Arrival (15 page)

‘Thanks, Mrs Hunter,' said Peter. ‘That would be –' ‘We really should be going,' said Jordan pointedly. ‘Thank you, though.'

Peter sighed.

‘Oh, stop whingeing,' Jordan muttered as we walked our bikes out into the street. ‘There's food in my bag if you're hungry. Have you got the map?'

‘Right here,' said Peter, patting the back pocket of his jeans and putting on his best non-whingeing face.

It only took us about a minute to ride out to the edge of town. At the end of my street were about ten different bike paths and walking trails leading off into the bush. They branched off from a wooden information stand with safety advice and litter warnings and a blown-up version of the map Jordan had been using yesterday. There were other people gathered around the map, figuring out which path they wanted to take.

‘See, this is what people are reduced to when there's no TV,' Peter explained.

Jordan studied the big map for a minute, then pointed at one of the dirt tracks and said, ‘That one. Let's go.'

The track turned out to be a lot rougher and bumpier than the one out to the airport, and a couple of times I almost stacked my bike over a rock or a fallen tree branch. Even so, I had to admit that it was peaceful out here, riding along and watching the scenery go by. Or at least it would've been for someone with normal-sized problems to worry about.

‘How do we know when it's time to turn off?' I asked.

‘There should be a rock formation coming up on the left,' said Jordan, looking up the road. ‘Like a great big boulder with another couple of – look, there it is!'

We stopped at Jordan's pile of rocks and waited a few minutes until we were sure no-one else was coming past. A few other cyclists zoomed past us – full-on bike freaks with streamlined helmets, riding goggles, and skin-tight body suits that left way too little to the imagination.

We must have looked kind of suspicious waiting there by the side of the path because one of them pulled to a stop next to us. He took off his helmet, revealing a familiar orange comb-over.

‘Mr Hanger?' said Jordan, raising an eyebrow.

Mr Hanger shot us all a dangerous look. ‘What are you three doing out here?' he demanded.

Some teachers just never know when to stop being teachers.

‘We're riding our bikes, sir,' said Peter. ‘What does it look like?'

‘Peter, I don't appreciate –' ‘Sir, it's Saturday,' Peter said. ‘You're supposed to be off-duty. Give us a break, will you?'

Mr Hanger snarled. He looked like he was dying to find some way to ruin our day, but I guess he realised there wasn't much he could do to us on the weekend, so he just gritted his teeth and ordered us to stay out of trouble.

‘You should go home and read my new essay, sir,' said Peter as Mr Hanger prepared to leave. ‘It's a real page-turner.'

‘I'll thank you not to tell me how to spend my weekend,' barked Mr Hanger, putting his helmet back on. ‘For your information, those papers have already been marked –
even
those that had to be resubmitted.'

‘Pretty good stuff, huh sir?' said Peter.

‘Yes, much better,' grumbled Mr Hanger, swinging a leg up over his bike and pushing off down the path again.

‘Idiot,' Peter muttered.

We waited until he was fifty metres down the road, and then we slipped away into the trees.

Unfortunately, cutting across through the bush to the main road was not as easy as we expected. It would've been fine if it was just us on foot, but try dragging three bikes through a hundred metres of rocks and branches and fallen trees.

‘You know what?' said Peter as we finally scrambled out by the side of the main road. ‘I'm suddenly feeling a whole lot better about this trip.'

‘Why's that?' I asked him.

‘I just survived seeing Mr Ranga in spandex,' he said. ‘Whatever Crazy Bill wants to show us out here, there's no way it's gonna be scarier than –'

‘Truck!' said Jordan. ‘Quick, get down.'

We crouched behind a bush at the edge of the road as the truck sped past, carrying supplies into town.

‘Should be okay for a while now,' said Peter as we stood up again. ‘There's usually only a couple of trucks a day, tops.'

After almost two weeks of getting around on Phoenix's narrow grey bike paths, it was weird being back on a proper road again. We stuck close to the edge as we rode along, ready to dive back into the bushes if we needed to.

At first, I was constantly craning my neck around, eyes peeled for anything out of the ordinary. But after an hour or more of riding along and seeing nothing but trees, rocks and an endless dusty road, I was sweaty and bored and wondering if we were wasting our time.

Then I started to notice something weird about the road. ‘Do you get the feeling we're riding in circles?' I asked after a long silence.

‘Yeah,' said Peter. ‘One of those long, straight circles.'

‘I'm serious,' I said. ‘I don't think this road is running straight out away from the town. I think it's curving off to the right a bit.'

‘So?' said Peter.

‘So, I don't know yet,' I murmured. ‘Weird though.'

The conversation dropped off again for a while. A couple of times, I thought I heard the sound of other voices coming from off to our right somewhere, but I figured I was just imagining things. Then a bit further up the road, I was distracted by something glinting in the distance, breaking the monotony of the trees.

‘Look.' Peter pointed, noticing it too.

A big metal sign had been put up on the side of the road. We crossed over for a closer look.

‘
Roadwork in progress
,' said Peter, reading aloud. ‘
Authorised vehicles only. No cyclists beyond this point.
For more information, call
– are they kidding? How are we going to call?'

‘Can't see anything up there,' said Jordan, squinting against the sun.

‘Could be further up the road,' Peter suggested.

‘Could be nowhere at all,' I said uneasily. ‘Could be just a convenient way of keeping people away.'

‘Well, they're going to have to do better than that,' said Jordan, riding on again.

We continued up the road for another hour or so, through more of the same dense bushland. My whole body ached. I was starting to think that this might not have been exactly what Dr Montag meant by taking it easy over the weekend. Even though we were riding down a narrow road with eucalyptus trees towering on both sides, the sun still somehow managed to beat its way down to us, and we rode slower and slower as the exhaustion started to kick in.

We took a quick break for lunch, for which Jordan rationed us out one sandwich each, and then we pushed on again. I started to think I'd been right about the roadwork. That warning sign had turned out to be the last evidence of any human activity along the road for ages.

‘It's three-thirty,' said Peter after a while. ‘It'll take us longer to ride back than it did to get here. We should probably think about –'

‘No,' Jordan called back over her shoulder. ‘We can't go back now. We haven't found anything yet.'

‘We've been riding for over
three hours
,' said Peter. ‘What if there's nothing to find? Is it really worth getting caught breaking curfew?'

‘Crazy Bill wouldn't have just sent us out here for no reason,' she insisted.

‘Wouldn't he?' said Peter. ‘I mean, how do we know that? Who knows
what's
going on in that guy's head?'

‘Let's give it another half an hour,' I suggested. ‘At four o'clock, if we still haven't found anything, we can –'

‘Whoa, hold on,' said Jordan, suddenly skidding to a halt. She leapt from her bike and wheeled it off the road, into a little ditch at the edge of the trees.

Peter and I both froze.

‘Quick!' said Jordan, frantically waving us down into the ditch with her.

We dropped our bikes and crouched low in the dirt.

Jordan stuck out a hand and pointed along the road in the direction we'd been heading. ‘Look,' she hissed. ‘There's someone out there.'

Chapter 22

S
ATURDAY
, M
AY
16
89
DAYS

Way off in the distance, two black-uniformed security officers were standing guard in front of a heavy boom gate that stretched out across the road. Both of them were armed. Not with the pistols that all the security guys in town kept holstered to their hips – these guys were carrying giant semi-automatic rifles.

The one closest to us was holding something up to his face.

‘Binoculars,' Jordan breathed. ‘Did they see us?'

The guard's eyes traced a wide, slow semicircle from one side of the road to the other. Then he froze, binoculars pointed almost right at us. I glanced up onto the road and a jolt of panic hit me as I realised how much dust we'd kicked up scrambling into the ditch. A big cloud of it was still hanging in the air.

The guard stared at the cloud. He straightened up and took a step towards us. I pressed my body into the dirt, silently cursing myself for not being more careful riding down the road. But a second later, the guard lowered his binoculars and slouched back down against the end of the boom gate.

‘See? Nothing to worry about,' said Peter, his voice a lot higher than usual. ‘They're just bored. I reckon the most exciting thing they've seen out here today is a kangaroo. Besides, they're just security guards. They wouldn't actually hurt us, right?'

I'm not sure who he thought he was kidding. It felt like my heart had suddenly decided to bust out of my chest and make a run for it. And, all things considered, making a run for it didn't seem like such a bad idea.

‘That's weird,' said Jordan, her eyes locked on the guards.

‘What?'

‘The security guards are only watching this end of the road,' said Jordan. ‘They don't seem too worried about anyone coming from the other direction.'

She was right. Every now and then, one of the guards would turn and look back behind them over the boom gate, but they were clearly more interested in making sure no-one got through from our side.

‘They're guarding something,' I whispered. I straightened up a bit higher against the wall of the ditch, trying to get a better look, but all I could see beyond the boom gate were more trees and more road. I dropped down again as one of the guards reached for something at his belt. But then he lifted his hand and I realised he was just unclipping a water bottle.

‘We'll have to go around,' said Jordan.

‘Yeah,' I said, trying to sound determined instead of terrified. ‘But let's leave the bikes. We'll make too much noise dragging them through the bush again.'

I turned to look at Peter. His expression had suddenly shifted. Obviously his belief that the guards wouldn't hurt us was not something he wanted to test.

‘You coming?' Jordan asked him.

He stared at her for a long time, then gave her a mute little nod.

With Jordan in the lead, we left our bikes lying in the ditch and clambered up the far side. We crept about fifteen metres straight out into the bush, then veered around to the left, wanting to cut as wide a circle as possible around the security guards. But we also needed to stick close enough to the road so that we didn't lose track of how far we'd come and emerge from the trees too early. Which meant that if the guards looked hard enough, they'd probably spot us coming past.

I glanced down at my bright red T-shirt and wished I'd been smart enough to wear clothes that would blend in with the bush. Every time my foot snapped a branch or crunched down on a leaf, I stopped dead, expecting to hear the sound of gunfire ripping through the trees.

It was a completely different kind of fear to what I'd felt at the airport with Crazy Bill. Back there, everything had happened so quickly. It was all a blur of loud noise and flashing torches with no time to absorb any of it. But here in the bush, inching our way painfully slowly between the trees, I had all the time in the world to think about how dead I would be if we were spotted.

As we passed within earshot of the guards, I caught a few snatches of their conversation.

‘…not really what I had in mind when they offered me the job,' one guard was saying.

‘You're not wrong there,' said the other. ‘I dragged the whole family out from Perth on the promise of a new life. And now what? I stand out here guarding an abandoned road all day.'

‘This is temporary though, right?' said the first guard. ‘I had a word with the chief, and he said in a couple of months we'll all be upgraded to more challenging work.'

I glanced over at Jordan, who was biting her lip at this piece of news. I kept moving, trying not to think too hard about what this ‘challenging work' might involve.

Through a gap in the trees, I saw the other guard shrug. He lifted up his binoculars and started peering around into the bush again.

I crouched low behind a tree and saw Jordan and Peter do the same.

‘You ever wonder what they're really doing out here?' the first guard asked. ‘Why they need so many of us?'

‘Nope,' murmured the other, his eyes sweeping across our hiding place. ‘Not my job to ask those sorts of questions.' He dropped the binoculars again and began drumming his fingers on the butt of his rifle, staring into space.

I glanced over at Jordan and cocked my head in the direction of the guards.
Keep moving?

She nodded and we got to our feet again.

We continued like this, parallel with the road, for another fifteen minutes or so – stopping and starting, jumping into hiding at the first sign of danger – until we were sure we'd gotten well away from the security guards.

Away from
those
security guards anyway. For all we knew, there could be a hundred more lurking around out here.