Draw the Brisbane Line (15 page)

‘Can’t we just merge back into the southbound?  Someone would let us back in.’ She had to resist turning the end of the statement into a question, and a grasping one at that.

‘If we tried to merge back into that traffic?  And if we succeeded?  I guarantee you there’ll be at least two or three people in range with firearms who would see our re-joining of the stream as cutting in line, and they’d take offence.’

‘What?’ Tait said.  ‘A couple of farmers might take pot-shots at us with their twenty-twos?’

‘Farmers they might be,’ Banksia said.  ‘But they’re really pissed-off farmers.  Our friend Jim back there?  Plenty more like him around.’

‘What, you think there are QTA among that lot?’

‘They’re bloody everywhere my boy.  And a lot of them are carrying a damn sight more firepower than a couple of twenty-twos.  So, who knows a prayer for not being killed while driving down the wrong side of a highway during a mass exodus?’

‘I know the one that starts
now I lay me down to sleep
,’ Tait said.

Jenny shared a look with Banksia.  Was he being serious?  He seemed too young and attractive and healthy to have a properly-formed sense of irony.

‘Right,’ she said, and shifted into drive.  ‘Let’s just skip the prayer and get this over with.’

With the road clear as far as they could see, Banksia rolled the car into the passing lane and then accelerated slightly to take them to the shoulder.  They drove forward at about sixty kilometres-per-hour, which on the big wide empty highway felt little better than walking.  Tait wanted them to move faster, averse to swimming upstream when the downstream-bound fish were thundering lumps of death-steel, and Jenny shared his sentiment on that one.  Banksia argued that if another car did approach from the other direction, they might all want as much time as possible to work out who was going to go where. ‘I don’t plan on having to side-step anyone at the last second,’ Banksia said.

Jenny spotted a small gap in the trees not more than fifty metres away.  ‘There,’ she said.  ‘Is that it?’

‘Looks like it,’ she said brightly, and then snuffed out the sunshine with a deep frown.  ‘Oh, come on man, you must be shitting me.’

Jenny felt the rumble before she saw anything.  She turned to see a big white semi bearing down on them, half in their lane and half the middle lane and heading the same stupid wrong way.  Its lights flashed them, and it showed no signs of slowing, let alone stopping.

‘Why isn’t he slowing down?’ Jenny said, having to raise my voice over the growing grumble.

‘Maybe his brakes are gone,’ Tait said.

‘Maybe he’s just a homicidal thundercunt,’ Banksia said.  ‘And, fabulous, here comes his mate the other way, just in time for some Range Rover pancakes.’

Another white semi was coming at them fast in the passing lane.  If they had to move into the gap left in the middle lane by the two trucks, Jenny had a feeling that Banksia would be right about the whole Range Rover pancake thing.  While the oncoming truck seemed to be keeping mostly to his lane, the prick behind them was all over the road.

‘Hold on kids,’ Banksia said.  ‘We’re going to have to thread the needle.’

‘We’re what?’ Jenny said.

‘Strewth crikey bloody bollocks!  We’re about to squeeze through a gap tighter than a croc’s arsehole!’

‘Oh right,’ she said, her voice little more than a whimper.  ‘Thanks.’

She wanted to say, wait.  She wanted to say, why don’t we just speed up, match the semi’s pace and let him past when it’s safe, then turn back and get onto the side road headed the
right
direction?  She wanted to say that, but all that came out was a weak
hnhhh
.  She realised, as she looked at Banksia’s face, that it wouldn’t matter what she said, because Banksia was
loving
this.  She tried to project a stony expression, Jenny recognised the deliberate jaw-setting and cheek-biting — but her eyes, they were blazing with glee.  Jenny was pressed back into the warm leather seat as the Range Rover accelerated at a rate the LFA could have easily beaten, though not with Jenny at the wheel.  The semi was barely metres behind, blasting them with a foghorn as it threatened to bumper-kiss them into oblivion, and the approaching northbound beast didn’t appear to be any more friendly, blinding them with high beams just in case they were still able to see.

Banksia tossed aside any pretext of sombre fear as she let out a squeal of glee.  She was standing on the accelerator when she wrenched the wheel hard to the right and sent them bouncing up over the shoulder and down a sudden drop.  It was a blessing, Jenny supposed, that with the thundering engines and booming horns and blinding lights and Tait screaming
Our Fathers
in the back seat, her brain had gone into sensory overload and short circuited any attempt on her part to think or to panic.  They plummeted down a seemingly vertical drop, and her unborn foetus climbed into her throat as if it were trying to eject to safety.  As they levelled out, the back end of the Range Rover clipped the side of a big gum, but the car’s trajectory barely altered as they rocketed along a track barely wide enough to hold them.

A track barred by a large log, less than twenty metres further along.

More disturbing was that Banksia’s glee seemed to double.

Nero didn’t see who was in the black Range Rover, and he didn’t give a filthy shit.  When they finally lifted their pace, he shouted to the empty cab of the semi, ‘About fucking time!’  He picked up his speed to match the car, and he would have kept doing so, but then the shiny suburban tractor disappeared.

‘Whathefuck?’

For one absurd moment, he thought he might have passed right over the top of it.  Then he saw the trail of dust in his wing mirror disappearing into the scrub, and he caught the briefest glimpse of what appeared to be a thin dirt track.

‘Crazy fuckers,’ he said aloud.

His body was a big sweaty pain sack, but the drugs helped lighten some of the heaviest injuries.  He knew the name of each man who’d taken their turn at him with a boot or a fist or a broken bottle, and he had all those names lined up in a ledger in his head.  They were all in the red, weren’t they just?

He kept his foot pressed hard to the floor, the needle ticking past one-forty, one-fifty.  If he had to turn sharply for any reason he was a dead man, but he had to get to Brisbane before all those backstabbing pricks did.  They had a solid head-start on him, but if they were still on their bikes, as he expected they would be, they shouldn’t be too far ahead of him now.  The constant refuelling alone would have slowed them by hours, and if they stuck to the southbound highway, he must be almost right on top of them.  He scanned the glinting gridlock for signs of movement.  He saw the occasional trail-bike, but so far no hogs.  Still, he sensed he was close.  The short grey hairs bristling on his scalp told him so.

Every time he shifted position in the seat, some wounds re-opened, scabs cracked and flaked, bruised muscles throbbed with thick blood.  His tongue kept finding the gap where an eye tooth used to be, not twenty-four hours ago.  That had been Blinky’s work with his bloody brass knuckles, now a damn sight more bloody if he hadn’t washed them since Moranbah.

Blinky, the treacherous little shit.

He’d regained consciousness out on his front lawn with flies covering his face and the sun tanning his skin to tight leather.  Something nearby was burning, but he couldn’t stretch his focus beyond his own skin.  He couldn’t remember making his way outside, he must have done it in the midst of the beating.  The pain in his body told him to stay where he was and wait for an ambulance, but he told that pain to fuck right off as he dragged himself to the house and in through the open front door.  He had to pause twice along the way to vomit, and he fancied he saw his own swallowed tooth in the first puddle.  He came close to blacking out several times, but he managed to make it to the bathroom, where he found the first-aid kit.  He ignored the paracetamol and ibuprofen and codeine and brushed past the prescription painkillers and finally came out with what he needed. A small bottle of morphine and a disposable hypodermic.  It took all his strength and concentration to get that fine needle through the top of the bottle, and he probably blunted it some around the rim, but any additional pain that rough injection brought would have been lost in the noise.

He felt the effects almost immediately.  Before the drug could dull his senses, he dragged himself out to the shed where he kept a small package of cocaine.  He rarely used the stuff, hadn’t touched it in years, but he needed it now.  He took a snort straight out of the open bag and lit fireworks in his head.

He packed the coke and some more morphine and needles into an old black gym bag.  From beneath his bed, he pulled a Sig Sauer nine millimetre and a sawn-off twelve-gauge and a plastic shopping bag full of ammunition for both, then went looking for his car.  He soon found it, charred and twisted and still carrying a big enough fire to cook on out the front of the house.  No matter, he needed something bigger if he was going to chase those stupid fuckers down before they got to Lily.  Dumb bastards, it was bad enough they left him alive, but to leave him with weapons and medication was tantamount to suicide.  In his mind, they were already dead.

He wandered through the streets for all of ten minutes before he found what he was looking for, a big white semi-trailer, unlocked and holding close to a full tank of petrol.  No keys, but that was no real obstacle.  The driver had either pissed off in something else, or was dead somewhere.  As he drove the big rig through the streets towards the highway, he began to suspect the latter.  Fires burned freely through houses and shops, and the day was filled with the screams of every kind of siren.

He had to mount the curb a few times to bypass traffic accidents blocking the road, but he eventually made it to the highway, leaving the flickering daytime glow of Moranbah behind him.  He took another snort from the bag of coke and planted his foot to the floor as he climbed up the gears.

And now, he just about had them, he could feel it.  It would be close, Brisbane not more than an hour or two away, but he thought he’d get to them.  If he wasn’t killed in a head-on collision.

He leaned into the steering wheel and willed the big rig to go faster.  Through his swollen lids, he glimpsed a flash of movement in the southbound lanes ahead, and he knew right away that they were Bush Rangers hogs.

‘Got you now, you fuckers,’ he hissed with a broken whisper.

The big engine beneath him roared.  Then it coughed.

Then it died.

Dave and Papetti slowed to a crawl as they tried to sneak down the fast lane past the burning wreckage outside of Newcastle.  The heat rolling off the flaming lorry pulled the skin tight around Dave’s eyes, and any moisture in his face instantly evaporated.  The Humvee scraped the guardrail with a nerve-grating squeal.  Dozens of camera-phones from the clogged artery of the southbound lanes captured their painful passage.

‘No need to pull that face,’ Papetti said.  ‘Ain’t no vanity plates on this bitch.’

‘Ain’t
any
,’ he said.

‘Fuck you.’  She side-punched him lightly on the arm.

They cleared the wreckage — a jack-knifed semi-trailer, two crumpled hatchbacks and a dusty old Pajero leaning too far and too low at one corner, the semi burning bright and pumping out thick clouds of grey-black smoke — and pulled over to the left.  She flicked on the headlights and the hazard lights before unbuckling her seatbelt.

‘What’s this, you going to render assistance?’ he said.

‘I’m curious to see what kind of shape that SUV’s in.’

‘You thinking of switching rides?’

‘I’m thinking if he has no use for what’s left in the fuel tank, then we do.’

‘Wow, that’s cold.’

‘That’s practical.’

She was right, but to Dave it still felt wrong.  He knew they had to find Jenny, and he was more than willing to take whatever action was necessary to achieve that, but he couldn’t help wondering what Clary White would have to say about this.  Should he put on a hat and dark glasses and hope nobody recognises him?

He stepped down out of the Humvee and followed Papetti to the small gathering at the roadside.  Two women huddled together, one squat and solid in a stretched white t-shirt, the other taller and vaguely avian, both of them sobbing and awkwardly and clutching one another.  A man with an etched wooden face, framed by incongruous blonde curls, stood apart from them, glaring at their approach.  If he were a dog, Dave thought, he’d be growling at them.  He stood apart from the women, grim-faced, like he was a highway cop and he’d just pulled them over for speeding.  Across the highway divider, the southbound stream rumbled and muttered and emitted regular
ch-chick
sounds as camera phones snapped shots.

He guessed the women were from the hatchbacks.  The man looked like a farmer dressed in his city best, stiff navy trousers and a white shirt with a plain blue tie knotted too small and tightly at the collar, the way he might have worn it as a schoolboy.  He had to be the Pajero’s owner.

‘That your truck?’ Papetti said to the man as she approached the group.

‘That’s my
vee-hicle
,’ he said to her, mocking her accent. ‘What’s it to ya?’

Ch-chick.  Ch-chick
.

‘Looks like you did an axle,’ she said.

‘Crazy bastard was coming the wrong way down the highway, must’ve been going at about one-fifty.’  He nodded at the trio of women.  ‘They were in front of me, basically caused the accident by swerving all over the road.’

‘We did
not
,’ one of the women said in a wet sob.  ‘He was coming right for us!  He was mad!’

‘Well he’s dead now,’ the man called back at them, ‘So you’ve nothing to worry about, do you?’  In a lower voice to Papetti, he added, ‘I took a peek, half the guy’s head is smeared on the windscreen.’

‘What happened to you then?’ Papetti said.

The man sighed and rubbed at his eyes.  He seemed disappointed that Papetti hadn’t balked at the imagery.  ‘I was at the rear.  We all cleared the truck as it went over, but these chooks decided to create their own little pile-up.  I had to brake hard and turn sharp to try and avoid them, I guess it was just too much for the axle to bear.  Just outside the warranty too, wouldn’t ya fucken know it.’

Papetti waited for the man to finish before saying, ‘Diesel?’

He squinted at her.  ‘Excuse me?’

‘Does your car take diesel?’

He twisted the corners of his mouth and wiped his palm on the hip of his trousers.  ‘Don’t see how that’s any of your business.’

‘Come on mate,’ Dave said.  ‘It’s not like you’re going to use it.’

Ch-chick.  Ch-chick.

‘Maybe not in that thing,’ he said.  ‘But it’s fuel.  Gunna be a big shortage of the stuff real soon.’

‘Which is why we need it?’ Papetti said, the
duh
cutting through her tone.

‘You’re not gettin my fuel,’ he said, and tried to stretch his spine up a couple more inches.  ‘What are you ridin with the US Army for anyway?’ he said to Dave.  ‘Gotta say I’m curious about that.  What’s our
beloved
Dave Holden doing ridin shotgun with GI Jane?’

One of the women broke off from her sobbing.  ‘Are you Dave Holden?’

Ch-chick.  Ch-chick.

Dave tried to ignore the question.  They already had a captive audience recording their every move and expression, and if possible, he wanted to keep those expressions out of the tabloids.

‘Mate, I’d really appreciate it if you could just let us siphon off some of your diesel.  Here, I can pay you.’  He pulled out his wallet and counted out four fifties.  ‘Two hundred do you?’

He snorted.  ‘That money’s not worth much to me, not where I’m going.’

‘And where would that be, Curly?’ Papetti said.

‘Where do you think?  Up to the Brisbane Line.’

‘Is that some kind of local slang?  What does it mean?’

‘No slang,’ Curly said.  ‘It’s the line you Yank bastards have drawn up to say fuck Queensland.’

Papetti put the heel of her left hand to her eyes.  Her right hand, Dave couldn’t help noticing, stayed close to the holster on her hip, fingertips brushing the black nylon.  ‘I’m not going to feign interest or comprehension of any of that, Shirley Temple.  What I am going to do right now is go back to my vehicle and get a hose and a jerry can.  Then I’m going to fill it with the diesel sitting useless in your broken truck.’

‘And Mr Tennis Australia is gunna pay me, is he?’

She shrugged.  ‘Up to him.  I couldn’t give a shit either way.’

Ch-chick.  Ch-chick.  Ch-chick.

Curly looked up to the blue sky and squinted.  Dave thought, this must be his thinking pose.  He wiped his hand against his hip , just the right hand.  When he finally lowered his gaze back to them he wore a dirty smirk which reminded Dave of a schoolyard bully who’s just decided on a particularly nasty course of fuckery.

‘Fine,’ he said.  ‘You can take some of my fuel.’

‘Thank you,’ Papetti said, and began to move off to the Humvee.

‘As payment, I’ll take Holden.’