When the sun was high enough to give some heat, she had left the road and made camp in a stand of silver wattle. She bagged a branch with plastic, tied it off. Ate half a ready and drank a little. The fifth morning. Already she could feel the distance accelerating again and fear rising to choke her. Dark pictures in her head. Exhaustion took her down but in sleep she waded through sand and Matti was always just ahead of her, just out of sight across the drift, pushed away by her approach.
In the late afternoon she woke and drank the water she’d harvested, finished the ready and got back on the road. In the last light she saw that the country west of the highway was cropped with millet and murnong, beans and chickpea and kangaroo grass. On the other side, a little way off to the east, was the perimiter fence, and then bush and low brown hills, and somewhere beyond them, the wall. XB Force patrol vehicles a long way way off in the No Go.
Between the highway and the fence was mostly scrub. She passed people setting up camp for the night, spoke to a few of them. They were coming from further north, heading for Port Howell. A family remembered a bus with Agency branding going the other way. There were kids, their son told her. I was waving and waving at them. They invited her to share their camp but as long as there was a clear sky she preferred to keep moving through the coldest hours. It was safer, quieter. The trucks were like clouds blowing past, nothing to do with her.
Walking came easy. Li had walked through her childhood with Val, town to town on the circuit, and after Val she’d just kept walking. The settled years in Nerredin had softened her a bit but she’d got all the blisters she was going to get on the road to Valiant. It was Matti who’d slowed her down. Frank too, if she was truthful. Her makecamp boots had some wearing in to do but that just meant they’d last longer.
When she couldn’t walk any more she slept in the scrub. Broke camp early afternoon on the sixth day and got to Kutha two hours later.
North of Kutha was Kutha’s dump. Plenty of people must have picked through the pile but it seemed like none of them had had a magnet. In under ten minutes she dug out an iron. It was scorched black and the power cord was half melted off but still attached. She stripped the wire for patching supplies. Left the iron on top of the heap for someone who could carry it and kept walking.
More croplands. More greenhouses. Roadside stalls for the passing foot traffic. Close to dusk she came to the bore Rich had told her about, fenced off and guarded by Kutha militia. Trucks had priority. Li joined the foot queue waiting for their turn at the pump. Her waterbag was still almost full from the top-up at Kutha but she drank deep, peeled off the filthy gloves and ran water over her hands, soothing the tight, itchy skin. Rinsed her face carefully, trying not to wet the bandage. Rich had told her to leave it on as long as possible after the blisters cracked, to stop dirt getting in, keep the sun and the flies off. She couldn’t afford to let it get infected.
That night was clear and bright again, but she was moving more slowly; it was getting harder to walk through. She rested periodically but didn’t let herself fall asleep. Looked into the darkness beyond the fence, trying to picture the wall and all those sheltered people sleeping behind it. What was in their nightmares? People like her?
Footsore, before light on the seventh day, she passed another empty farmhouse. Remnant fencelines and then the hulking ruin of a cattle container. Dry bores and collapsing windmills, a skeleton ute with all the useable parts salvaged. It reminded her of West. She needed to stop but the empty houses didn’t tempt her, too much risk of ambush. She made camp. Singed the skin of a sawn-off roo tail and laid it in the ashes of her fire. While it cooked she cleaned her knife and stropped it on her belt. There was plenty of fresh roadkill along the highway at night, feral dogs and rabbits as well as roos. Quicker than trapping. She and Val used to get a feed of roo or wallaby pretty regularly. She hadn’t seen a wallaby in a long time.
The sense of time passing intensified when she lay down. There was the work of not imagining what Matti was thinking, whether she thought Li was coming for her. Sooner or later her body’s need for sleep would keep her brain quiet, but first she had to run back over everything she’d heard in Kutha, everything that told her she was on the right track, that Matti was safe at the barracks by now. Safer. But even in Kutha there were things to trip her up. Couldn’t swear they did a headcount getting them back on the bus.
The trick was to slide slideways into other memories. But they didn’t always help either. Like the revolving
