The morning sunlight lay heavy on the backs of their necks. Patches of vegetation were giving way to long stretches of umber earth, punctuated by tufts of thorny brush and a sky so wide and blue it stung the eyes. Dettie was driving faster, more aggressively, overtaking other motorists and gunning the accelerator, but the pulse and sway of the car, sweeping across lanes, grumbling back into place, was oddly soothing. Jon and Katie were soon asleep again in the back seat, each slumped over, mouths agape. Sam watched the few trees that still peppered the horizon slash by. Many were tall, ashen tangles of branches, all erupting at once from ground level, as though their trunks had been sucked down into a dried-over riverbed, choked and seized in place.
The radio was on but turned low. Dettie kept one ear tilted to listen. When the news reports came on she would raise the volume slightly, her fingers clenching the dial from the moment the intro played until the sign-off trumpeted its way back to the music playlist.
At first Sam had been thinking about how clearly he had heard his mother’s voice—how peculiar it had been, as though she had crawled momentarily out of his mind, spoken, and then disappeared. It reminded him of the zombie comic. How the woman had heard the zombie’s shadowy howls across the distant hills, echoing, but clear. He was tired of reading the comic, though, and his eyes were heavy in the warmth, so he just lay back in his seat, occasionally practising his name back to himself—pinkies, thumb, palm: Sam. Otherwise he just let the noise of the news drift over him, his gaze tracing across the same details of the car’s cabin he’d been staring at for days.
The radio’s hushed patter carried on, Dettie’s face clenching into a panicked scowl whenever the news anchor spoke. A government official was reminding everyone of the strength and severity of the fire front. It was not to be underestimated at any cost, he was saying. There were still fire-fighting volunteers travelling in from other states, but more were needed.
Sam knew every millimetre of the car’s cabin by now. The tear in the dashboard, its split plastic exposing an eruption of yellow foam. The floor mat beneath his feet, still marked with a lick of dried mud. The five-cent coin jiggling in the ashtray.
A farmer who had lost his property was being interviewed, his voice catching as he spoke. ‘So fast,’ he sobbed. ‘No time to get the cattle out.’
The steering wheel was worn down in the grooves where Dettie had rubbed her thumbs over the years. A starfish crack at the edge of the window was lit gold by the sun.
A family had been reported missing—Dettie’s hand shook on the dial, the volume dipping—after their holiday house was consumed at a caravan park. She let the sound rise again.
A single slat on the passenger side air vent was broken, slanted against the force of the fan gushing against it. The paddle-pop boomerang was marked with the indents of teeth.
Once the weather report was over—a total fire ban was in place, record temperatures expected—the music returned and Dettie lowered the volume, releasing the stereo knob and straightening herself to glare at the road ahead.
Sam felt the same itchy upholstery against his elbows as he lifted the hem of his T-shirt and directed the breeze onto his belly. He could barely remember a time when his body wasn’t resonating with the ride, the car vibrating its persistent, deadening thrum beneath and through him.
Up ahead on the road, yet another mound of roadkill was emerging from the haze. It was a large kangaroo, torn open at the stomach. Two crows were perched on its flank, feasting. As the car sped by he saw one digging its beak into the wound like a knife. For the first time Sam didn’t feel a lurch of revulsion at the sight. In fact, when he thought about it, it didn’t seem that horrible anymore. With the stories of fires raging out there somewhere—people missing, animals being burnt alive, the numb fear in people’s voices as they spoke into the reporter’s microphone—the remains of some creature on the road wasn’t so scary by comparison. It seemed natural, actually. The kangaroo was already long dead. The birds and ants and bugs needed to feed.
For all of her eccentricities, Dettie was right about one thing: they were out in the wild now. And there were worse things to worry about than a chunk of dead meat. Beside him, she shook her head ever so slightly to herself. A tiny involuntary twitch, persisting as she dug her thumbs into the grooves they had already worn into the steering wheel. She spurred the engine on.