Carrier (13 page)

‘Lena,' he seized me by my arms and shook me a little, ‘this is… I can't tell you how good this is…it's…' His eyes widened as a thought struck him. ‘Let's go hunting,
now
.' He let go of my arms and messed my hair up; it was a brotherly-type gesture of affection that had me grinning all the way back to the cave where I grabbed my slingshot from my backpack.

‘What if that car returns?' I said, eying our open environment under broad daylight.

Patrick raised his arm and pointed ahead. ‘If we stick around there, to the left, where there's lots of bushland, there's no chance of anybody spotting us, car or not. And any vehicle, no matter how big, won't be able to drive through brush so thick. Plus, if we're lucky…' He grinned. ‘There'll be rabbits in there.'

‘Right, let's go then.' I started towards the bushes, which were a kilometre or so away. It was nice to have the sun's warm rays on my skin, the open land before us, and not a fence to be seen. My heart raced with anticipation of my first hunt out in the wild. This is one of the main reasons why I had left Desert Downs, to hunt freely like this.

As we came to the outskirts of the bushes, I crouched down low and Patrick followed. I figured he deserved first dibs and offered him my slingshot. He took it and selected a small round stone from the ground directly beneath us, the spectacles sliding down his nose before he pushed them back up with his index finger. We crept further in and remained low, shrubs closing in on us, creating a small cocoon where together we watched and waited.

The air was still. I could hear my own heartbeat throbbing and wondered if Patrick could hear it too, but I figured his must be even louder. Sweat beaded his forehead; he was breathing short, hard breaths, anticipating his first catch.

I felt the vibrations before I saw it.

A dusty brown rabbit came twitching into view. It stopped at a large pile of droppings in a clearing beyond the scrub and sniffed at the air. There he proceeded to twitch and sniff and then deposit his own droppings, before twitching and sniffing again. His ears pricked and he froze, most likely sensing us.

Without a word, Patrick drew back the sling, the stone poised between his shaking fingers, before letting it fly.

It whipped past my ears, landing right between the rabbit's eyes. Then, seconds later, when another rabbit came to investigate, approaching her mate precariously, Patrick groped for another stone and shot her, also. She fell back, her hind legs jerking a few times before they stilled. Patrick wasn't lying when he had said that he used to be a good shot.

He swore in triumph and I slapped him on the back and the next thing I knew, Patrick took my face in his hands and pressed a loud, smacking kiss to my cheek before letting me go and taking off to get the rabbits.

Too stunned to move, I remained where I was, my mind lost in a haze of sensations — the brush of his lips against my skin, the sweetness of his breath, the tendril of hair that had tickled my forehead.

‘Sorry. I was just...excited,' he called back at me, laughing and shaking his head.

I rose to my feet and scratched the back of my neck, trying very hard to will away the blush that prickled threateningly in my cheeks.

He thrust the slingshot in my hands and scooped the rabbits up by their ears. ‘Poor buggers,' he said, with a note of sadness in his voice. ‘But they're in a better place now.'

Later, while the rabbits roasted on a spit above a crackling fire, Patrick sat outside, cradling the baby birds to his chest. The way he nursed those birds, the way he rested his head against the outer cave wall and watched his new world through my dad's glasses, made my heart flood with warmth.

It also made me think about that kiss, and how I wouldn't mind another, this time on my lips. I brought my fingers to my lips and touched them as if they were something new I'd only just discovered, and crawled into the cave to tend to the rabbits.

When the rabbits were done, I tore off a couple of pieces of meat and let them rest on a stone to cool. By the time Patrick came in, several minutes later, it was ready to eat.

Patrick stared at the food and smiled. ‘This looks great.'

‘Thanks to your good aim,' I said.

Patrick shrugged, but a small smile curved at the corner of his mouth. ‘Thanks to you for the glasses.'

The meal was quiet and a little awkward. Since our little back-slap and kiss moment, the air between us pulsed with a brand new energy. I avoided eye contact as much as possible, so he couldn't read my embarrassing thoughts, and Patrick kept clearing his throat and taking sips of water from his canteen. Perhaps he too had urges to kiss me on the lips.

The thought kept bringing a rush of heat to my cheeks.

Both of us couldn't finish quickly enough, and as soon as we did, we both traded the intimate, closed atmosphere of the cave for the wide open outdoors.

I sat beneath the branches of a stringybark tree, the air around me completely still while I listened to the various birdcalls echo across the dips and valleys before me. Everything looked golden and promising when painted by the late afternoon sun.

After a few minutes, footsteps crunched behind me and Patrick appeared. He stood in front of me to block the low sun from my eyes.

‘So, I was thinking we leave in around half an hour, before the sun sets. This way we'll have a bit of time until the pitch-black darkness sets in. We need to find the track that leads home before then, and once we do we can follow it blindfolded.' Patrick chewed on his bottom lip and fixed me with a searching look, as if he wondered if I was going to change my mind.

‘I can't wait,' I said, grinning up at him. ‘I'll probably only stay the night, though. I wouldn't want Mum to go completely grey. She'll be stressing enough as it is.'

‘My brothers are going to go nuts.' He grinned and shook his head, the sun giving his brown hair a golden halo. ‘You're their first girl. You'll be treated like a princess.'

After dousing the fire and packing up our meagre supplies, we were finally on our way. I stayed silent in thought while we walked and was surprised when I noticed that darkness had fallen. It was nice to see the night sky without all the grey of the storm clouds blocking it.

Patrick walked by my side, occasionally looking up at the stars as we walked on. We stopped to put on our jackets when the temperature dropped. The birds remained warm and safe, wrapped in Patrick's shirt inside my backpack.

When we moved onto an open track, wide enough for a car to fit through, my skin prickled with goose bumps. But at least it was night and we could hide better than in the daytime.

‘What are you thinking about?' Patrick asked a little while later. His voice cutting through the silence was a relief, relaxing my tense shoulder muscles. Perhaps if we filled the black void of night with conversation, the time would pass quicker.

‘I was just wondering where the person with that car got his fuel from and if they using some kind of home-made fuel. Mum once told me about a car running on fish and chip oil.'

‘Fish and chips?' Patrick laughed softly, the sound echoing across the dark land around us, reminding me how vulnerable we were out here on the track like this. I shivered.

‘I was thinking about that, too — the fuel,' said Patrick. ‘Who knows...maybe there is life out there and the country is getting rebuilt without us knowing, just like you said.' A small, hopeful grin spread across his moonlit face and it was infectious.

‘So, if we discover a rebuilt country, do we agree on ice-cream first?'

‘Definitely, then lots and lots of bread and as much orange juice as we want to drink.' Patrick's words made me lick my lips. We'd been rationing our water and my throat was itching for a drink.

I stopped and took out my canteen and was about to take a sip when I decided to pass it to Patrick first. I knew he'd drunk all of his back in the cave and offering the use of my bottle was my quiet way of letting him know that I trusted him, that I believed him when he said he wasn't a Carrier.

He looked at me with widened eyes glittering in the light of the moon, as if I'd just offered him ice-cream or some amazing treat, before taking a single gulp and handing it back. The whole time his eyes didn't leave mine. In that moment, the pulsing energy we'd shared between us in the cave returned. Our breaths could be heard in the still night air and it felt as if we were standing in a closed room, not the open plains.

When I reached for the bottle, my hand brushed over his and he sighed, in a way that made my stomach flip.

‘Thanks,' he said, before a goofy smile appeared on his face. ‘Maybe, if we ever reach the coast, we'll go to the beach and have a swim.'

‘I'll collect seashells.'

‘We'll catch some fish,' Patrick added. ‘And we'll grill them up and fry some potatoes in hot oil to get them all crispy.'

‘Then we'll use the oil to fuel our car!'

Patrick laughed.

‘And we'll never eat rabbit again.'

‘And they all lived happily ever after. The end,' I said, laughing.

‘Can you hear that?' Patrick stopped laughing all of a sudden and put his arm out to still me, his eyes darting around the clearing.

A low, earthly rumble that grew louder by the second met my ears, and I froze.

A pair of round yellow lights appeared, like monster eyes, several metres ahead. The vehicle's engine screamed as the lights sped towards us, rapidly growing in size.

‘Lena, run!' Patrick grabbed a hold of my sleeve and yanked me off the track and into the bushes. We fell onto a pile of prickly spinifex grass, but both rolled to our feet within seconds.

‘Run! Move!' he shouted above the engine roar. The lights turned in our direction. The car left the path and climbed over the dirt, stones and small twigs pinging and cracking against its metal underside.

My feet, for some reason, seemed to have lost all feeling and no matter how hard I tried to run, the overwhelming fear that we were being chased by the roaring machine seemed to weaken my reflexes and render me paralysed. Luckily, Patrick, who by now had his arm firmly clasped around my waist, dragged me forward.

‘We have to get to thicker bush!' he shouted.

Without turning my head back, I thought of Mum and of the little boys waiting for Patrick, and the idea of neither of us ever seeing them again made me force my feet one in front of the other, until I was running alongside of Patrick, keeping up and not falling over and dragging him down.

‘That way!' Patrick pointed to the left where it was slightly bushier. But as soon as I sprinted towards the area, he went the opposite way, so that the monstrosity roared after him instead. He was sacrificing himself for my safety.

But I wasn't having it. He had six hungry boys waiting at home for him. He had way more to live for than me.

I cut directly across the path of the oncoming vehicle and ran in a diagonal, so as to detour it.

Patrick spun around to watch the vehicle change tack, and although I couldn't hear him above the rumble of the engine, I saw his terror-filled eyes as the car's lights passed over his face.

Forcing my eyes away, I concentrated on pumping my legs, but I knew it was useless to compete against a machine. My thigh muscles burned as I ascended hillier ground and prayed for some kind of incline or hole or even a random patch of shrubs to hide behind.

The ground was rocky beneath my tread-worn sneakers. More than once I slipped and skidded forward, landing on my knees first and then on my face, before scrambling to my feet and running blindly ahead. I'd have hellish bruises to contend with tomorrow — if there was a tomorrow.

As the vehicle closed the distance between us, its headlights lit me a pathway.

Ahead, at the top of the hill lay a cluster of large, rust-coloured boulders about two and a half metres high. I only had to press on for several more metres or so and I could hide behind the boulders and arm myself with my knife or slingshot before whoever was in the car got out — unless they had guns, of course.

The vehicle was so close now, the engine roaring in my ears and rumbling beneath my feet. I thought of Patrick and how he'd tried to sacrifice himself for my safety and pressed forward, and the thought gave me the extra strength I needed to reach the boulders.

My almost tread-less sneakers slapped against the smooth, stony surface of the hilltop, and finally I fell against the closest boulder and threw myself behind it.

While I rooted around in my backpack for my knife and slingshot, a familiar yapping filled my ears.

I peered around the boulder, the bright lights of the motor vehicle near-blinding me as I caught a flash of rusty orange, then another, as it flew toward the car.

‘Charlotte! Emma! Come back here!'

They were howling and yelping at the vehicle that continued to plough up the rocky hill towards me, towards
them
.

‘Come here, now!' I shouted their names again and again, until my throat felt as though it was going to split in two and finally the girls spun around and leapt behind the boulders just in time to miss the vehicle.

I sprang to my feet, and together, we ran down the other side of the hill.

‘Patrick!' I shouted, glancing over my shoulder, the headlights burning my eyes so that stars appeared wherever I looked. The girls yelped and howled while they ran. They'd most likely never seen a motor vehicle in their lives and were probably as scared as I felt.

‘Run, girls, run! Get Mum! Go!' I shouted, hoping and praying that Mum was somewhere nearby with her shotgun ready. If there was ever a time for Mum to unleash her inner commando, it was now.

The car stopped all of a sudden, several metres behind us, its engine humming. If somebody got out of the car right now and gave chase, I wasn't sure I could keep running. The muscles in my thighs had already melted, and my ankle joints were screaming. For several metres I pushed forward, until I stumbled across a lone bush and threw myself behind it, landing on my stomach.