Ash Road (16 page)

He stopped because he could not drive through it and was not at all sure that he could drive round it.

‘Ridiculous,' he barked. ‘And what are all these people jamming the road for? They'd do better to go the other way, towards the city.'

‘It looks as if there's a notice on the barrier, sir,' said Wallace.

‘Well, take a look at it.'

Wallace jumped out and walked round to the other side. It says “No Through Road”,' he yelled.

‘All right! Drag it across a few feet. Give me room to get past.'

‘Do you think you should, sir?'

Gramps turned crimson. ‘I'll do as I think fit!'

Wallace dragged it across, and Gramps drove through. ‘Will I put it back again, sir?' Wallace asked.

‘Put it back? No blithering fear. Leave it where it is. They can't close the road to its residents. Hop in.'

Wallace hopped in, and Gramps cut into the traffic stream, but once in it he knew he couldn't accelerate through it. The highway was the only road that was open, and he had to take it at a crawl whether he liked it or not, along with everyone else. He fretted to break out of it, to form a second lane and pass, but it was too risky. It was a highway in name only; the road wasn't wide enough, except in the final approach to Prescott. But there he couldn't pass, either; police directed the traffic, turning it all to the left, into the heart of the town, and Gramps wanted to go to the right. He jammed his feet on the brake and stayed put in the middle of the intersection, and when the policeman shouted at him he shouted back, and Wallace and Harry longed to shrink into invisibility. For this was not like the lonely bush only a few miles away; it was a world of houses and people and car engines and voices and groups of staring people. Here were vehicles drawn up by the roadside near a service station, vehicles bearing drums of water and knapsack sprays and piles of wet hessian and dozens of noisy young men. And farther down Main Street, in the town, were more parked vehicles heaped with furniture and television sets and baby carriages and bedding. Down there, too, were crowds of people wandering without purpose or intent, people down from the mountains, wondering what had happened to them, wondering whether their homes still stood or were heaps of ashes and tangled iron, people bewildered by the catastrophe that had so rapidly overtaken them. For they could still see their mountains, at the opposite end of Main Street, dark mountains in the shadow of dense smoke, mountains that sometimes erupted isolated towers of flame far away, flame so brilliant that it seared through smoke and gloom with the violence of a cannon in the night.

‘You!' roared the policeman. ‘Go left. Left! That way!'

‘Miltondale,' boomed Gramps. ‘I'm going to Miltondale.'

‘Go that way,' roared the policeman.

‘Miltondale,' boomed Gramps.

The policeman strode to the car. He was a young man, a stranger in town. Gramps had never seen him before.

‘Do as you're told,' shouted the policeman.

‘I'm not out for a joy-ride,' boomed Gramps. ‘I've got a dying man on the back seat. Look for yourself. And if I don't get him to hospital, he will be dead!'

‘You can't go to Miltondale. The road's closed. I've got my orders. The road's closed, except to authorized and incoming traffic. Turn left. You're holding everybody up.'

‘Listen to me,' growled Gramps. ‘This is my town. It's been my town for more than forty years. It was my town before you knew your right hand from your left. If I want to go right, I go right.'

He let in the clutch fiercely and leapt across the intersection, dislodging the startled policeman by force. Then he put his foot down and left Prescott behind. ‘Fasten your safety-belts,' he said.

It was five miles to Miltondale, through the populated gullies and along the creek road and through the State Forest where no one lived.

Stevie trudged through the gate, sweating profusely and swearing to himself.

Stevie didn't swear much. He knew two or three words that he mistakenly believed to be terribly wicked, and when he was really mad with the world or its inhabitants he muttered them over and over again, taking great care that no grown-up overheard him. After all, he was rarely so mad with the world that he wanted to suffer for it.

He plodded round the house, too tired even to swing a kick at the invitation of an empty can, banged through the screen door, and shouted: ‘I hate you, Pippa Buckingham. Why didn't you wait for me?'

Pippa didn't answer.

‘That old Gramps Fairhall is a creep. Sendin' me off for Peter on a wild-goose chase and then not givin' me a ride home. He said he was goin' to give me a ride home.'

Pippa didn't answer.

‘Where are you? G'arn. Answer me, Pippa.'

The house creaked to the heat and groaned to the wind, and no one answered.

‘Don't be mean, Pippa. Where are you?'

Stevie wandered from room to room, a little cautiously, because he thought Pippa might jump out to frighten him. She didn't.

‘Gee whiz. She's not here. Where is she? Where's Pippa?'

The only living thing in the house was the cat, and it was asleep, stretched out full length on the foot of Julie's bed.

‘Where's she gone?'

He returned to the back step and yelled her name across the garden. There was nothing out there either, except the carpets drying in the sun.

He poured himself a glass of ginger beer from a bottle in the refrigerator and took a handful of biscuits from the jar on the pantry shelf and sat down to deal with them.

He didn't mind being on his own when he was outside playing, or down in the gully looking for worms or tadpoles, or running errands, but that wasn't like being alone in an empty house. An empty house was nasty, because it felt empty, surrounded him with emptiness. Emptiness was queer.

What had happened to Pippa? Where had she gone? She was supposed to come home to help him bring the carpets inside and to put water in the spouts and to fill up all the buckets and things and put them round the house and to listen for the telephone and to have breakfast. Pippa was mean.

For the first time the sound of the wind began to worry Stevie. It rattled the windowpanes and scraped the branches of the silver birch trees against the roof and caused all sorts of different noises in all sorts of different places.

‘Gee,' said Stevie.

There was a wireless on top of the fridge. He switched it on to drown out the other noises. But the dial didn't light up.

‘Bloomin' old thing,' he said, and started singing to himself, the way his mother did when she was particularly unhappy.

Gramps was stopped twice along the creek road before he reached the State Forest, once by another policeman, once by an army sergeant. To their questions he stated his case bluntly, with suitable epithets directed against those who on any pretext would delay his errand of mercy. It was not only to Peter that Gramps was a menacing character. Something in his bulk, some quality of his immense voice, intimidated people, and each time he was allowed to proceed. At the edge of the forest, where smoke was so low that it swirled through the trees, the army sergeant said, ‘No one's come through here in twenty minutes. We've had a stream of people from Miltondale and they've stopped coming. It's bound to be risky.'

‘It's my risk,' boomed Gramps.

‘What about your passengers?'

Gramps glanced at the boys. ‘Well?' he said.

‘I've got faith in you, sir,' said Harry.

‘Yeh,' said Wallace.

And they did have. Gramps had impressed them tremendously. They would have driven with him through a brick wall if his continued contempt for visible forms of danger had assured them it was possible. And Gramps was not blind to the danger now. He was not so short-sighted that the gloom and the smoke and the nervousness of other people escaped his attention. He set the nose of his car into the forest and put his foot down with three miles of heaven knew what lying between him and Miltondale.

He roared into the forest with his headlights on and with the speedometer on fifty. He knew every turn of the road like the back of his hand, knew every rise and every dip. He had pushed vehicles along this road for more than forty years; he had driven horse-carts over it when it had been a track full of pot-holes and ridges. More often than not he traversed it in perfect safety without a conscious memory of having observed a single foot of it. That was how he drove now, at a far higher speed than a man of superior vision would have dared, unaware of what passed him by, except gloom and eerie glow and random shafts of sunlight and the gothic arch of the tall timber through which he rushed.

Wallace and Harry were aware of other things; Wallace of the heat, of the smoke-laden air that sometimes made him cough, of the sheer excitement of an apparent race against time, of the dimness ahead and the blur of the road, and of Harry sitting tensely and precariously on the edge of the back seat with the extremities of his safety-belt barely meeting at the clasp, and with his right hand closed over the sick man's shoulder. Harry's feelings went deeper than impressions, they went straight to questions. Why was the road deserted? Why was there smoke without fire? Where was the fire, for the heat was such that it could have been the blast from an oven thrown open? Was it that the fire upwind was so vast and so widespread that heat went everywhere before it like dragon's breath?

Gramps's voice intruded suddenly. ‘Wind up the windows! Jump to it!'

It was the voice of command, and their hands leapt to obey. Then they saw flames to the right, flames at tree-top height exploding like surf on rocks: waves of flame, torrents of flame, flames spraying in fragments, in thousands of pieces, in flaring leaves and twigs that rained on to the road in a storm of fire. It was upon them in seconds, or they had come upon it so swiftly that there was no turning from it: no time to turn, no chance to turn, no place to turn.

Wallace cried out, not conscious of his voice or of his words, conscious only of the appalling magnitude of what he saw and of what he was certain was about to engulf him. It was as if the sky, aflame, was about to fall and smother him in clouds of fire, yet he sensed beside him the big man with a mouthful of bared teeth shouting things like, ‘God', ‘Mother of God', ‘Hold on, boy', ‘Courage, boy'. And Gramps went into it with his foot to the floor because there was nothing else he could do, and Harry went into it screaming the only prayer that could break through his terror: ‘Gentle Jesus meek and mild...' The car straddled the centre line; it was the thin white line that Gramps clung to; that rolled and swayed beneath him in excess of sixty miles an hour; that was his anchor to the earth, for everything else was swirling fire and smoke and invisibility and stifling heat, fearful heat, that consumed the very air he breathed. His lungs felt that they would burst, and his senses swam, and the thin white line began to wander and wobble, and he knew he was going to lose it, he knew that it was going to get away from him, and in panic he touched the brakes.

Instantly he lost the line. It vanished. He didn't know whether it had gone to his left or his right, and the smoke was as dense as a fog, and his tyres were squealing, scorching rubber sliding on bitumen. He felt the change from hard surface to loose surface, from sealed surface to the gravel at the side of the road. In that moment the car struck the bank side-on and spun.

Twice more the car struck the bank, first tail on, then head on; then it stopped.

10

Peter

Harry was stunned. For a time he barely realized that he was alive. Then little by little he began to understand that his safety-belt had held; that Lorna's father, secured to the seat scarcely less awkwardly than he, had changed position but had not been dislodged; and that Wallace and Gramps Fairhall still sat in the front almost as if they had gone to sleep.

Though the fire still roared, there seemed to be an odd silence. The engine of the car had stopped, and the heat was almost unimaginable. What was outside Harry didn't know. All the glass in the car, except one side panel, had cracked, perhaps from the impact, perhaps from the heat. The windscreen was quite opaque, a crazed mass, and the door handles were almost too hot to touch. But Harry had to have air; it didn't matter what sort of air; he had to have it. He snatched at the handle and kicked the door open.

He stumbled to the road into an extraordinary world of blacks and greys and tongues of fire. It was like a black and white photograph of enormous proportions, in the midst of which candles burned mysteriously. It was a creaking and cracking and rending world superimposed upon a thunderous background roar. It was a world of wraiths and ghosts and changing shapes, of fantastic forms fashioned from smoke. It was a world of acrid odours, of strange smells and sensations, terrifyingly unreal, but a world becoming cooler, for the monster had swept over it and gone bellowing into the depths of the forest. It left behind it a hundred thousand tiny fires in the boughs and branches of seared trees and in the undergrowth, thousands of tiny fires that flaked off from the heights and fell through masses of foliage stiff and pale and dehydrated, millions of sparks that scattered on the wind, and legions of tiny dead creatures. Snakes and lizards and feathered creatures and furred creatures were strewn the length of the road or lay buried in the forest ashes.

Harry saw this grotesque world but scarcely comprehended it, for he saw it through a mist. It was a mist of salty tears that welled from his smarting eyes, a mist of coughing and confusion and nausea. He was sick where he stood. He was sick until each contraction of his muscles was like the turn of a knife. Then he stood blankly, unseeing, swaying, swallowing air and smoke and vapours in great gulps, groaning and shuddering in his bones; and suddenly, with startling clarity, questioning whether he alone had survived.

He was not alone. Gramps had Wallace sitting at the side of the road, bending the boy by the trunk, forcing his head between his knees, and all four doors of the car were flung open. The paint on the car was blistered; the rear end, the front end, and one side were partly crushed; and twin tracks of black on the bitumen and sweeping marks in the gravel defined the path the skid had taken.