Dorm Three flashed past.
Dorm Two.
The swamp rat clattered and jangled now, and Luke had a feeling that this crazy car was just waiting for her master, Mad Mike, to lean out the window, whirl his lasso and start whooping. They shuddered and skidded past Dorm One, gravel spitting and scattering away from the bald tyres. Admin was straight ahead, and beyond that the gates.
Luke planned his next move. If the gates were open, he’d lift his foot and pop the clutch, then hang on to the steering wheel for dear life when the engine started. He would bet anything that not even Mad Mike had let the swamp rat roll this fast before engaging the engine. He knew that the road immediately outside the Dwight Complex was rarely used by locals, and he prayed that none of them were on the road tonight.
If the gates weren’t open… Luke closed his eyes for a split second. He took a deep breath. If the gates weren’t open he’d pop the clutch and ram down on the accelerator. Maybe they’d make it through. But deep down he couldn’t imagine that the swamp rat, even at full speed, would take out the front gates of a secure complex like this.
Even the swamp rat seemed to sense something big was about to happen. A worrying, whirring sound was building as they hurtled forward. No matter how positive he tried to be, Luke couldn’t believe they’d made it here in under five minutes. It was true he’d busted a gut getting up that hill, and that he had been running with bullet boy, but it just felt as though they’d left the Admin building later than that.
As they flashed past Admin, Luke suddenly remembered his file. He could feel it jammed into his jeans, the plastic stuck to his chest. I hope you were worth it, he thought. He slapped his stomach, making sure it was secure, and put his hands back on the wheel. The gates were dead ahead now, maybe fifty metres to go – still too far to see whether they were open, but he squinted into the night anyway.
Then he spotted them through the gloom ahead.
Oh my God!
‘Luke, they’re closing!’ Zac yelled.
Luke popped the clutch, dropping the car into third gear.
The explosion from the rear of the swamp rat wrenched the wheel from his hands and rocketed the car to the left. Luke grabbed for the steering wheel and pulled with all his weight to the right. The car screamed in protest. Luke gunned the car full-pelt, straight ahead, as the gates closed. What else could he do?
He looked to his left to meet Zac’s eye, in warning, in apology, for comfort.
Zac was gone.
Bucking and wailing, the swamp rat shrieked towards the gates and Luke squeezed his eyes shut, bracing for impact.
It never came.
The car kept hurtling forward, deafeningly loud. He opened his eyes just in time to see the gates flash by – and they were opening again. Mouth wide open in shock, he whipped his head to the left, and there sat Zac, knees up in crash position, grinning at him.
‘Ambulance, dead ahead!’ yelled Zac, over the noise of the swamp rat.
Luke swerved the car to the left on the gravel road, out of the path of the oncoming ambulance. The swamp rat’s bald tyres skidded off the gravel and she bucked like a bull, trying to tear off into the bush. He held onto the steering wheel with everything he had and pulled it back in time to screech right out onto the street that led away from Dwight and into the suburb of Windsor.
He straightened the car out on the road. Heart rapidly decelerating, Luke allowed the frozen muscles in his foot to ease off the accelerator a little as he tried to learn to drive this thing while the engine was running. He kept his eyes on the street ahead, pretty sure that the ambos would have something to say about the two kids in the busted-out vehicle who’d almost taken them out in the driveway.
So there goes the head start, he thought.
He decided to get as close to the train station as he dared and then find a place to dump the car. He figured they had another five to eight minutes before the cops could get mobilised; that is, unless they were already cruising. Oh well, nothing he could do about that if they were.
He was more interested in what had happened back there.
‘What happened back there?’ he yelled.
He could hardly hear his own words. Freezing wind rushed through the doors, adding to the noise from the uncovered engine.
‘What do you mean?’ Zac yelled back.
‘I mean, where did you go?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Zac yelled.
Luke’s brow furrowed. I could have just imagined it, he thought. It was pretty stressful. But…
‘What about the gates? They were closing,’ he said, eyes streaming from the wind buffeting about his face.
‘Lucky, huh?’ said Zac. ‘Someone must have opened them again just in time for the ambulance.’
‘Yeah, lucky,’ Luke said. That’s me. Lucky.
Still, he had to admit that so far tonight things could have been worse. They hadn’t yet passed a house or another car, and he was hoping that the first vehicle they met wasn’t going to have flashing blue and red lights.
On the road up ahead he spotted a railway crossing.
That’ll do me, he decided.
‘Hold on,’ he said to Zac.
He pulled the swamp rat over to the side of the unsealed road and crawled along, searching for an opening through the trees. With the car rolling out of gear, it was now no longer as loud as a Mack truck. He spotted a stand of scrubby bushes he figured he could drive his way through.
‘We’re going in,’ he said. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, keep your hands in the vehicle at all times.’
He steered the swamp rat into the bush.
A camp on the outskirts of Pantelimon, Bucharest, Romania
Right now, Samantha was positive that any punishment she and Mirela copped for sneaking out would be worth it.
Because she was squished into the back of Besnik’s Toyota HiAce van, and her knee was jammed up against Tamas’s thigh. Right now, she felt that lunch with the gypsy king had been a mere diversion, being chased by the ninjas had been but a game, and the gossiping at the moonlight ceremony had never even happened.
Tamas’s older brother, Luca, was their driver, nineteen now, and old enough to satisfy any Gaje policeman that he was legal to drive. Samantha remembered plenty of trips when they’d had to use fake IDs, fast talking and/or running when pulled over by the cops. Hanzi, Luca’s cousin and Mirela’s big brother, had the prized front passenger seat. Sam, Mirela and Tamas’s little sister, Shofranka, were in the back. Of course. Samantha didn’t think she’d ever had a ride up the front. She was cool with that.
Tamas was not.
He sat glowering, cross-legged on the van’s hard floor, one leg jammed up against two bald tyres and a spare sliding door, and the other pressed against Samantha’s knee. She
For as long as forever, Samantha had watched Tamas fight his big brother and cousin for a spot in the front seat of the HiAce. Given over to storage, a bedroom for up to six little kids during winter, and daytrips into town for the teenagers, anyone under thirty thought the HiAce was the coolest vehicle in camp, maybe even the coolest car in Romania. Diarrhoea-yellow, handpainted with an old house-paintbrush – back window and all – the HiAce was
