to have again. It wasn’t only the noise and the flash and the weird sensation of the air exploding around us, it was the psychological thing of looking down the barrel of a gun and knowing it’s about to be fired. Sometimes I wonder about people who are shot dead. What do they think when they look at the little hole in the barrel and realise it’s the last thing they’ll ever see, their final view of the world, the last image their eyes will convey to their brain. In the old days people believed that if you were murdered your eyes retained the image of your killer, so to solve the crime they only had to prise your eyes open and they’d see a little photograph of the person who’d done it. Mr Kassar, my old Drama teacher, told me that, so it must be true… on second thoughts, maybe I’d better check it.
If life were fair, the last view you’d have before you die would be fluffy white clouds, a crystal-clear stream, a lamb gambolling in a paddock, or some corny crap like that. But I guess for many people it’s the filthy walls of some derelict building where they’re doing drugs; or a muddy trench with rats running along it, in a battlefield; or the twisted metal and smashed windscreen of a car wreck.
The guy behind us, his last view of life was a staircase, Lee and Gavin and me, and the carpet. And his own blood perhaps. He probably saw some of that as he died. There was plenty of it. I got a look at him just as he fell. He came toppling towards me, trying to hold his throat together, and failing. His body covered half-a-dozen steps because he fell straight down, and I guess he was pretty tall anyway. Then he slid down another two steps and halfway over the top of me. He lay there, the heaviest weight I have ever felt. He wasn’t just heavy because he weighed seventy or eighty kilos. He was heavy because, I don’t know, he was life and death and the whole of humanity, and I felt I couldn’t bear that weight any longer. I think that was the moment when I made some critical decisions, not consciously, but I think inside me a large door closed and a new door began to quietly open.
Of course there was no time for that right then. The scene was one of total chaos. I had blood all over me, and it was still pumping out of the man’s throat as I got myself out from under him. My eyes and ears were still dazzled and shocked by the bullet that had come at me from out of the barrel of Lee’s rifle. Lee had leapt up the steps and was ushering Gavin down them. At the same time he was covering the top of the stairs, by walking down backwards and scanning constantly with his eyes and his rifle. The person at the foot of the stairs who was covering Lee had now moved out of sight again. I could hear heavy pounding from somewhere inside the building, to my left. There were still a few shots from outside in the street. Gradually smoke was drifting up the staircase, also from outside. Not a lot of smoke, not enough to make me think the building was on fire, in fact maybe just the smoke from the gun battle, but it added to my sense of fear and confusion.
The stairs were slippery with blood now, but I navigated that and followed Lee and Gavin as they ran down the passageway. At last I could see light at the end of the tunnel. It was the light from the street outside, not much light because it was apparently the middle of the night, but enough to make me feel that we had a real chance for freedom and fresh air again.
The table I had seen when I first entered the house was now knocked over, and I was pleased to see the automatic rifle lying on the ground. With a bit of luck one of the defenders had tried to use it and found that the magazine was missing. It may have been coincidence, but just past the table was a body, a very lightly built young soldier, lying on his side, his head resting on his outstretched arm as though he were asleep, and just a little blood seeping from underneath him.
As I reached the front door I checked behind me to make sure we were not being followed, but Lee was on the job anyway, kneeling just outside the front door with his rifle trained down the corridor past me, looking for problems. ‘God,’ I thought, ‘he really has turned into the ultimate fighting machine. There’s nothing he doesn’t think of, no options he doesn’t cover.’ He motioned to me to keep going, so I went on out into the street itself, cautiously though, looking left and right and straight ahead, rifle at the ready, not sure what to expect. Someone was ushering Gavin towards a vehicle, so I followed them. The vehicle was an old Volvo, dark green. I figured, well, if you can’t trust a Volvo driver, who can you trust? Then I realised it was Homer at the wheel. I immediately revised my opinion of Volvo drivers.
To my right was the person who had been covering us on the staircase. I realised now, with a shock, that it was a girl. She was standing with her back to me, but at a bit of an angle, so that I could see some of her profile. She was definitely female. A moment after I registered that fact, a guy ran across from the left, in front of me, yelling as he passed her, ‘The area’s secured, Pimple.’
Pimple! I nearly dropped my rifle. The Pimple was a girl? I’d never really seriously considered that possibility. It was funny, the effect on me, in among all that uproar, but it was like dry ice had been poured all through my system and I was suddenly frozen to the spot. Managing to overcome that, I swung right to get a good look at her. In a night of shocks, I then got the biggest one of all. It was Bronte.
CHAPTER 17
‘Who owns all the blood?’ Homer asked as I followed Gavin into the back seat. He was already accelerating as he threw the question back over his shoulder. With Homer’s smart remarks, you always have to translate, and this question, translated, meant, ‘Are you okay? Is it your blood? Because if so, I’ll do something about it.’
Underneath Homer’s big, tough, blokey exterior there is a heart. It’s like with the Earth, first you go through the Rocky Crust, then the Mohorovicic discontinuity, then the Outer Mantle, then the Inner Mantle, then the Gutenberg discontinuity, then you finally get to the hot part, the molten outer core and the inner core. See, I have done some work in Science. By then you’ve travelled over six thousand kilometres, but eventually you do get to the heart. So yeah, it’s a pretty good comparison with Homer.
‘You’re just paid to do the driving,’ I said. ‘So shut up and drive.’
He took me at my word and off we went. He drove straight up over the footpath and into the park, following a concrete path that I guess was designed for council vehicles. He accelerated as soon as we were on it, and within seconds we were flying through the park at a speed that would have been dangerous on a freeway. I glanced out the back window and saw people piling into two other vehicles back outside the house. One of them looked like Lee, but it was getting difficult to see. A moment later the first of the cars started following us. I assumed they were on our side, because Homer seemed quite relaxed, and the words ‘The area’s secured, Pimple,’ had been reassuring for me.
We got to the other side of the park without hitting any fountains, stray dogs or joggers, although joggers wouldn’t have been a big risk at this time of night. But Homer came blasting out of the other side of the park at such a speed that when we tried to take the jump from the footpath to the road, we bottomed out pretty badly. I think the Volvo was kind of low-slung. It didn’t put Homer off one little bit. He did a full racing turn, rocking the thing on its springs so much that I wondered if we might get seasick, but the car did stick to the road well, even if it left most of its rubber on the bitumen. He hit the accelerator again, and the turbo charger kicked in, and away we went, but something was badly wrong underneath, and a horrible clattering, banging, scraping noise had even Gavin looking at me with a puzzled face. I leant across in front of him to see out his window, as the noise seemed to be coming more from his side of the car, and was slightly alarmed to see sparks flying as we raced along at a hundred and something k’s an hour. ‘Homer!’ I yelled, ‘I think you’ve broken something.’
‘I think so too,’ he agreed. He hit the brakes with about as much force as he’d been using on the accelerator. Neither Gavin nor I were wearing safety belts, and we had to grab at the seats in front to avoid going through the windscreen. ‘Let’s abandon this one and hitch a ride,’ Homer suggested, opening his door. We didn’t need a second invitation, but piled out after him and ran back to the next car, which had also stopped. It was a dark blue Holden station wagon. Again Gavin and I got in the back seat, this time with Homer sliding in from the other side. Lee was in the front passenger seat, and who should be driving but my old friend Toddy. That was yet another shock, but only a little one, compared to the sudden appearances of Lee, Homer and, most importantly, Bronte.
‘Hi Ellie,’ Toddy said in a good-natured way, as though we were just passing in the street one Saturday morning as we did our shopping.
‘Hi Toddy,’ I replied, trying to keep the same tone.
Off we went again, and for once I felt more secure with Toddy than I had with Homer. He drove quickly and cleverly, but not outrageously or recklessly. I started to feel a little safer. It would be a long time before I could relax, but I did get the impression that Gavin and I were in pretty good hands. ‘So Bronte’s the Scarlet Pimpernel?’ I asked Homer and Lee.
