Fear Is the Rider (10 page)

Fifteen minutes later they hit the sandstorm.

It whipped up in seconds. Some freak of wind across the desert spun the dust from among the stones then flung it in a long wide streak towards the southern horizon. It rose so quickly that Shaw drove into it at a hundred and twenty kilometres an hour. Instantly he couldn't see beyond the bonnet of the Honda. He took his foot off the accelerator and stamped on the brake.

The Honda pulled to one side as it slowed down and the wheels dropped off the line of gibbers. Shaw and Katie could feel the underside of the car grating on the stones. The storm cleared for a moment and Shaw pulled the driving wheels back onto the gibber ridges, then the dust closed in on them again.

‘I can't drive in this. I can't see.'

‘Neither can he,' said Katie. ‘Keep going. We can't be far from that hotel.'

The speedometer was showing less than ten kilometres an hour.

‘He'll roll over us in minutes at this rate!'

‘He can't go any faster than we can.'

‘No,' Shaw shouted. ‘You don't understand. We can't go any faster than him. He'll keep going flat out until he hits the dust. Then he'll be just behind us. If we get stuck on these bloody stones he'll be on us in moments.'

‘Then we'll get out and run,' said Katie. She turned and looked behind. There was nothing but dust. Red rolling dust behind, in front, to the sides.

At times Shaw couldn't even see the track in front of him. Momentarily the dust would clear and he'd be able to see fifty metres ahead, then it would close in again and he was driving blind. He found he could feel his way along the gibber ridges, but only by driving terribly slowly. He looked at the speedometer. Five kilometres an hour!

As the dust cleared he accelerated. Up to fifty, sixty. But always at the terrible risk of sliding off the ridges as the storm closed in again.

‘How long will this last?'

‘How the hell would I know?' Katie was very frightened. ‘Could be minutes. Could be days.'

They were blinded now and the Honda slipped off the ridges and stopped.

‘Jesus God,' muttered Shaw. He wrenched the steering wheel to the right and accelerated. The front wheels took again, slowly climbed the ridges and the Honda crept forward.

Both of them kept looking behind, always expecting the bulk of the Land Cruiser to loom out of the dust. But they couldn't even see beyond the windscreen. They couldn't remember how long they'd been driving in the storm and for all they knew the thing could have been right behind them.

The storm swirled so thickly that Shaw couldn't see out the front windscreen. Even the bonnet of the Honda was lost. The car was barely moving, the motor racing in first gear, and the smell of burning rose from the tortured clutch.

Then suddenly it cleared and they could see a hundred metres to the front and sides.

‘Look!' shouted Katie.

To the right just on the edge of visibility was a series of mounds, too regular to be natural, with some sort of wooden structures beside them.

The dust came down again.

‘Did you see it? Did you see it?'

‘What?' said Shaw. ‘What was it?'

‘The truck. There's a truck there.'

‘I just saw the mounds. I didn't see a truck.'

‘There's a truck there, I tell you. There's a truck. That's an opal mine. I saw a truck there. There's men down there. Don't you understand?'

‘I didn't see any truck.'

‘There's one there, I tell you.'

The dust lifted again and Shaw saw it.

A large earth-moving truck, parked near one of the mounds, barely a hundred metres away.

‘Get over there quick! There's men down those mines.'

Obediently Shaw swung the Honda off the track and immediately it stopped. The gibbers were too big and loose here and the Honda wouldn't take them. The driving wheels spun helplessly against the large stones.

‘Get out and run!' yelled Katie. She had her door open and was out of the car before Shaw made up his mind whether he agreed or not. He grabbed the gun from where he had thrust it in the back of the Honda and followed her. He couldn't remember whether he had reloaded it or not.

‘Katie!' he called. But she was twenty metres ahead of him and the dust was closing in. He could barely see the truck. Then it was gone. He could still see the mounds of mullock above the opal mines. Katie was heading directly for them. He went after her. Was the gun loaded? He had cartridges in his trouser pockets. He ran awkwardly, holding the gun so that the barrel pointed backwards, away from Katie.

She had reached the first of the mounds and he caught up with her in a few seconds.

‘Down below!' she said. ‘Down below. Can you hear me?'

In the centre of the mound was a hole about a metre in diameter, neatly drilled into the earth. An iron ladder ran down it. Above it was a hand windlass and a rope ran down from the winding bar into the centre of the hole. At one side of the windlass hung an iron triangle. Attached to the triangle by a length of wire was a short iron bar. It was obviously a signalling device.

Shaw grabbed the iron bar and beat at the triangle. The clang rang through the rustling of the dust-laden wind. He beat the bar again and again.

‘Down below!' he shouted. ‘Can you hear us? We need help!'

There was only the sound of the desert wind.

‘Try the next one,' said Katie.

There was another mound a few metres away, but the dust was so thick now they could barely see it. They crossed over to it, the flying particles of sand tearing at their eyes. It was the same as the first one except that there was no sounding triangle.

Shaw leaned forward over the hole.

‘Below!' he shouted. ‘Is there anyone below?'

Only the sound of the wind.

The storm swirled away from them for a moment and Shaw saw the truck not twenty metres to the right. A desperate thought speared his mind.

‘That truck! Quick. Come over.'

He ran across to the truck unconsciously taking Katie's hand with his left hand and holding the gun in his right.

They knew before they reached the truck.

They tyres were flat and the window on the driver's side of the cabin was broken.

It had been abandoned.

For years in the dry, unresting desert it had stood there perched in time to be their destruction.

‘It's all empty,' said Katie. ‘The whole place is deserted. There's no one here.'

Shaw shook his head and tried to speak but his mouth was dry and full of dust. He tried to spit but couldn't.

He looked around for the Honda, still holding Katie's hand. He couldn't see it. Visibility was no more than fifty metres and he couldn't see the track of the Honda or anything except the mounds of mullock rising around the old opal mines.

‘I think it's over there,' said Katie, pointing into the obscurity of the dust.

Irrationally Shaw wanted to blame her for making him leave the Honda in the first place.

‘It could be anywhere. We'll have to wait until the dust lifts. There's no point in just blundering around in this.'

‘But…but…'

Shaw knew what she wanted to say. The Land Cruiser was lumbering through the dust, now surely almost upon them. When the dust lifted would they see the square ironclad vehicle already upon the Honda?

He broke open the shotgun and saw the brass gleam of the two cartridges.

‘We're all right while we've got this,' he said. But he didn't believe it.

‘We can't just wait here,' said Katie.

‘We can't do anything else. We don't know where the Honda is and anyway…it's stuck, remember. We'll have to see if this clears. He won't know where we are.'

They stood together in the stinging dust staring uselessly into the red cloud that surged and faded and surged again, filling their world, granting them a brief glimpse of stretches of empty desert then closing in again.

‘Come and get up on top of one of those mullock heaps,' said Shaw. ‘We might be able to see better from there.'

They walked across to the nearest mullock heap and clambered to the top of it. There was a windlass and a ladder going down into the ground but the frayed rope dangling from the windlass eliminated even the forlorn hope that it might be a working mine.

From the top they stared into the dust, seeking some sign of the Honda or even the track.

‘The track's got to be that way,' said Katie, pointing to what she thought was the south. ‘It has to be south. The sun's over there somewhere.' You could tell where the sun was by the brighter glare in the dust overhead to the west. ‘So that has to be south. If we walk that way we have to hit the track.'

‘It bends all over the place,' said Shaw. ‘We could walk for miles without hitting it.'

‘But we'd hit it eventually. Then we could walk to the hotel.'

‘Don't leave your car,' the policeman had said. ‘Whatever happens, don't leave your car.'

‘The sun would kill us if this dust cleared,' said Shaw, not adding that he thought the dust would kill them soon anyway.

‘It'll be dark soon,' said Katie, gesturing at the glare in the dust. ‘We can walk in the dark, the hotel can't be far.'

Shaw looked at his watch.

‘The sun won't go down for an hour,' he said, ‘and if the dust clears he'll be able to see us miles away, walking.'

‘But…' Katie wanted to argue, but there was no argument. ‘So what do we do?'

‘We wait here until the dust clears,' said Shaw.

‘But it mightn't clear for days.'

‘It might be worth trying for the hotel when it does get dark,' said Shaw. ‘We can keep heading south as you said until we hit the track, if we can work out where south is in the dark.'

‘For God's sake let's start walking now!'

Shaw hesitated.

‘It could be thirty or forty kilometres to the hotel,' he said.

‘We can walk that in a night. Before dawn.'

‘Then let's wait until dark.'

‘But you just said we won't know the direction in the dark. The sun's the only point we've got.'

‘Oh Christ,' said Shaw, ‘you could be right. Let me think.'

But then he stopped thinking because he saw the figure of a man walking towards them through the dust fifty metres away, a tall man, black against the glare of the sinking dust-shrouded sun.

Shaw raised the shotgun.

‘There he is!'

‘Shoot him! Shoot him!'

Shaw almost pulled the trigger but the inhibition of a lifetime enmeshed him.

‘We're not sure that's him,' he said helplessly, lowering the gun.

‘Of course it's him. Who else could it be? Shoot him. Shoot him!'

Still Shaw hesitated. The figure moving slowly towards them was nothing more than a shape, a silhouette of a man. By a grotesque coincidence it could be somebody other than the man who was hunting them, someone from the hotel perhaps, another chance traveller.

Then he saw the axe clearly, held half raised in the man's right hand.

‘It is him,' muttered Shaw and raised the gun again.

The man was barely forty metres away, exposed to a shotgun that scattered a circle of heavy pellets a few metres in diameter. Shaw waited as the figure stalked slowly towards them, drifts of dust now and then almost obscuring him.

Shaw pulled back the hammers of the shotgun. The man paused, staring towards them it seemed.

Shaw pulled the first trigger.

The hammer clicked home, but nothing else happened. The cartridge had not exploded.

Aghast, Shaw pulled the other trigger. The same thing.

But there were cartridges in the barrels. He had seen them.

Then he realised that what he had seen were the exploded cartridges left in the barrels after Katie had fired at the truck back among the rocks.

Shaw didn't allow himself the energy for the obscenity that almost reached his lips. He broke the gun, pulled out the cartridges, fumbled in his pockets for two more, thrust them into the barrels, closed the gun, cocked the hammers and raised the weapon once more.

But now he could see nothing ahead of the squat blunt sights but the red rolling dust with sun shining through it.

‘Oh Christ! Oh Christ! Oh Christ!' said Shaw. He wouldn't have known himself whether it was prayed or a curse.

The dust closed in around them and Shaw, wildly swinging the barrel of the shotgun, could barely see past the sights. Somewhere in the dust was the man with the axe, moving towards them.

The eccentric wind kept clearing the dust momentarily so that they could see a few metres, then swept in around them in opaque sheets.

They were being choked and blinded but they didn't dare move for they didn't know where the man was. They turned in slow circles, Katie automatically keeping behind Shaw as he swung the gun around ready to blast at the first sign of anything moving towards them.