Burning for Revenge (26 page)

So I started doing a few things to improve the atmosphere. I chucked a few flowers in vases and put them through the house. I raided some neighbourhood fruit trees, and made a fruit salad. Just stuff like that. It felt very weird in one way, to be doing these things in the middle of a war zone. But in this war there were no rules. We made it up as we went along. The whole thing was surreal, and you had to accept that as early as possible, or you were in trouble.

I also started talking more, which probably sounds weird, but with the pressure of Kevin's problems, and the terror and wild thrills of the airfield attack, we'd all done much less talking. Now, in the relative safety of Grandma's, we were having more conversations, but not enough. Fi and I had always talked, though still not much lately, and Homer and Lee talked a bit. They had a lot of respect for each other these days. No one really talked to Kevin.

So I tried to be more outgoing. I remember Robyn saying once "Talking about yourself can be selfish or generous." When I asked what she meant, she said: "If you never talk about yourself, about your problems and stuff, that's selfish, because you're not giving your friends a chance to help you. And if you talk about yourself all the time, you're selfish and boring."

I was still conscious though of the way Lee attacked me over my comment to Kevin. "Ellie, why do you use that primary-school-teacher voice," or whatever he'd said. Ouch. Robyn had been good without making a big thing of it. I mean she wasn't good all the time—hardly—but when she was nice to people, it seemed natural. With me it didn't always come out that way. Maybe because I wasn't naturally nice. I hoped that wasn't the reason.

What I'm saying is, I didn't go around being Pollyanna, or a refugee from the Brady Bunch. I wasn't, like, "Hi everybody, how are we today, isn't it great to be alive?" I'm not that stupid. But I did try to be not quite so into myself. And that's all I want to say about that.

Suddenly, one day, the motorbike soldiers appeared. They were scary. They hunted in packs of four at a time,
and they threatened us in ways that jeep patrols and foot patrols never could. For one thing, they were so quick, suddenly appearing at the end of the street. For another, they were very mobile, able to go up and down driveways and across lawns and gardens. For a third, they were professionals.

They came through West Stratton every two or three days, and we learnt to fear them. Luckily the fence around the back garden was high and solid, so from the front, or the driveway, no one could see the work we'd done cleaning up the place. But it'd be a dead giveaway if they ever got off the bikes and came in. All Kevin's spadework looked highly suspicious. So we rushed to disguise the work, covering the soil with leaf litter as though it had been blowing down for months, sticking dead things back in the earth to hide the new growth, unstaking the vegetables and letting them sprawl again. And we put in a homemade alarm system, a string trailing from the peppercorn to the kitchen window, so the person on sentry could alert the others. Each time a patrol appeared we only had about thirty seconds to shut down—that's how quick they were.

I felt the war was closing in on us again. We made the decision to stop calling Colonel Finley. We tried four nights in a row, then skipped two, then tried for another two, then quit. It spooked us all to stop, but it would have spooked us more to keep going. All we ever got was the static, the funny static, not normal at all. It sounded just too electronic for me. It made me even more paranoid than normal.

My efforts to be more involved, more outgoing, improved some things I think. Homer said I was easier to get on with. Maybe everyone was trying harder. Despite the new tensions there were more jokes than we'd had for a while, more conversation about stuff other than the war. It sure was a relief to hear that.

But one thing didn't change. Lee still went wandering at night. I didn't like it at all. I didn't like my fears about what might be happening, what he might be doing. Some instinct told me he was getting into danger, going too close to the edge, taking physical risks, and maybe other risks as well.

He didn't go every night, only every second or third night. Sometimes he came home exhausted, sometimes grim and tensed up, sometimes pleased with himself. But always there was that sense of alertness, something powerful being suppressed. Whichever mood he was in made me edgy. I had a dream where he was a panther leaping out of trees and grabbing babies and swinging them onto his back, then streaking away. When I woke up and lay there remembering it, I couldn't work out if he was saving the babies or taking them away to eat.

Of course my real fear was that he was staging one-man raids, launching attacks on enemy soldiers. At some dark level I imagined him as a silent killer, stalking the streets, savagely striking people down from behind: a dangerous panther.

So I started following him. Not like a detective. I don't think I'm being dishonest when I say that: I wasn't trying to stick my nose into his business. It was more what I said before: he didn't have parents any more and it made me more—I don't want to say the word but I will—more protective.

I followed him three times. The first two were a wipeout. I lost him badly; once when I let him get too far ahead, and once when a small convoy of trucks cut between us, and I had to wait for them to pass. By the time they'd gone Lee was nowhere to be seen.

The third time was very different. It was a cool clear night, refreshing after a long hot day. No sign of the storm I was walking into. A light breeze tickled my face, whispered against it, except I didn't hear its message. Lee was a shadow in the distance, a movement between buildings, somehow not a person any more, certainly not the person I'd come to know so well during this long year. I couldn't think where he might be going. I couldn't work it out. The night before, when the first rumbles of the convoy came down the street, Lee seemed disinterested. He didn't even look around, just increased his speed and faded into a dark patch at the end of the block. I don't know where he went after that, but if he was staging a private guerilla war surely he would have taken a good look at the trucks of the convoy.

Nothing though. Nothing at all.

On this night there was no convoy. We followed a different route from the other two nights but after half a dozen blocks I realised we were heading in the same general direction. At Halliday Road, which is one of the main exits from Stratton, he swung right and went straight on out of town. By then we'd covered a couple of kilometres already and I began wondering how long this trip would be. Whatever, it was obvious he had a definite purpose. This wasn't just a vague wander around.

We walked another two kilometres. I was getting worried that out here, where it was flat, he might hear me, or even see me if he looked around. On the other hand, I could now afford to drop back further, which made it easier. All I needed was a glimmer of him, a tiny human smudge on the pupils of my eyes. Once in a while a noise came, a slither of a foot on a wet slope or a rattle of loose gravel. I hoped I wasn't making any noise he could hear, and I hoped no one else heard the sounds he made.

When he did change direction, my ears gave me the clue. I heard the softer sound of his boots on bitumen and I stopped and looked up quickly. I was closer to him than I'd realised and I had to duck down again in case he noticed. But he crossed the road swiftly, walked another ten metres, then opened a gate and went into a paddock.

He closed the gate behind him. He seemed to know his way so surely. He'd obviously been here a few times before. Why? If he was haunting the countryside, attacking and killing, he would hardly keep coming back to the same place. And he would take much more care, looking around more often, stopping and waiting every once in a while. He seemed dangerously overconfident.

I eased myself through the gate. There was a name on it, "Karen Downs," so it was obviously a property. It gave me a shock because there was a girl called Karen Downs at school. She always beat me at Computer Scrabble. The coincidence between the names distracted me for a moment and when I looked up I realised I'd lost Lee again. It was so frustrating. Seconds ago he'd been moving towards a gap in a long row of pines—a windbreak—and now he'd disappeared among the shadows. I couldn't tell if he was standing in the gap or if he'd gone right or left. Or, in fact, gone straight through the trees and was now well on his way across the second paddock.

I stopped for a minute, watching and waiting. When I couldn't see any movement I moved closer, walking slowly and carefully, crouching to keep my profile as low as possible. I stopped every few metres, scanning the treeline with my ears. There was nothing, just the constant hissing of the leaves, and, back towards the road, the purring of a boobook owl.

I dropped even lower. I'd almost forgotten I was stalking Lee. It was getting more and more like an operation against the enemy. I was as nervous as if I were spying on them. For those last ten metres into the treeline I was pretty much on my belly, wriggling through the grass like a tiger snake. I just hoped I didn't find a big wet fresh cowpat with mv bare hands. The grass was wet with dew already.

Once in the treeline I stopped again and listened. A car went past on the road, at high speed. In this silence you could hear it from ages away, both coming—and going. It was using headlights, but I was too far from the road to be threatened by them.

After its noise faded at last I stood and listened again. There was nothing. If stars made a noise then I would have been deafened by their singing, because the heavens were lit from one'end to the other, crammed with stars. There were some parts where you couldn't imagine how another star could squeeze in. But unless the wind was the voice of the stars I had to assume they were silent, because the wind was all I could hear.

I started getting angry. Had I come all this way for nothing? Why was I here anyway? What the hell was Lee doing, running some kind of private war? He had no right. And was I doing something sneaky and horrible, turning into a spy? Or was it something important and understandable? I knew Fi or Corrie would never do anything like this. Oddly enough, I had a feeling Robyn might; that she'd at least understand my motivation.

Well, as usual, I was just going to have to make my own judgements.

I stood up, very cautiously, and looked around. As I did, the faintest movement caught my eye and I thought I saw Lee's dark shape disappearing over the rise in the next paddock. An instant later and it was gone. I threw caution away, went over the fence, and ran like crazy. I realised fairly quickly that he must be on the driveway, a well-made dirt road going into the property, not overgrown at all. I figured from its smoothness that it was getting a fair bit of use, which of course made me all the more curious and worried.

But I kept running, till I got near the top of the rise. Then I hurried on crouched over, my heart accelerating with every step, my eyes trying to search ahead in the darkness, with only the starlight to help.

The next paddock was the home paddock: you entered it either by a gate, for stock, or, next to it, a cattle grid, for vehicles. Beyond those were the buildings. You've seen one farm, you've seen them all, and yet every farm's different. This one had a modem brick veneer-type farmhouse that would have looked more at home in the suburbs. To the left the blue water of a swimming pool caught the reflection of the stars. There were quite a few bushes and shrubs, but I couldn't see any garden.

Further to the left were the sheds and silos and kennels and chook yards. That's where Lee was heading. I could see him more clearly now. He went quickly and confidently along the southern side of a big machinery shed. He was easily visible against the silvery galvanised wall. I kept parallel with him, but a long way apart, staying in the shadows of the treeline that bordered the paddock. When he reached the end of the shed he set out towards a big wooden building, that was dark and old, and pretty dilapidated.

Lee was halfway to it when something happened that caused every hair on my body to stand in its follicle. My scalp felt like someone had run 240 volts through it. My mouth opened so wide I didn't seem able to shut it again. I just could not believe what I was seeing.

From out of the old barn someone was walking towards Lee. They met in the clear ground between the barn and the galvanised shed. She was tall with long flowing black hair and she moved like a snake, like she was all muscle and no bone. They met. They put their arms around each other. They kissed.

After a few minutes they separated and walked towards the barn, not holding hands, but staying close to each other. The blood came back into my body. I watched every move they made. As they merged into the shadows of the building the girl paused and looked around, quite searchingly. She hesitated for several moments, then I think Lee, who was already inside, must have called her, because she turned suddenly as though answering someone, and went on into the darkness of the doorway.

I was in shock. It was like someone had come up behind me and hit me over the head with a baseball bat. And I was outraged. Outraged by everything, including the fact that Lee hadn't even bothered to look around, to check the area. He'd grown as careless as that. The girl was more careful than him.

The blood was running through my veins again but I had no idea what to do. Or if I should do anything. I couldn't move. My mouth was still open but I don't think any air came in. I was mesmerised, like a hypnotised chook.

And it was that which saved my life. My stillness meant that the men converging on the barn didn't see me.

I don't know what I first noticed. A twitch out of the corner of my eye. I remember frowning and turning my head slowly, suddenly feeling I was going to see more than a falling twig or a hungry owl. And I was right about that. In the next three seconds I saw four men. They were moving very slowly and carefully towards the barn. I looked to the other side, but thankfully, saw no one. This was a frontal attack, it seemed. Maybe there wasn't even a door at the back of the barn.