‘You look awful.’

‘And smell it too. Lying there sweating for twenty-four hours, I wouldn’t recommend it.’ There was a pause, then, self-consciously, he said, ‘Listen, Ellie, thanks for getting me out of there. Every minute of the twenty-four hours I could hear the footsteps of soldiers coming to get me.’

‘Sorry about the wild trip in the truck.’

He grinned. ‘I couldn’t believe it. Towards the end there, when you hit the brakes, I actually got thrown out, but I did a sort of roll and landed back in. That’s when I bust a few stitches I think.’

‘Yeah, I’m sorry. We needed to get rid of a car behind us.’ I wiped my face. ‘God, I can’t believe the things we’ve done.’

‘A couple of bullets hit the shovel. They didn’t go through it, but the noise they made! I thought I was dead. But I don’t think they knew I was in there, or they would have sprayed it with bullets.’ Homer came backing out of the garage in a large olive-green Mercedes. Lee laughed. ‘Homer hasn’t changed.’

‘Yes he has.’

‘Has he? I’ll be interested to see that. He’s a pretty smart guy, Homer. Listen Ellie, there’s one problem here. If we leave the BMW sitting where it is, and a patrol finds it, they’ll think there’s a connection between us and Chris’s family. They might burn his house, or if they’ve got Chris as one of their prisoners, they might do something to him.’

‘You’re right.’ I turned to the others, who were getting out of the Merc, and repeated what Lee had said. Homer listened, nodded, and pointed to the dam.

‘Can we do that?’ I asked. ‘To a nice new BMW with only a couple of bullet holes?’

It seemed that we could. I drove it to the upper side of the dam, put it in neutral, got out and gave it a good push. It was a light car and moved easily. It ran down the slope, holding almost a perfect line, and went straight into the water. It floated out for a few metres, getting lower and lower, then stopped floating, leaned to one side and began sinking. With a sudden gurgle and a lot of bubbles, it disappeared. There was a small cheer from Robyn and Homer and me.

And it was the noise of that small cheer which brought Chris out from his hiding place.

He looked funny, dressed in pyjamas, standing there, rubbing his eyes and staring at us. But we probably looked funny to him, like scarecrows in shock, staring back at him in astonishment. He’d come out of their old piggery, which these days was just a row of old sheds, so obviously abandoned and derelict that it was a good choice for a hiding place.

Time was getting short. We had to make some quick decisions. It didn’t take Chris long to decide he wanted to come with us. For a week he’d had no contact with anyone, just watched from a tree, and later the piggery, as patrol after patrol came through the property. The first group had taken all the cash and jewellery; Chris had buried the other small valuables after that, but had spent the rest of the week in hiding, emerging only to check animals and pick up supplies from the house.

His story, told from the back seat of his family Merc as we cruised the side roads, made us realise how lucky we’d been to avoid ground patrols. His house was closer to town than ours, and much grander and more conspicuous, and he’d had daily visits from soldiers.

‘They seem nervous,’ he said. ‘They’re not into being heroes. They stick close together. The first few days they were really jumpy, but they’re more confident now.’

‘How did it start?’ I asked. ‘Like, when did you first realise something funny was happening?’

Chris was normally quiet but he hadn’t talked for so long that now he was the life of the party.

‘Well, it was the day after Mum and Dad left for their trip. You remember? That’s why I couldn’t come on the hike with you. Murray, he’s our worker, was taking his family into the Show and he offered me a lift, but I didn’t want to go. I didn’t think it’d be much fun without you guys, and I’m not heavily into that kind of stuff anyway.’ Chris was a lightly built boy with intense eyes and a lot of nervous habits, like coughing in the middle of every sentence. He wouldn’t be into Commem Day or woodchopping competitions; he was more into the Grateful Dead, Hieronymus Bosch, and computers. He was also known for writing poetry and using more illegal substances than you’d find in the average police laboratory. His motto was ‘If it grows, smoke it’. Ninety per cent of the school thought he was weird, ten per cent thought he was a legend, everybody thought he was a genius.

‘Well, Murray never came back that night, but I didn’t realise, because their house is quite a way from ours. I didn’t really notice anything unusual. There were Air Force jets racing around, but I just thought it was Commem Day stuff. Then, about nine o’clock, the power went off. That’s so common I didn’t get excited, just waited for it to come back on again. But an hour later it was still off, so I thought I’d better ring up and see what was happening. Then I found the phone was off too, which is unusual – we often lose one or the other, but not both. So I walked over to Murray’s place, found they weren’t home, thought “They must have gone out to tea”, came home, went to bed with a candle – if you know what I mean – woke up in the morning, found everything was still off. “Now this is serious,” I thought, went back to Murray’s, still no one there. I walked along the road till I got to the Ramsays’ – they’re our neighbours – went in there, it was empty, kept walking, found no one at the Arthurs’, realised there’d been no traffic, thought “Maybe I’m the only person left on the planet”, went round a corner and found a wrecked car with three dead people in it. They’d hit a tree, but that hadn’t killed them – they’d been shot up badly. Well, bad enough to kill them. You can imagine, I freaked out, and started running towards town. Around the next corner was the next shock – Uncle Al’s house, which had been blown up. It was just a pile of smoking rubble. I saw a couple of vehicles coming, and instead of jumping on the road and flagging them down, which I would have done if they’d come along earlier, I hid and watched. They were military trucks, full of soldiers, and they weren’t ours. So I thought “Either I’ve been using some very strange and heavy stuff or else this is not a typical day in the life of Wirrawee”. It’s been pretty weird ever since. Waking up in the middle of the night and seeing a BMW floating in the middle of the dam was just another part of it.’ Chris kept us entertained for a good half-hour by the time he’d told us what had happened to him and we’d told him our story. And more importantly, he kept us awake. But long before we got to my place Homer and Robyn were heavily asleep. Chris and Lee and I were the only ones still conscious. I don’t know about the other two but it was a terrible struggle for me. I resorted to things like dabbing my eyelids with spit, which might sound strange, but it did help a bit. It was with deep relief that I saw the first soft light from the east reflecting off the galvanised iron roof of home. Only then did I realise I’d spent all that time driving the most elegant car I was ever likely to have, and I hadn’t thought about it once. What a wasted opportunity. I was quite cross with myself.

Chapter Twelve

There’d been a few visitors in the short time we’d been away. Looters had come, and like at Chris’s they had taken jewellery and a few other bits and pieces. My watch, some silver photo frames, my Swiss Army knife. They hadn’t done much damage. I felt sick about it but was too tired to feel the full impact. Corrie and Kevin and Fi had come too – all the stuff on our list had been removed, and they’d left a message on the fridge: ‘Gone where the bad people go. See you were!’ I laughed and then rubbed at it till it was completely removed. I was getting really security conscious.