The Bunker
MAZ
Maz is reading Katie Morag and the Big Boy Cousins to Ned and Luca, and the cousins are being quite naughty. Ned and Luca are transfixed, particularly by their mummy’s weird accents. It is eerily quiet outside. The timer on the wall says forty-five minutes and is ticking loudly. They will run out of air in three-quarters of an hour, and the fire hasn’t come yet. Perhaps it won’t, Maz is thinking, but as she turns the page they all hear an explosion.
‘What’s that?’ Luca is trying to look at the glass hatch above their square chamber, which was blackness a moment ago and is now a rainbow of reds and oranges. And a fist, knocking.
Maz and Ciara turn their boys’ heads away and cover their ears. They almost screwed up back there with Chook and Tricia; they will not turn around.
Maz is trying to read Katie Morag but she can’t help it and looks. There’s a boy knocking on the hatch. He has a plaster on his nose. There are two others with him, knocking:
Help, help us. Please, it’s me. Let me in, let us in.
It’s getting very hot, difficult to breathe, and the sky has changed colour and she can’t hear a thing: that’s right, she remembers, it’s time to shut the hatch. Maz reaches up and closes it so the boys’ faces disappear. 191
‘Let’s lie down, babies, let’s lie face down for a few minutes. If we put our ears to the ground maybe we’ll be able to hear someone talking in rainy old Leeds.’
The knocking may well have stopped, but Maz can’t hear it now. Her face is pressed against concrete and the heat is unbearable and the noise is terrible and the clock is ticking and the boys are sobbing and so is Ciara because the bunker is shaking.
‘It’s the storm, honey bunches,’ says Maz, holding three heads down with her arms, ‘just the storm.’
The Red Lion
PETE
‘Time to get inside,’ Pete is yelling. A motley crew has been hosing and sprinkling, and stamping and filling buckets and wetting towels and sheets and blankets and cloths, but now it is time to retreat.
Everyone is in the bar but Pete and Lion Henry, who’s hosing the roof. ‘Get down now!’ Pete yells, holding the ladder.
Henry isn’t coming down fast enough. He’s halfway when something hits him and catches his shorts. He stamps the flames with his hand, and he gets it, phew, but then he’s hit in the socks and in the chest, again, and again.
Pete isn’t sure if Henry explodes or if that’s what it looks like to be on fire.
He is now inside the bar, and sliding the lock. 192
Pete takes a moment, unlocks the door again, and turns around.
There are fifteen people in the bar, and while they are all looking at him, it may be more to do with the fact that he is smoking, all of him, literally, and not because they all know he just tried to lock out a bushfire.
No-one is asking about Henry Gallagher either, not even his wife Shirley, who hasn’t been spotted outside her house for decades, and yet is here on the floor and cradling a shaking lamb.
Sami and Perla are dousing Pete then shoving wet towels in the cracks of the door.
Mohammed and Craig are wetting the walls and windows with cloths.
Verity O’Leary is wanting to drown out the noise by putting money in the jukebox but the power is off and Giang from the supermarket is giving #CommuterKid from Shitboxville a free pot of blackcurrant and lemonade with ice because his #CommuterMum and #CommuterDad are busy filling buckets.
The Old Railtrack
DANTE
Dante didn’t regret punching his father. The guy was going to die if he didn’t get a move on. The church doors had been locked since the ceremony and, after many attempts to get in, everyone had fled. Against his advice, many had chosen their cars and turned south onto North Road, stopping soon 193after to remain there, some of them U-turning to head north and stopping soon after to remain there. There was no access in or out of the town and no-one could see a thing now, everything was smoke.
A few of the guests had chosen to take refuge in the adjacent presbytery but Dante was not into that decision and neither was Von. It was one huge pile of dried-out weatherboard tinder, that place.
The flames had reached the Ryan buildings; they were coming. He couldn’t see anything except The Boarder, who he pulled from the ground.
‘Get to the car,’ he said to Vonny, who was with Emily the Bride, and the four of them ran across the road to the car, which was still parked opposite the first oak. Poor Garibaldi, he was shaking as Dante revved the engine. He sped along the nature strip, swerving to break through the fence across from the church.
‘Where are we going?’ The Bride in the back said, as if she wanted hashtags for the selfies she’d been taking only five minutes ago.
His mum had made him walk this route many times, so he knew it well. There were no buildings, hardly any trees. It was safe apart from the fire that was approaching from the north-west. The wheels hit the tracks, and Dante turned left, getting it wrong a few times before settling between the lines. They were now heading north-east, but not fast enough. He pressed the accelerator to the ground.
‘What the fuck?!’ The Bride said.
‘What the fuck?!’ The Boarder, his father, said.
Vonny knew where they were going. They should go off the tracks soon. ‘There, we don’t need eyes, that’s it,’ she said, ‘slow down here and get off.’ 194
Dante headed off the tracks and up the bare hill.
They were about to make it, so close, but the four-wheel-drive blew a tyre, swerved, and stopped halfway up the hill, the flames closer now, and coming straight for them.
‘Okay guys,’ Dante said, his dog tucked under his shirt and blanket, ‘so we have to get out and run through the flames to a burnt area – in that direction.’ He pointed at the oncoming fire. ‘It’ll feel wrong but if you cover yourself and bolt, it’s not. As fast as you can. It’s the end of the line, it’s thin, we can do it. There are blankets behind the chairs, got them?’
They had one each.
‘Are you ready Von?’
‘Aha,’ Vonny said, turning to The Bride in the back, and noticing her heels, shit. There were no spare shoes in the car. She grabbed her veil and pulled it off. ‘You ready?’
‘Yeah,’ said The Bride.
Then to The Boarder: ‘You?’
‘Okay.’
The four of them grabbed a door handle each.
‘On the count of three,’ said Dante.
McBean House
BOARDER #3
‘Dyke bitches,’ Boarder #3 is saying. He and his best mates, Boarders #1 and #2, have just sprinted from the bunker to the house. 195
Boarder #1 is there first, and opens the shutters enough to slide the glass window, so the three of them can crawl inside.
There are embers on the living-room floorboards. Boarder #3 is slapping them with his thong while Boarder #1 is opening the outside shutter and closing the glass.
Boarder #2 unplugs his earphone and the song he’s listening to plays from his phone: ‘The Ballroom Blitz’.
The shutter has now reached the top. The trio stand in line at the glass windows, mesmerised by the view. Flashes of red and orange and yellow colour the sky and their eyes. Several fires are interacting up there.
Boarder #1 can’t take his eyes off the big one at the back, which joins forces with the others and it’s on.
Embers are shooting at the house, pounding the glass.
The boys find each other’s hands, and take another step back.
The Water Tank
ROSIE
Flip forward if you must, but my death will be much more satisfying if you don’t. Won’t be long, promise.
That’s right, it’s me, Rosie, in the water tank. Dad just called me, thank God. He’s on speakerphone and his words are echoing.
‘Tell me about the fete.’
I can’t hide it. I’m finding it hard to think about the fete, I keep flipping forward to now, but who can blame me. 196
‘So we’re all playing a game,’ Dad tells me; he says he and the girls are under the kitchen table playing I-spy. Cathy’s spying something beginning with L, and Amy is guessing leg but not whose or which leg, so she’s specifying your leg, which is correct, but no-one is giggling.
‘So I had the perfect day,’ I say. ‘Imagine, in this heat. I won on the spinning wheel, Cathy, free highlights at the Palm Tree Unisex Hairdressing Salon, we could go together. And Vonny taught us all a song that’s from a lost Aboriginal language, Inanay, you can never even try to know what it might mean.’
I can hear that Harriet is spying smoke and that Amy is spying something hitting the windows and that Cathy is too hot to spy and is saying Our Father who art in Heaven Hallowed be Thy Name.
‘How much water is in there, baby?’ Dad says.
I lean out of the deflating dinghy, and put my finger in the simmering water. It hurts but I don’t want him to know. ‘Dunno.’
‘You should maybe get out of there? Make a run for it? Head for the house?’
His voice is quivering and the kids are crying and it’s noisy where they are. He knows I am going to die and that he is too, and that so is Cathy and so are Amy and Harriet and all I can think to say is, ‘I love you.’
‘You’re so resourceful, baby girl. I love you.’
The phone is dead.
I don’t have long to be resourceful, and I am not good at it till the very end, as you will see. The water is boiling now, 197the sky is roaring, and there is nothing to paddle with but my arms, which I decide against because the dinghy is melting anyway. I sacrifice feet and calves and get into the bubbly water. I scream a lot. I’m not brave, but I make it the three steps needed so I can take hold of the smouldering ladder with my hands.
Oil rags are firing at me from above and I can no longer feel my legs or hands and the heat no longer feels like heat. I am yelling a lot and have only made it one third of the way up the ladder. I can’t go any further, my hands may even be stuck, and my feet, why did I take my shoes off. Another missile. They are attacking from above, landing in the water, landing in the dinghy, knocking Dante’s Esky off its ledge, landing in my hair. I scrape a hand off a rung, grab the piece of burning bark in my hair and throw it into the tank. It works.
Dante’s stash is on fire.
I fall back and land in the deflated dinghy. I have probably broken bones already, but not my nose, it’s above water. I inhale the weed and the other smoke as hard as I can, which isn’t very. There is a circle of black above me, black and red.
You’ve caught up. It’s happening, now, and while I may be resourceful, it’s still the worst death imaginable. 198