy, but that hadn’t stopped him. We didn’t have a lot of
clues about what had happened to them since, except that Corrie was
in hospital, unconscious, and Kevin was a prisoner at the
Showground. We also heard that he had been badly beaten by the
soldiers for turning up with someone who had a bullet wound.
Presumably the soldiers jumped to the worst conclusions. They may
have even thought that Kevin and Corrie had been involved in the
destruction of the Wirrawee bridge – the bridge that the rest of us
had blown up the previous night.

‘What is my sweet bippy?’ Lee asked,
disturbing my flood of memories.

‘Eh? Oh honestly, Lee. I can tell you what it
isn’t.’

‘Kevin,’ Robyn breathed. ‘It’s a miracle.’

I wasn’t going to disagree. I was wildly
excited to see him. I could feel my eyes growing bigger as I stared
and stared. From this distance he looked OK, and he was moving
freely. He had always been a big guy, and strong, and although he’d
certainly lost some weight he didn’t look too bad at all. Not as
bad as in my nightmares, anyway. We watched avidly as he put the
broom on the back of a Holden ute and picked up a shovel. Then he
lifted his head and gazed all around, as though searching for
something. He even looked up at the sky for a few moments. We
couldn’t show ourselves – it was too big a risk – but I knew we
wouldn’t be leaving this area for a while yet.

We watched them all afternoon. The work party
knocked off at about five o’clock. We’d noticed back in Wirrawee
that this army kept regular office hours. Or maybe the sentries
were getting nervous about the drop bears. The prisoners slouched
off in a disorganised bunch towards the farm buildings, which we
could see as we edged forwards. The buildings were nearly a
kilometre away. The soldiers followed, one in the front seat of the
ute and one standing on the tray. Like most of the sentries we saw
these days, he hadn’t unslung his rifle: it hung over his
shoulder.

The five of us moved along parallel to them,
but kept well in among the trees. We didn’t wear anything metallic
these days, in case the sunlight’s reflection gave us away. We were
taking extreme care. We paced them easily enough though: they
weren’t exactly hurrying, and it was clear where they were
headed.

I don’t know the name of the property – we
weren’t familiar with this country – but it was obviously one of
the older ones, probably dating back to the 1860s when a lot of the
Wirrawee and Fletcher land was selected. In fact, the Fletchers
were the people who’d taken most of it up, but this wasn’t their
place. I’d been on a school excursion to their house: it was a
massive old sandstone mansion owned by the National Trust.

The prisoners were heading for a single-storey
stone farmhouse surrounded by heaps of outbuildings. There were six
tall palm trees standing over it, and a big white flagpole out the
front. Behind it, in the distance, was a great area of water: a
lake, probably a natural one, where the river had spread itself
across a couple of hectares. It was a pretty sight with the
purple-black winter clouds piled high above. It must have been a
wonderful home for a lot of different people over the years. Now it
had become a home for a new group: we could see colonists moving
around the homestead, looking at something in the garden, watching
a couple of children kicking a soccer ball. ‘It’s all right for
them,’ I thought bitterly. ‘They don’t have to do any work. They
mightn’t ever have to work again.’

They certainly had plenty of servants to pick
from. Kevin’s group had eight members and they looked fit enough,
from a distance. Lean, but fit. We watched them swing away to the
south when they got close to the flagpole. They walked on down a
side track to another group of old buildings, a dilapidated bunch
of cottages and sheds. They disappeared into there; the ute pulled
up behind them and the two sentries got out. One stayed at the
front of the buildings; the other went to the back. By remaining a
hundred metres away on either side they had a good field of fire if
anyone tried to escape. They could hold the place easily with just
two of them.

Ten minutes later an old Commer fire tender
drove up to the same buildings. There were two sentries riding
shotgun on the back. Four prisoners got out of the cab and went
straight into the cottages. These sentries had a short chat to
their mate out the front, then went to the homestead. Half an hour
later they returned and relieved the two men on guard.

We were very excited by what we’d seen. We
were all bursting to talk to Kevin. We wanted to tell him
everything that had happened to us, and we wanted to hear
everything that had happened to him. We hoped he’d have information
on all the people we knew, not just our families, but our friends
as well, and especially Corrie. Most of all, we wanted him to
rejoin us. Our group could never be complete again, since the death
of Chris, but having Kevin back would be fantastic. There were
times in the past when he’d irritated me but in the excitement I’d
forgotten all that. Anyway, I would have irritated him often enough
too.

At first we thought it would be easy to get to
him. The security seemed so light compared to what we’d taken on
and beaten in the past. But as we waited and waited through the
night for our chance, we began to realise that it wasn’t going to
be such a picnic. There were only two sentries, but they were wide
awake. They were relieved at midnight by a pair who were equally
sharp. After a freezing night we had to give up, and with the
approach of dawn we slipped away through the trees to find a safe
spot to sleep.

We realised we had to make something happen.
Lee took only a short sleep, then went back and watched to see
where the work parties went. He followed them to a dam in a distant
paddock, then came back to tell us that they were repairing its
wall: it was a newish earthen dam that didn’t seem to be holding
together too well. We left them there and spent a slow day in the
cold woods, waiting for them to return.

Our first aim was of course to let Kevin know
we were around. Again that should have been easy. At about 5.30
they came trudging back, but this time, instead of taking the track
down to the old buildings where they slept, they took another one,
which led around the lake. This brought them fairly close to us, so
we followed, keeping inside the treeline. After fifteen minutes
they were out of sight of the main house, and at that point the ute
stopped and the guards got out. ‘This OK,’ I heard one of them
call. They leant themselves comfortably against the ute and took
out cigarettes, laughing as they watched the prisoners. The
prisoners were laughing too, making comments to each other that I
couldn’t quite pick up. Then I found myself blushing a little as I
realised what they were going to do.

‘Oh golly,’ Fi giggled, beside me. She’d just
realised what was happening. I took a quick look at her. If I was
blushing, she looked sunburnt. Half the men were down to their
jocks already. Clothes were dropping like rose petals, and pink
skin was appearing everywhere. Not as pink as Fi’s and mine though.
I didn’t dare look at Kevin; I knew that if I caught one glimpse of
him I’d never be able to look him in the face again.

I mean, I’d be embarrassed to come
face-to-face with him again.