A Killing Frost Read online

  We left two days later. It was a Sunday morning, as far as I could tell—we all had different theories about the date.

  We carried enormous packs. We didn't know how far the district had been colonised while we'd been hiding in Hell. Everything seemed to have been proceeding at such a speed that we had to expect the worst. So We took a lot of stuff. Being winter, most of it was for warmth: jumpers, mitts, balaclavas, woollen socks. We took sleeping bags but not tents—we still didn't have proper tents, since we lost them in the Holloway Valley. We hoped we could find shelter in sheds or caves. But We did carry a heap of food, not knowing what we'd be able to scrounge or steal.

  "Steal!" Homer said angrily when I used that word. "This is our country. Stealing is what they've clone; it doesn't apply to us."

  Our main project before leaving was to relocate the chooks. We knocked up a new feeder and filled it to the brim. That would keep them going for many weeks, but the problem was water. Eventually we solved that problem by rebuilding their yard so that the creek now-flowed through a corner of it. "Lateral thinking," Robyn said proudly. It had been her idea, and she'd done most of the work. The chooks certainly seemed to like it. They clucked around happily, murmuring to each other as they explored their new territory.

  It was ten in the morning when We left. The last thing I'd done, just after breakfast, was to make a little bouquet out of leaves and grasses—it was the wrong season for flowers—and take it to Chris' grave. I wasn't surprised to find someone had been there before me and left a wooden flower, a flower clumsily carved out of wood. It could have been anyone: Homer, Fi, Lee, Robyn, any one of them could have done it.

  The weeks of hiding, and the depressions that we'd been through, had taken the edge off our fitness. The heavy packs seemed to have doubled their weight before we reached the first of the giant rock steps that the path threaded around on its way out of Hell. At least the weather was on our side. It was cold but not raining; a moist winter day, when our breaths made us look like chainsmokers. I never tired of blowing the little white clouds and watching them evaporate. Above us was nothing but cloud, the whole sky grey and flat. You knew, just looking at it, that it would be cold all day and there would be no sign of the sun. But it was OK for what we wanted; I had no complaints.

  At the top we rested for a while, annoyed and disappointed at how hard we'd found the climb.

  "It's the packs," Fi said. "They're the biggest loads we've ever carried out of Hell."

  "It's the lives we've been living," Homer said. "Just lounging around watching TV all day. I knew it'd catch up with us."

  We walked along Tailor's Stitch. A lot of the features around the Wirrawee district were named after old trades: Cobbler's Bay, Tailor's Stitch, a hill named Brewer's Mark, and a rock formation called the Old Blacksmith. We kept our eyes and ears open for aircraft, but there were none. About halfway to Mt Martin we turned left down the rough old four-wheel drive track that would take us into the valley. We went right by the Land Rover, hidden in thick bush near the top of the ridge. We'd agreed that it'd be too dangerous to use it until we knew more about what we'd find around Wirrawee. But at least the walking was now downhill.

  My place was the first one we came to. Approaching it from the Tailor's road we were in good cover until about a k from the house. By then it was midafternoon. As we reached the edge of the line of trees I signalled to the others to stop while I sneaked forward, searching for a good lookout. I found a huge old river gum and installed myself in it. It was perfect, except for the stream of bees pouring in and out of a large hole in the trunk, about thirty centimetres above mv head. I hadn't seen them when I chose the tree. But at the same moment that I noticed them I also noticed a movement out in the paddock we call Bailey's, and I instantly forgot about the bees.

  For the first time since the invasion I saw strangers in our paddocks. There was a ute over by the western fenceline and I could see two men working on the fence itself. One of the old pine trees that Grandma had planted must have come down in a storm, and fallen across the fence. One man was holding a chainsaw and the other was dragging away some of the lighter branches. As I watched, the bloke with the chainsaw gave the cord a pull and started it up, then moved in to continue cutting.

  It would have been a normal bush scene except for one thing: the soldier with the rifle across his back who was watching from fifty metres away. He was sitting astride a motorbike, a cigarette in his mouth. He looked about fourteen years old.

  I studied them for a few minutes. At least the man with the chainsaw seemed to know how to use it; lucky, as it was a big one. We'd all been raised on horrific stones of people slicing arms or legs off with chainsaws. In our district they cause more accidents than tractors and firearms combined.

  I went back to the others and told them what I'd seen. In the thicker bush, where they were, the chain-saw sounded like a distant mosquito." But it was blocking our progress and it would keep us there for another hour or more, by the time the men put the fence back up. We agreed "to take another siesta; the alternative was doing a serious bushbash to get around them. None of us wanted that much sweat.

  While the others settled back on their packs, using them as cushions, I took a walk around the beeline so I could get closer to the work party. I had mixed feelings about them being on our land. I was angry and upset, of course, to see trespassers there, but I was relieved too that someone was at last looking after the place. We'd all been shocked, on our previous expeditions, to see how quickly things were degenerating. Fences were down, sheep were flystruck, horses were foundering, rabbits and foxes were everywhere. The houses, too, were showing signs of wear and tear. A few more years of this and the whole country would be a wilderness of blackberries and Scotch thistle.

  In time I got quite close to the men working on the pine tree. I could hear them easily. They'd turned the chainsaw off again and I realised that as they worked they were having a go at the boy with the rifle.

  "Hey Wyatt, Wyatt Earp!" one of them called out.

  "What?" I heard the boy answer. His voice was much softer than the men's, but sounded reluctant, almost sulky.

  "I hope you know what you're doing, sitting under that tree."

  "What for?"

  "Well, this time of day, middle of the afternoon, that's when the drop bears get active."

  "That's right," the other man said. "Shocking area for drop bears, this."

  "I wouldn't sit under that tree for a million dollars," the first man said.

  "Terrible what those drop bears do. I've seen them take a bloke's face off. Those claws, Gawd, they'd give you the horrors."

  "And you never see the one that gets you."

  "That's the truth."

  "What for, drop bears?" the boy asked.

  I'd worked around a bit further, to where I could see his face. Me was fidgeting anxiously, but trying to look untroubled.

  "You don't know what drop bears are? Fair dink, don't they teach you blokes anything? Fancy sending a bloke to a place like this and not telling him about drop bears."

  "They told you about sharks, didn't they?" the second man asked.

  "Sharks, yes."

  "And crocodiles?"

  "Crocodiles, yes."

  "And hoop snakes?"

  The boy hesitated. "Hoop snakes, yes," he said after a moment.

  "Well, I'll tell you what mate, I'd rather go fifteen rounds with a crocodile than have a drop bear land on my head."

  "What for, drop bears?" the boy asked again. He was showing real nervousness now, standing up straighter against the motorbike and with increased alertness in his voice. The men stopped working and spoke to him directly.

  "Mate," the first one said, with great seriousness, "it's none of my business if you end up wearing a drop bear for a hat, but if you want to keep that good-looking face attached to your head, I wouldn't recommend you spend any more time under trees."

  The young soldier looked around awkwardly, then peered up through th
e branches. Finally he said: "That enough. We go now."

  "Well, whatever you sax;" the first man said. "You're the boss. But it's pretty early to knock off." To his mate he said quietly, "I guess he just doesn't want to lose face."

  Both men sniggered. The box; flushing red, said angrily, "Enough. We go."

  He flourished his rifle, then kicked at the starter of his motorbike. But he was off balance from waving his rifle, and he fell sideways, sprawling across the ground and dropping the bike. The men just grinned at each other and walked casually to the ute. They got in and started it, putting it in'gear as the boy, humiliated, struggled again with the starter of the bike. By the time he got it going the ute was a hundred metres away, bumping slowly across the paddock towards the gate. The boy tore off after it, his rear tyre sliding around as he accelerated. I wondered if the men would make him open the gate. I was smiling as I walked back to the others. Seemed like there was more than one way to skin a pussycat.

  Three

  My smile didn't last long. As we made our cautious way from property to property we were shocked by the speed with which 'the invaders had moved. A 'disease of colonists had infected the countryside.

  "You know what it must seem like to them?" Homer said. "It must feel like the old days, when the whites first arrived, and all they could see was this huge country with no one in it who they cared about. So, after living in pokey little towns or on ten hectare farms in England, they could suddenly spread out and help themselves to thousands of square k's each. You remember that unit we did in history: selectors and squatters? Well, a couple of centuries later, here's history repeating itself."

  We were all silent, a depressed, pessimistic silence.

  It took us a few days to work out how things were organised. As far as we'could tell there were two or three families who'd moved onto each farm. As well, some places had mini prison camps, thirty or forty people who were used as slave labour in that particular area. They were locked up each night in sheds or shearers' quarters or workers' cottages—whatever was available. Most of these mini camps were guarded at night by four sentries, one on each corner, and were lit by improvised floodlights. It wouldn't have been so hard to stage a breakout, but I guess the problem for most people was where to go after they broke out. Not everybody had a convenient bolthole called Hell, with a stockpile of food and other stores. It was just another fluke, the way it had worked for us. I still couldn't decide if it was a good fluke or a bad one.

  One odd thing was that we didn't recognise any of the prisoners. As we spied on them from different vantage points we thought that most of them seemed like experienced cockles: they moved stock confidently and handled tools well. They were even shearing at a couple of places. But we didn't see anyone we knew and we decided not to take the chance of talking to strangers. It might have made us feel good but the risk wasn't worth it.

  Perhaps that, more than anything else, showed how-much we'd changed. We'd toughened to such an extent that we chose not to ask about the welfare of our families if it meant any possibility of danger to ourselves. If someone had told me six months earlier that that's the kind of person I'd become ... Of course these prisoners, who we thought were from another area, quite likely wouldn't even know- our parents, but there had been a time when we would have asked anyway.

  On our third day we were just about out of the Wirrawee district, hiking through some scrubby, very poor country between Wirrawee and Fletcher East. By-staving in the uncleared stuff we were able to make good progress. There was nothing to attract colonists there, just cockatoos, galahs and kangaroos. And an echidna that I nearly trod on as it grovelled in the dirt, trying to dig its way to China. We had glimpses of both farmland and the pot-holed bitumen road that wound through the valley like a confused snake. At about lunchtimc we saw something that had already become familiar: a group of prisoners at work, with a couple of sentries. It took us a while to figure out what these prisoners were doing. One of them was operating a front-end loader and had dug a big pit; the others were wheeling loads to the pit from a large low brick building a hundred metres further away. We were due for a meal so we stopped and ate our scanty lunch while watching them hard at work.

  After a couple of minutes Homer suddenly said: "I've figured it out."

  "Figured what out?"

  "What they're doing."

  I pressed my Ryvitas together to make the Vegemite come squiggling'through the holes like little black worms. "OK, what are they doing?"

  "It's a piggery and they're taking out the bodies of the pigs. Or what's left of them."

  "Charming." I squinted mv eyes and peered harder. "Yes, you might be right." I tried not to think what a stinking mess an abandoned feedlot for pigs might be. And I didn't feel so good about the look of my Ryvitas.

  "Oh!" said Fi, instantly sympathetic. "You mean they starved to death in there? The poor things. That's awful."

  "The last ones wouldn't have starved for a long time," Homer said cruelly.

  "How do you mean?" Fi asked, not noticing the tone of Homer's voice.

  "Don't ask," I said, too late.

  "They would have eaten each other when they got desperate," Homer said.

  "Oh!" Fi said, outraged.

  "There goes lunch," Lee said.

  "Lucky we weren't having ham sandwiches," Robyn said.

  "Are they cannibals?" Fi asked.

  "Not exactly," Homer said. "It's just that they eat everything. They'll cat their keepers quite happily. There was a guy in Peppertown, no one's quite sure what happened, but they think he might have tainted in his pigpen. Anyway, by the time they found him ... well, they didn't find him, if you see what I mean."

  "Yuk,"' Fi said. "You always know the most disgusting things, Homer."

  "Rats eat each other," Lee said. "If you put too many of them in a cage, for example."

  "Just like humans," Robyn said.

  Throughout this conversation I'd been casually watching the prisoners toiling away at the piggery. Now suddenly I stopped eating, a Ryvita halfway to my mouth. And'not because of the conversation the others were having.

  "That bloke just coming out now," I said quickly, urgently. "The one with the broom. Tell me I'm dreaming."

  They looked, they stared.

  Homer jumped to his feet, dropping his half-eaten biscuit in the dirt.

  "You're not dreaming," he said.

  "No, you're not," Robyn agreed, speaking like someone hypnotised.

  "Oh God, I don't believe it," Fi said.

  Lee had the worst eyesight of the five of us, and he alone had to ask to make sure. "Do you mean ... are you saying ... you think it's Kevin?"

  "I don't think, I know. That's Kevin. You can bet your sweet bippy on it."

  We gazed, in a kind of trance. I don't know about the others, but I was thinking of the last time I'd seen Kevin, driving away in a big beautiful Mercedes that we'd requisitioned. We hadn't expected it to become an ambulance, but that's what it had become. When my first best friend Come had been shot in the back by a bullet from out of the dark, fired by a soldier she never even saw, Kevin drove her into Wirrawee, to the hospital. The hospital—in fact the whole town—was occupied by the enemy, but that hadn't stopped him. We didn't have a lot of clues about what had happened to them since, except that Come was in hospital, unconscious, and Kevin was a prisoner at the Showground. We also heard that he had been badly beaten by the soldiers for turning up with someone who had a bullet wound. Presumably the soldiers jumped to the worst conclusions. They may have even thought that Kevin and Corrie had been involved in the destruction of the Wirrawee bridge the bridge that the rest of us had blown up the previous night.

  "What is my 'sweet bippy'?" Lee asked, disturbing my flood of memories.

  "Eh? Oh honestly, Lee. I can tell you what it isn't."

  "Kevin," Robyn breathed. "It's a miracle."

  I wasn't going to disagree. I was wildly excited to see him. I could feel my eyes growing bigger as I stared a
nd stared. From this distance he looked OK, and he was moving freely. He had always been a big guy, and strong, and although he'd certainly lost some weight he didn't look too bad at all. Not as bad as in my nightmares, anyway. We watched avidly as he put the broom on the back of a Holden ute and picked up a shovel. Then he lifted his head and gazed all around, as though searching for something. He even looked up at the sky for a few moments. We couldn't show ourselves—it was too big a risk—but I knew we wouldn't be leaving this area for a while yet.

  We watched them all afternoon. The work party knocked off at about five o'clock. We'd noticed back in Wirrawee that this army kept regular office hours. Or maybe the sentries were getting nervous about the drop bears. The prisoners slouched off in a disorganised bunch towards the farm buildings, which We could see as we edged forwards. The buildings were nearly a kilometre away. The soldiers followed, one in the front scat of the ute and one standing on the tray. Like most of the sentries we saw these days, he hadn't unslung his rifle: it hung over his shoulder.

  The five of us moved along parallel to them, but kept well in among the trees. We didn't wear anything metallic these days, in case the sunlight's reflection gave us away. We were taking extreme care. We paced them easily enough though: they weren't exactly hurrying, and it was clear where they were headed.

  I don't know the name of the property—we weren't familiar with this country—but it was obviously one of the older ones, probably dating back to the 1860s when a lot of the Wirrawee and Fletcher land was selected. In fact, the Fletchers were the people who'd taken most of it up, but this wasn't their place. I'd been on a school excursion to their house: it was a massive old sandstone mansion owned by the National Trust.

  The prisoners were heading for a single-storey stone farmhouse surrounded by heaps of outbuildings'. There were six tall palm trees standing over it, and a big white flagpole out the front. Behind it, in the distance, was a great area of water: a lake, probably a natural one, where the river had spread itself across a'couple of hectares. It was a pretty sight with the purple-black winter clouds piled high above. It must have been a wonderful home for a lot of different people over the years. Now it had become a home for a new group: we could see colonists moving around the homestead, looking at something in the garden, watching a couple of children kicking a soccer ball. "It's all right for them," I thought bitterly. "They don't have to do any work. They mightn't ever have to work again."