Fear Is the Rider (9 page)

‘As fast as you can!' shouted Shaw. He pulled the shotgun out from behind Katie and thrust the barrel over the back of the seat pointing towards the rear window. He had some idea of firing through the rear window if the chance arose. There was no dust now they were on top of the gibber ridges and he could see the Land Cruiser clearly enough to distinguish the bull bars and the headlights and pitted and mud-smeared windscreen.

The Land Cruiser was still clearing the gibbers easily, running along the wheel ruts much faster than the Honda.

The stones were rattling against the underside of the Honda in a continuous roar. Shaw had to put his mouth close to Katie's ear and shout to make himself heard.

‘Go faster, he's catching up!'

‘I can't hold it on the ridges!'

‘The faster you go the easier it'll be. Go into third.'

Katie slipped into third gear and the speedometer rose to eighty.

‘Foot down!' yelled Shaw.

He had been right even though he'd only been guessing: the faster the Honda sped over the gibbers the easier it was to control.

A hundred kilometres an hour.

‘Go into top!'

At a hundred and twenty the Honda almost glided over the gibbers, and the tyres stopped spinning the stones so frequently against the underside. It seemed almost quiet inside the car as it raced away from the Land Cruiser until the pursuing vehicle became a featureless mass, then a blur, then a column of dust above the heat haze.

The desert is many different worlds. There is stone. Then sand. Then rock. Then the strange lines of scrub where the ancient soaks run. The only constant is the immense isolation. The isolation and the eternal killing sun.

The outcrop of rock appeared ahead of them at first like a group of buildings.

‘There's a town!' said Shaw.

‘There can't be. It's something else.'

As the Honda rode across the gibbers plain the rocks were revealed for what they were, a semi-mountainous, enigmatic outcrop rising high above the desert level. The track wound through the rock, winding and twisting, at times barely wide enough to take a motor vehicle. On either side the rock, red and white, rose high above the roof of the Honda. The surface of the track was hard, almost solid rock, but the Honda was travelling slowly as Katie took the hard turns in the track.

‘We could stop him here,' said Shaw.

‘Stop him?'

‘Find some point in these rocks where he can't ram us and wait for him with the shotgun.'

‘Kill him?' She seemed to have forgotten that only minutes before she had made the same suggestion.

‘Kill him. Of course I'd bloody well kill him. Look, try that.'

There was a natural cleft in the rock walls lining the track. It was about fifty metres deep and twenty wide, littered with boulders.

‘Stop!' said Shaw.

Katie stopped.

‘If we went in there, got the car behind one of those rocks, then got on top, when he comes after us he'll have to go very slowly or come on foot. If we wait up there,' he gestured at a side of the rock walls, ‘we could kill him whether he's in the truck or not. You've seen what this thing can do at close range.'

‘But…'

‘But nothing.'

‘The hotel…'

‘One blown tyre and he's got us. Here we can fight him.'

‘Where is he?'

They looked east. There was a distant disturbance in the heat haze. It had to be dust.

‘Ten minutes behind us, fifteen,' said Shaw. ‘We've got two chances if we stay in there. He might go past us, then we can cut back to Yogabilla. If he comes in after us we'll get a shot at him at close range.'

‘But the hotel…'

‘We could be anything up to three-quarters of an hour away from the hotel even if nothing goes wrong,' said Shaw impatiently. ‘This bloody car's falling apart under us. And we get to this hotel…we don't even know what's there…who's there, what it's like. Here we have a chance of killing him, of getting past him.'

Katie, young, civilised, in danger of death for the first time, tried to access the probabilities.

‘He might…' she faltered.

‘He might do anything,' said Shaw with sudden authority. ‘Drive in there. Get the car in between those boulders, he can't ram us there.'

Katie waited a moment then drove the car into the deep cleft. At the end of it, where the rock wall rose high and impassable, was a litter of boulders. She nosed the Honda in among them, scraping the sides. There was a way out on the other side of the boulders where the car could be driven back to the track, but while it stayed within the barricade of stone there was no way the Land Cruiser could ram it.

‘Right,' said Shaw. ‘Keep the motor running.' He turned the air-conditioning on. ‘We've got a few minutes. We'll stay here and cool off. Have a drink.' He reached over for the water container and they both drank, deeply and slowly this time.

‘Wait there,' said Shaw. ‘I'm going up on the rock.'

He left the car, carrying the shotgun, and easily clambered up the broken rock face on the side of the cleft. It was about ten metres high and from the top he could see back across the desert for what seemed an infinite distance.

The Land Cruiser was there at the edge of the heat haze, a small speck at the head of the turbulence.

Shaw could feel the heat beating up at him from the rock and down on him from the sun. Two hours it took to kill, the policeman had said; he could wait here for fifteen minutes.

Katie was out of the car.

‘I'm coming up!' she called.

She was as well off with him as in the car, Shaw thought.

‘Soak something in water, some towels or shirts or something,' he said. ‘We'll need something over our heads.'

‘Have we got enough water?'

‘Plenty. Use that yellow tank in the back and fill the water container. Bring that with you.'

Katie found two towels in the back of the Honda and soaked them in water. The drinking container was half empty and she filled it from the yellow tank, holding the two vessels awkwardly together and spilling water on the floor of the car.

‘Will I leave the motor running?' she called.

‘No. Turn it off if you're coming up.' They would either have plenty of time to get away or no time at all. The motor might overheat if it were left running while the car wasn't moving.

It was an easy climb up the side of the rock and Katie was beside Shaw in moments. He took one of the towels from her and wrapped it around his head. She did the same. The top of the rock was irregular and they could lie down hidden from sight on the plain below. The rock surface was unbearably hot against the exposed parts of their legs.

‘What are you going to do?' Katie was whispering. She didn't know why.

‘It depends on what he does.' Shaw found he was whispering too. Neither looked at the other. Both kept staring at the dark, rapidly growing blur ahead of the now clearly visible funnel of dust.

‘If by any chance he just goes past we'll get back in the car and head for Yogabilla. He'll think we're ahead of him. If he stops and comes in here'—Shaw gestured down to the cleft where the Honda was almost hidden from the track—‘I'll try to shoot him. Even if I just blast his tyre out, it'll stop him.'

The towels around their heads were almost dry. Shaw took the water container and poured water over Katie's head and his own.

The Land Cruiser was materialising rapidly. They could see outlines of the roll bars, and the bull bars, and the spotlight on the front of the radiator looking like a malevolent single eye even in the sunlight.

‘He'll be here in a few minutes,' said Katie.

‘Keep your head down.' Shaw broke open the shotgun, took two cartridges from his shirt pocket and inserted them in the barrels. He closed the barrel and cocked both the hammers.

‘The trouble is, I don't know how far away this thing is effective,' he said. ‘Obviously close up it's murder. If, by the grace of God, he comes close enough I'll blow his head off…but…'

‘He can't get us up here anyway,' said Katie. ‘We can kill him if he tries to climb up after us.'

Shaw felt the towel, again almost dry around his head. There was little need for anyone who wanted to kill to climb up after them. All he needed was to wait for the sun to do it. But with any luck it wouldn't happen that way. He might go past. Or he might drive into the cleft and try to destroy the Honda. The Honda, glinting brightly silver through the caking dust that covered it, was not ten metres below them. Surely the shotgun would kill a man at that distance.

The two of them lay there, tiny figures on the immenseness of the rock, tinier still in the immensity of the desert spread around them in millions of square kilometres. And tiny too, but growing larger and larger and filling the horizons of their minds was the Land Cruiser, rolling along the track bearing a strange death in its metal frame.

They could see it quite clearly now: brown, metallic and menacing. In their minds, the machine itself had become the enemy; whoever, whatever was driving it, was an integral part of the vehicle. They watched the dust cloud dwindle as the Land Cruiser started up the rocky slope to the broken range where they were hiding. They could hear its labouring motor in the stillness of the desert.

‘Any moment now,' said Shaw and shifted the gun in his hands, his finger near the triggers but careful not to touch them.

Then the Land Cruiser stopped.

Almost a hundred metres away, well down the slope from the rock on which they were lying, it stopped in full view.

‘He's stopped,' said Katie, dully.

They waited. Waited for the Land Cruiser to move. For the driver to get out. For something, for anything to happen.

But nothing happened.

The Land Cruiser stayed where it was in the middle of the track and there was no movement in it or near it. It was as though it were an abandoned vehicle.

Only a dozen kite hawks wheeling endlessly in the sky above them disturbed the deep immobility of the desert. The heat was surrounding them, from above, from the rock, enveloping them like a molten shroud.

‘He knows we're here,' whispered Katie.

‘He couldn't.'

‘Then why isn't he coming on?'

‘He couldn't know we stopped. There's no dust on these rocks. He can't know we've stopped.'

They waited and watched the Land Cruiser.

It didn't move.

‘If he knows the country,' said Katie, ‘he'd have been waiting for the dust to start again on the other side of these rocks. He's knows we're waiting for him.'

‘But he doesn't know we've got a gun.'

‘Doesn't he?'

‘How could he?'

‘He could have seen us pick it up. He wasn't that far behind.'

Shaw didn't answer. He couldn't remember how far the Land Cruiser was behind when they'd picked up the gun.

‘Shoot him from here,' said Katie.

‘Too far away.'

‘How do you know? Shoot. Try it.' Her voice broke.

‘It's too far. I think.'

‘You think! You think!' Katie screamed. ‘Give the bloody thing to me!'

She took the weapon from his unresisting hands. He didn't want to let her have it, but he didn't know how to stop her.

She knelt, pointed the gun at the truck and pulled against the trigger. Both barrels went off almost simultaneously and Katie was knocked sideways by the recoil.

The blasting double roar of the barrels broke the desert silence like a stone breaking a pane of glass. Then the silence fell again and the truck was still there and there was no sign of where the shot had landed.

‘It's too far.'

Katie regained her balance and knelt again. Tears were running down her cheeks.

‘Dear Christ,' she said, ‘I shouldn't have done that.'

Shaw gently took the gun from her.

‘It doesn't matter. He wasn't coming up anyway. It's probably just as well to let him know we have the gun. He might keep away from us.' He didn't believe it but he wanted the girl to forgive herself for firing the gun.

They waited and watched the Land Cruiser. The sun had completely dried the towels around their heads now.

‘We might as well get out of here,' said Shaw. ‘He's only going to wait there until we move. We can't wait in the sun any longer.'

‘Can we get out of there before he gets up the hill?'

‘Easily,' said Shaw. ‘We can leave him behind easily enough. We'll make for the hotel. This was a mistake.'

‘I shouldn't have fired,' said Katie.

‘Forget it. Come on. Let's get on before the bloody sun kills us.'

He broke the barrel of the shotgun and slid down the side of the rock. Katie grabbed the water container and followed. The Honda was hot and both gasped as Shaw started the engine. He had to move slowly through the boulders and it took him longer than he thought it would to drive out of the cleft back to the track. He was just turning to the left when the Land Cruiser came surging over the crest, its roll bars almost scraping the rock face on either side of the track.

But in the winding valley of rock on the hard surface the little car was much more manoeuvrable, and quickly drew ahead. Then they came down off the rock and onto the gibber, and Shaw, track-wise now, drove fast and straight onto the ridges and, with the wheels straddling the shifting stones, spurted up to a hundred, a hundred and twenty, and pulled far ahead of the Land Cruiser.

The air-conditioning was on but there seemed to be all the power they needed in the engine and the cool draught of air on their faces and bodies was like a caress. The towels they'd used around their heads were on the seats beside them, bone dry.

They didn't speak. Shaw's hands were white with the strain of holding the steering wheel as the front wheels writhed in the grip of the gibbers.