A Killing Frost Read online

  A Killing Frost

  John Marsden

  * * *

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

  BOSTON

  * * *

  Copyright © 1995 by John Marsden

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to

  reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions,

  Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South,

  New York, New York 10003.

  First published 1995 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd.

  under the title The Third Day, The Frost

  First American edition

  The text of this book is set in Transitional 521.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Marsden, John.

  The killing frost/John Marsden.

  p. cm.

  Sequel to: Tomorrow, when the war began and The dead of night.

  Summary: Ellie and her friends, a small band of teenagers

  trying to survive in the Australian countryside, continue

  to resist the enemies who have invaded their country.

  ISBN 0-395-83735-9

  [1. Survival—Fiction. 2. War—Fiction. 3. Australia—Fiction.]

  I. Title.

  PZ7.M35147Ki 1998 97-2797

  [Fic]—dc21 CIP

  AC

  Printed in the United States of America

  QUM 10 9 8 7 6 5

  * * *

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks for help generously given by Lizzie Farran, Lachlan Dunn, Dallas Wilkinson, Rob Alexander, Peter Sapleton, Heide Zonneveld, Hayley Reynolds, Anne O'Connor, Rebecca Dunne, Lauren Sandstron.

  The first reader of this trilogy was Julia Stiles, and I treasure the memory of her wonderful support and enthusiasm.

  * * *

  To my sister and long-time friend, Rosalind Alexander

  —J.M.

  * * *

  An Aussie Glossary

  Aga: wood stove

  B&S: dance for young rural

  people

  billy: container used on fire for

  cooking

  birko: angry

  bitumen: asphalt/tar

  board shorts: swimming shorts

  bush: uncleared Australian

  countryside

  bush bash: to force a path

  through the bush

  bush tucker: food that occurs

  naturally in the bush

  CBD: Central Business District

  chalkie: teacher

  chooks: chickens

  classer: worker who sorts shorn

  wool according to quality

  cockies: farmers

  Commer: truck

  crook: not well

  cuppa: cup of tea

  dunny: toilet

  fair dink: the truth

  fair go: be fair to someone

  fanging: racing

  footie: soccer

  galahs: species of bird

  goss: gossip

  gum boots: waterproof rubber

  boots (Wellingtons)

  jumpers: sweaters

  k: kilometre

  lagged: blamed

  legless: drunk

  Patterson's Curse: weed with

  purple flowers

  poddy: lamb or calf raised by hand

  polypipe: black plastic pipe for

  heavy duty watering

  possie: position

  Recovery: small party held after

  a big party

  roustabout: someone who does

  odd jobs in shearing shed

  Ryvitas: brand of crackers

  torch: flashlight

  trannie: transistor radio

  tray: back of a ute

  two-tooths: young sheep

  ute: utility vehicle

  Vegemite: sandwich spread

  whingeing: winning

  whitegoods: major appliances

  yakka: work

  * * *

  "The third day comes a frost, a killing frost..."

  —King Henry VIII, William Shakespeare

  One

  Sometimes I think I'd rather be frightened than bored. At least when you're frightened you know you're alive. Energy pumps'through your body so hard that it overflows as sweat. Your heart—your heart that does the pumping—bangs away in your chest like an old windmill on a stormy night. There's no room for anything else. You forget that you're tired or cold or hungry. You forget your banged-up knee and your aching tooth. You forget the past, and you forget that there's such a thing as the future.

  I'm an expert on fear now. I think I've felt every strong feeling there is: love, hate, jealousy, rage. But fear's the greatest of them all. Nothing reaches inside you and grabs you by the guts the way fear docs. Nothing else possesses you like that. It's a kind of illness, a fever, that takes you over.

  I've got my tricks for holding fear at bay. We all have, I know. And they work in their own ways, some of the time. One of mv tricks is to think of jokes that people have told me over the years. Another's the one Homer taught me. It sounds simple enough. It's to keep saying to yourself: "I refuse to think fear. I will think strong. I will think brave."

  It helps for mild fear; it's not so good for panic. When true fear sweeps in, when panic knocks down your walls, no defence can keep it out.

  The last two weeks I spent in Hell were solid boredom; the kind of time you long for when you're terrified; the kind of time you hate when it's happening. Maybe I was a fear junkie by then, though, because I spent a lot of time lying around thinking of dangerous things we could have done, wild attacks We could have made.

  These days I don't know whether I'm murderous, suicidal, addicted to panic, or addicted to boredom.

  I wonder what happened to the people who were in the world wars, after the fighting was over? They were mostly men in those wars, but there were plenty of women too. They weren't necessarily soldiers, but'you didn't have to be a soldier to be affected by it all. Did they press their "Off" buttons on the day peace was declared? Can anyone do that? I know I can't do it. I seem to be getting used to the way my life's gone lately, from total frenzy to total nothing. But I often dream of the regularity of mv old life. During school terms my days always started the same way: I'd have breakfast, cut my lunch, pack my schoolbag and kiss Mum goodbye. Dad'd usually be out in the paddocks already, but some days I'd get up early to have breakfast with him. Other days when I got up at my normal time he'd still be in the kitchen, toasting his backside against the Aga.

  For years—as soon as I was big enough for my feet to reach the pedals of a car—I'd driven myself to the bus. Kids living on properties can get a special licence to drive to school buses, but we never bothered with that. Dad thought it was just another stupid bureaucratic rule. From our house it's about four k's to the gate on Providence Gully Road. It's not our front gate, but it's the only one on the school bus route. Like most people we had'a "paddock basher"—an unregistered bomb—mainly for kids to use, or for stock work. Ours was a Datsun 120Y that Dad bought for eighty bucks at a clearing sale. Usually I took that, but if it wasn't going properly, or if Dad wanted it for something else, I'd take the Land Rover, or a motorbike. Whichever it was, I'd leave it sitting under a tree all day while I was at school and I'd pick it up again when I got off the bus.

  School was OK and I enjoyed being with my friends—the social life, the goss, the talking about guys—but, like most rural kids, living on a farm took up as much energy and time and interest as school did. I'm not sure if that's the same for city kids—sometimes I get the feeling that school's more important for them. Oh, it's important for us too, of course, especially nowadays when everyone's so worried that they won't be able to make a living on the
land, won't be able to take over their parents' places the way they used to assume they would. Every country kid these days has to think about setting up in some other work.

  What am I talking about? For a few minutes there I was back in peacetime when our biggest worry was getting a job. Crazy. Now those dreams of becoming brain surgeons, chefs, hairdressers and barristers have gone up in smoke. Smoke that smells of gunpowder. The dreams now were simply of staying alive. It's what Mr Kassar, our Drama teacher, would call "a different perspective."

  It's nearly six months since our country was invaded. We'd lived in a war zone since January, and now it's July. So short a time, so long a time. They came swarming across the land, like locusts, like mice, like Patterson's Curse. We should have been used to plagues in our country but this was the most swift, sudden and successful plague ever. They were too cunning, too fierce, too well-organised. The more I've learnt about them, the more I can see that they must have been planning it for years. For instance, the'way they used different tactics in different places. They didn't bother with isolated communities, or the Outback, or scattered farms, except in places like Wirrawee, my home town. They had to secure Wirrawee because it's on the road from Cobbler's Bay, and they needed Cobbler's Bay because it's such a great deep-water harbour.

  But Wirrawee was easy enough for them. They timed the invasion for Commemoration Day, when the whole country's on holiday. In Wirrawee that means Show Day, so all they had to do was grab the Showground and they had ninety per cent of the population. But to take the big towns and cities they needed a bit more imagination. Mostly they used hostages, and for hostages mostly they used children. Their strategy was to make things happen so fast that there was no time for anyone to think straight, no time to consider. At the slightest delay they started blowing things up, killing people. It worked. Those political rats, our leaders, the people who'd spent every day of peacetime telling us how great they were and how we should vote for them, felt the water of the drowning country lapping at their ankles. They took off for Washington, leaving chaos and darkness'behind.

  Yes, it was cunning, it was brutal, it was successful.

  And because of them—or because of our own apathy and selfishness—our peacetime ambitions had been vaporised, and we suddenly found ourselves living lives of fear and boredom.

  Fear and boredom weren't our only emotions, of course. There were others: even pride came sneaking in occasionally. In mid-autumn, just five of us, Homer, Robyn, Fi, Lee and I, had launched our biggest attack. We'd used gas to blow up a row of houses where a major command post had been based. We'd beaten the odds and caused an explosion that would have registered eleven on the Richter scale. There was no mushroom cloud, but it had everything else. That was spectacular enough, but we didn't fully realise what we'd done till afterwards. We'd struggled back to our mountain hideaway, intending only to detour for some food, and had made the terrible discovery of the body of our friend Chris. We'd brought him with us and buried him in our sanctuary, the wild basin of rock and bush known as Hell. And there we'd stayed for weeks, gradually made aware by the ferocity of the search for us just how far we'd promoted ourselves on the most wanted list. We were scared by the toughness of the search. With no access to news—except for occasional radio bulletins from other countries—we had no way of finding out who we'd killed or what we'd destroyed. But We were obviously in more trouble than a dog in a mosque.

  When the search calmed down and the hunting helicopters returned to their lairs, we calmed down a bit too. Still, we were in no hurry to do anything rash. We stayed in our bush home for a few more weeks. With plenty of food—even if there wasn't much variety—we lay around and ate and slept and talked and had bad dreams and shook and cried and jumped up trembling at sudden rustles in the undergrowth. It affected us all in different ways. Lee got a nervous twitch, especially at night, that pulled the right side of his mouth up towards his eye every time he spoke. And when We made love, even though he said he enjoyed it and he'd start off all excited, his body wouldn't do what he wanted it to do.

  What I wanted it to do. What we both wanted it to do.

  Robyn stopped eating and sleeping. She'd always been nicely plump and round but she starting getting skinny, fast: the kind of ugly skinny that I've always hated in my friends. "You think you've got problems," she said to me one day when Host my temper over a can-opener that wouldn't work. "I'm a paranoid anorexic insomniac."

  It was one of our few jokes. Only it wasn't very funny.

  Homer sank into a silent depression and went for days at a time without a word to anyone. He spent hours sitting on a rock looking up at Tailor's Stitch, and it seemed like the only time he used his voice was to have a tantrum. His temper, which had always been edgy, was now out of control. When it came to arguments I'd always matched Homer yell for yell, but for a few weeks there I joined the others and'melted away into the bush when he exploded.

  Me, I sort of did a bit of all those things, plus some. My particular specialty was flashbacks that were so lifelike I was sure they were real. I'd smell something and that'd set me off. A bit of plastic on the fire at night and the next thing I was back in Buttercup Lane and the air was full of burning rubber as trucks slid into each other on screaming tyres. My mind couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't. It was like having nightmares, except that I was awake. Sweat ran down my face so fast my eyes would be stinging; then I'd be gasping, and then hyperventilating. Needless to say, I had nightmares when I was asleep too, till I got seared of going to sleep. It's so long since I've had a good night's sleep I can't even imagine any more what it'd be like, but I dream of it—daydreams,'that is—and long for it.

  The one who handled it best of any of us, at that stage, was Fi. Fi was so lightly built that she looked like a grasshopper. She was all leggy. Maybe that was why I always thought of her as frail', easily broken, needing protection. But she had a strength that I could never quite figure out. I don't know where it came from, or where she stored it. How much heart could she fit inside her little frame? How tough could that balsawood body be? It's not that she had no feelings. Fi had always been mega-sensitive. She seemed strung like a violin: the slightest touch made her vibrate. But the terrible things we'd done didn't eat away inside her like they did the rest of us. She rose above them. One reason, maybe, was that she was so sure we were doing the right tiring. She was proud of what we'd done. I felt pride sometimes but, truth to tell, I never knew whether to be proud or ashamed.

  For all that, when the call for action came again, we answered it. Maybe we answered like robots, programmed to kill and destroy, but we answered.

  Two

  For three weeks there'd been no more aircraft overhead. The wasps and hornets that had prowled up and down the sky, buzzing angrily as they waited for us to break cover, had returned to their nests. Perhaps they thought we'd left the district. They might have suspected that we lived in these mountains, but they couldn't be sure—and even if they were, they couldn't know of our exact whereabouts.

  Within a few days of their disappearance we all started to relax a bit,'sensing that they had given up.

  Lee was the first to say something about us becoming active again. If he hadn't said it, someone else would. I was starting to turn a few ideas over in my mind, feeling a bit guilty about sitting around for so long. There was the fear of doing something and the fear of not doing enough. The fears battled each other all the time. But Lee wanted us to go beyond Wirrawee, all the way to Cobbler's Bay. It was a wildly terrifying idea.

  Cobbler's Bay was a wonderful harbour but in peacetime it was too'far from the city to be used regularly by-big ships. It had been popular with fishing boats, tourist charters and yachts wanting shelter for a night or two. But the enemy had used it a lot since the invasion. So much damage had been done to the major ports that Cobbler's had turned out to be very important to them. Frequent convoys poured down the highway to and from Cobbler's, carrying troops, supplies and weapons.

&nbsp
; We'd destroyed the Heron Bridge in Wirrawee, forcing those convoys to make a long detour, and we'd attacked one of the convoys in Buttercup Lane. Now Lee suggested we go to the very source of the convoys.

  "But what would we do when we got there?" Fi asked.

  "I don't know. Make it up as we go along. That's more or less what we've done everywhere else."

  "We've been so lucky."

  "It's not all luck," I said, even though I believed in luck myself. Sometimes, anyway. "Don't forget, we're free agents who can do what we want, when we want. That does give us an advantage. All they can do is guess what we might do, or react after we've done it. It's almost like, I don't know, they go by rules and we don't. They're confined and we aren't. You imagine, if you're playing hockey and one team follows the rules and the other team does whatever they feel like. It's a bit like that. We can pick up the ball and throw it to each other, or we can bash them in the shins with the hockey sticks, and it's not until we've done it that they can react."

  "Yes," said Homer slowly. "I'd never thought of it like that. But you're exactly right. If we're going to have a go at Cobbler's we'll have to be as radical as We can be. Totally unpredictable. Make the most of the advantage that Ellie's talking about."

  "So are we going to have a go at Cobbler's?" Robyn asked, in a small voice.

  There was a pause; everyone waiting for someone else to commit themselves. Finally I heard my own voice.

  "It's a nice place for a holiday."

  I don't know why I talk like a hero sometimes. Blame it on peer pressure. I never never never feel like a hero. But I think we would have all agreed to go take a look at Cobbler's anyway. No one could have stood being cooped up in Hell much longer, and no one had any better ideas.