Wildfire (24 page)

Bel stumbled to a halt and he nearly fell over her.

‘What did you do that for?’ she snapped.

‘You’re too heavy,’ Ben gasped. He unclipped the waist harness and Bel half fell forward.

She twisted round and looked at him, furious. Her red hair was nearly black with sweat and soot. In fact most of her was. ‘Don’t be so rude.’

‘It’s that jacket. You’ll have to take it off.’ With one
hand he yanked the jacket off her shoulders, then saw her boots.

‘Take those off too,’ he said, pointing. ‘They must weigh five pounds each! Jesus, Mum, you picked a hell of a time to give up wearing sandals.’

‘Take off my boots?’ said Bel. ‘Have you gone mad?’

‘Yes, and take mine off too. Otherwise we won’t be able to get airborne.’

She knelt down, obviously not convinced he was entirely sane.

‘Try and do it sometime today,’ shouted Ben.

‘There’s a petrol station over there and it’s about to blow.’

‘There’s no need for sarcasm,’ she said. But the thought of an exploding petrol station obviously persuaded her. She undid his bootlaces, grumbling, ‘I haven’t done this to you since you were three years old. Foot up.’

Ben lifted his foot. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he muttered.

She got one boot off, then the other. The sky was growing darker and darker.

Ben saw Kelly, a lime-green figure high in the grey
clouds. She was already making good progress towards the sea.

Bel knelt down and unfastened her own boots. She had done them up securely with double knots because they were a size too big.

While she fumbled with them, Ben watched the roof of the petrol station. The flames were getting higher and burning debris was dropping down onto the fore-court. Then a chunk of blazing roof fabric landed near one of the pumps.

‘Hurry up!’ yelled Ben.

‘I’m going as fast as I can,’ grumbled Bel.

‘Well, go faster,’ retorted Ben, ‘or we’ve had it.’

The piece of roof was throwing out flames and sparks barely half a metre away from the looped hose of the pump. Ben watched the progress of the flames with the same fascination that a mouse watches a cat stalk towards it.

Bel stood up, both boots off. She turned her back to Ben and hooked her arms into the shoulder straps. Ben again fastened the waistband and the leg straps.

‘You know the routine,’ he shouted. ‘On your marks …
go
!’

The roof was covered in fine gravel and it was painful to run on it in bare feet. Ben felt Bel falter with the discomfort and yelled in her ear, ‘Faster!’

The chute rose up behind. He opened the throttle. The propeller roared up to top speed.

Had they shed enough weight? Would the chute’s remaining fuel be enough to lift them?

The power pack dragged their feet clear of the roof, but it was like a badly judged take-off with too little lift. Ben kept the throttle on maximum. It wasn’t enough. They were starting to drift back down again.

Ben saw a flash out of the corner of his eye. Suddenly they shot vertically up into the air as if they’d been fired out of a cannon. The deafening roar came a split second later. A wave of heat followed, so intense that Ben felt as if his skin was peeling off. The shock wave catapulted them further up still. The sky around them was completely dark and filled with burning debris that wheeled and tumbled like a flock of birds on fire.

The flames had reached the petrol tanks in the fill
ing
station. The explosion and the immense burst of heat had rocketed them vertically upwards. Far below,
under the seething black smoke, the petroleum fire blazed as bright as the sun.

Way off in the distance, Ben could see a lime-green speck. It must be Kelly. She seemed to already be well away from the danger. That told him which way to steer to reach the coast.

He pulled on the left side of the canopy, but the chute didn’t respond. He looked up. Was the steering rope caught?

Then he saw a tongue of orange flame licking at the purple fabric. One section of his canopy was a tattered scrap of smouldering material. Already he could see sky through a hole that was getting wider by the second.

Quickly, he pulled the other side. The chute responded and took him inland again, over the burning city. Now they were starting to lose height again.

Bel twisted her head and looked round at him in alarm. She spotted the hole in the canopy and her face froze in horror.

They caught another thermal and the chute soared up once more. The burning city shrank to toy size. The intense heat dissipated and Ben felt able to
breathe again. Ahead, the horizon opened out and the smoke started to disperse. He could see the sea.

But did they have enough lift to get all the way there?

Now he could make out the jetty and, beyond it, the harbour. Boats covered almost every square metre of the water’s surface. People were crowded onto the decks, huddling together as they watched their city burn.

A crash landing in the harbour wouldn’t be so bad. Except that Ben wasn’t at all sure they were going to make it that far.

They were losing altitude again and he tried to open the throttle, but it was already at maximum. The hole in the chute above them was widening as the fabric continued to smoulder.

They passed over burning roofs, then a burning park, drifting lower all the time. Leaves from the trees lining the park threw sparks into the air.

They continued to descend, their feet brushing over flaming branches. Whirling cinders burned their bare soles.

Ben smelled scorching fabric and looked up.
Another section of the chute had gone. He gave it another thirty seconds at most – then the power pack would be blasting air up with no chute to catch it.

They didn’t need thirty seconds. When Ben looked down again, they were sailing over the boats. They’d made it. He cut the engine. The silence was immediate and almost soothing.

But now they were falling with only a small chute like a tattered umbrella to slow their descent.

The mast of a yacht loomed up and Bel pulled her feet out of the way. Ben, reacting slower, took a painful bang to his shins. They came down even lower and passed over a large white cabin cruiser. Their feet scrabbled along the top, leaving grubby marks. They passed over another boat and Ben tried to slow them down, extending his legs to brace his feet on the cabin roof, but his bare soles slipped on it.

Still they carried on, over another cruiser, getting lower all the time.

A dinghy crossed their path. The people in it were waving and shouting at them, but there was nothing Ben could do to get out of their way. The passengers threw themselves to opposite ends of the dinghy as the
four-footed purple flying creature ran through the middle of their boat.

The next thing in their path was a striped awning on a yacht. The roofs of the cabins had been solid. This was canvas, like a tent. It bent under their weight; then, with a loud crack, one of the poles supporting the awning gave way. The canvas roof turned into a slide, and Ben and Bel found themselves tumbling towards a large square of sapphire blue.

The yacht’s swimming pool.

They hit the water with a splash. Fortunately the water wasn’t deep. Ben managed to stand up and unfasten the waist band. Wet purple fabric clung to their heads like a clammy skin as he and Bel battled to get out of the harness.

When Ben had fought his way out of the chute, he saw a row of people in swimsuits and sun hats. They were all holding drinks and looking at the new arrivals in astonishment.

He swam to the side of the pool. A bronzed Australian girl with pink-streaked blonde hair smiled down at him. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked.

Bel emerged from the other end of the chute. Her
face was streaked with soot and her red hair was a tangled mess. She waded to the steps at the end of the pool and climbed out, her hand outstretched to introduce herself.

‘Er – sorry about dropping in unannounced. Hi. I’m

Dr Bel Kelland and this is my son Ben.’

A man in a peaked cap put his drink down and went to help her. ‘Did you come from the city?’

Bel nodded. Water made sooty pools around her bare feet.

One of the women picked up a blue towel, put it around Bel’s shoulders and invited her to sit on a sun lounger.

Suddenly there was a titanic boom and for a moment everyone looked at each other. It was so loud, it shook the sky overhead. Was it another explosion from the city? It seemed incredible – the sound was louder than a hundred petrol stations blowing up. Then the penny dropped.

‘It’s thunder!’ said the girl with the pink-streaked hair.

The heavens opened and rain came down. It was real summer storm rain, lashing down onto the deck
in great, fat, splashy drops. The woman hurried Bel inside, while the girl helped Ben drag the chute and the soaked engine out of the pool.

He didn’t go in immediately. He stood on the sun deck, marvelling at the feel of rain on his hot skin …

Ben walked down the corridor, a bunch of flowers in one hand, looking for room 319. The private hospital in Melbourne didn’t smell like a hospital, or even look much like one. With its pale yellow walls and pastelcoloured paintings it seemed more like a hotel. At the moment, filled with an overspill of patients from other hospitals, it was like a hotel that had been seriously overbooked.

He found the room and knocked. He heard the TV being silenced and then a voice called out, ‘Come in.’ The voice was American. It sounded hoarse.

Ben walked in.

‘Oh, it’s you.’

Kelly was sitting up in bed. The bandages on her hands looked a bit cleaner than the last time Ben had seen her. There was an oxygen mask hanging from a rail above the bed. As usual, she was anything but pleased to see him.

‘I brought you some flowers,’ said Ben, ‘but now I

wish I hadn’t. I’ll give them to the orphan next door.’

‘They don’t have an orphan next door,’ croaked Kelly. ‘They have a hunky rock star. Why don’t you go and send him in here and you can go and sit in his room on your own.’

‘Why do you get a room to yourself?’ said Ben. ‘Did you tell them you’re a rock star?’

‘It’s for security reasons. Half the world seems to think Uncle Sam is responsible for war, famine and the global recession. Given the trouble my dad had with those protestors yesterday, the authorities figured I could use a little extra privacy.’

‘You’re lucky you’re not in a jail cell for wasting police time. I hear they sent two helicopters to intercept the Ghan.’

‘Yeah, well, it was an honest mistake. And they
don’t have time to worry about that with everything else that’s happened—’

Talking made her cough. She tried to grab a tube dangling down from a water container above the bed, but instead of pulling it towards her, her bandaged hands only succeeded in batting it away. Cursing, she tried to retrieve it.

Ben let her struggle for a moment, then his better nature took over. He reached over and moved the tube so that she could reach it. She sucked on it, then let it fall from her mouth.

‘Thanks,’ she said grudgingly, then started coughing. ‘It’s smoke inhalation. They say it’ll pass in a day or two. How come you’re not suffering with it, anyway?’

‘I don’t open my mouth as often as you do, I guess.’ Ben realized he was still holding the flowers, so he dropped them on the table at the end of the bed. They landed with a slap. He nodded at the saline bag hanging beside her bed, and the line leading into her arm. ‘So what’s with the drip?’

‘My burns got infected. Something to do with not keeping them clean, running around in the desert all
afternoon, then landing in the sea and being hauled out by some guys who’d been gutting fish and hadn’t washed their hands. So now I’m on mega-strong antibiotics. Why are you here?’

Ben shrugged. ‘We’re staying in the hotel next door. There’s nothing on TV except
The Towering Inferno
and I didn’t fancy that. I heard you were here and thought I’d see what you were up to.’

Kelly began to laugh, a dry sound like a seal barking. ‘Yeah, well, I’m not your babysitter any more. Run along now and let me be miserable.’ She tilted her head back and clamped her lips around the water tube again.

Ben turned towards the door.

Kelly waved him back. ‘No – don’t go. I either talk to you or I watch endless news reports about the fire. Come and sit down. Where’s your mum?’

Ben pulled up a chair and sat down next to the bed.

‘She’s busy. She’s obsessed by finding out all she can about that US base we found.’

‘Oh yeah? Why?’

‘I told her about the big dome and she thought that sounded odd for a listening station. She made some
calls. It turns out it’s some kind of top secret research place. Just like the protestors said.’

Kelly bristled. She clearly felt that any criticism of Americans was a personal attack on her. ‘Oh yeah? What are we meant to be researching?’

‘Weather control.’

‘Weather control? I’ve never heard anything so far-fetched!’ She folded her arms defensively, then remembered she had a drip in her arm and looked down in alarm in case she had dislodged it. ‘Stop thinking that because we’re the most powerful nation on the planet we’ve got a god complex.’