Wildfire (13 page)

Sixty kilometres to the south, unaware that the train had already been searched and their parents were not aboard after all, Ben and Kelly were risking the last of their fuel flying to intercept it.

The fire in Adelaide was spreading. Wanasri and the crew of Engine 33 watched the paramedics load a woman on a stretcher into the back of an ambulance and close the doors. The air was full of damp smoke and it was impossible to see more than a few hundred metres down the road. Wanasri’s ears were ringing with the constant clamour of sirens, shouting,
and the hiss of high-pressure water blasting from hoses. Every surface she touched was hot and wet. The streets were slick with water and steaming like a jungle.

Petra pulled open the cab of the truck and climbed into the driving seat. ‘We’re needed down the road. There are some people trapped inside a house.’

Wanasri, Andy and Darren didn’t even bother to get back in the engine. They jogged down the road after Petra.

Wanasri stepped aside as the ambulance slalomed past, its siren wailing. Its fog lights were on so that it could navigate through the black clouds of smoke. It had a long journey ahead. The general hospital in the middle of town, which housed the major burns unit, was being evacuated, so new patients were being taken to an army barracks up the coast, which had set up an emergency medical centre. A small fire truck followed the ambulance, just in case. The crew drove with the windows up to keep out stray sparks. Muffled inside their heavy fireproof jackets, they looked like decontamination workers. The ambulance carried flammable materials like oxygen, which in this heat was like a cargo of nitroglycerine.

As Wanasri jogged along beside Darren and Andy, she kept thinking about the woman in that ambulance. They had rescued her from the fire but she had burns over most of her body. Her bare arms and legs were blistered and charred. Burns normally caused excruciating pain, but she seemed to feel no pain at all. At the time it seemed merciful, but Wanasri and the medics knew it was an ominous sign. When burns victims were quiet like that, it meant their nerve endings had been destroyed. They might lose limbs or die.

The injuries they were seeing today were getting worse as the fire grew further out of control.

Maybe with this next call, thought Wanasri, they would find somebody alive and well, or less severely injured. Maybe that pall of smoke they were heading towards would not contain the ashes of another unlucky victim.

As they got closer, her heart sank. It was a single-storey home. The roof had already collapsed and only part of a wall and a chimney remained. Another crew had put out most of the fire, but small hot spots still smouldered.

Andy and Darren reached the truck and unclipped pike poles – long fibreglass poles with hooks on the end for lifting hot materials. With a heavy heart Wanasri reached for hers. She felt a tap on her shoulder.

A woman was standing behind her. Tears made clean tracks down her soot-smudged face. ‘I’m the landlady,’ she said. I live two doors down. The tenant who lives here is blind. You’ve got to find him.’

Wanasri nodded. ‘Ma’am,’ she replied, ‘it’s not safe for you to be here. There are a lot of unstable structures. You just stay there, and we’ll look for your tenant, right?’

The woman looked so bewildered; maybe she just wanted to be told what to do.

Andy and Darren had their pike poles hooked into the corners of the roof. They started to push, lifting the roof away from the door so that they could get inside. Smoke gushed out – it was like taking the lid off a boiling saucepan; then hot embers, starved of oxygen when the roof fell on them, began to stir into flame again. Petra followed the others with a hose line and shot water at the flames until they disappeared.

Wanasri stepped carefully across the blackened debris to join the others. It was slippery, like crossing rocks at low tide. She steadied herself with her pike pole. The smoke and steam were clearing and the debris began to take shape. She identified the frame of a sofa, all the upholstery gone.

Now that she had met the landlady, she wanted more than ever to find the blind man safe and well. Hoping against hope, she began to think of reasons why he might be all right. The people who died in house fires were often simply disorientated by the smoke and couldn’t find their way out, even if they’d lived in the same place for twenty years. But perhaps someone who was used to finding his way around with senses other than sight would have a better chance.

She reached Andy and helped him lift up a beam. Andy looked under it, then stopped.

Wanasri knew that expression; even the most seasoned firefighters couldn’t help but react when they found a body. She caught a glimpse of teeth glinting white in the smoking black wreckage and looked away quickly. ‘Is that him?’

Andy shook his head. ‘It’s not human. It must be the guide dog.’

He didn’t have to say any more. Animals usually managed to get out more easily than humans did; they were faster and smaller. If the dog hadn’t got out, the owner definitely hadn’t. The body was definitely here somewhere.

Wanasri felt a lump rising in her throat. She had a dog. She’d had him for just a few months and already they were devoted to each other. She couldn’t bear to think of such a horrible death befalling such a trusting companion. How could this day get any worse?

The landlady had seen them and was walking shakily over the wreckage towards them. ‘Go and head her off,’ said Andy. ‘She doesn’t need to see this.’

Bel was walking through a blackened, smoky, steaming hell. She was in a paved precinct. She didn’t know where she was going, she just wanted to find a safe place to stop. There were shops on either side but they were burned out. Their blackened signs dripped with water. The paving slabs were cracked where heavy fire trucks had driven along them. Sun umbrellas lay on
the ground like felled trees, the fabric burned away; café tables and chairs were flattened. It looked like the fire brigade had swept in, blasted the whole lot and swept away all the people with it too. Was she completely alone?

She passed a shop and realized that the strange shape standing in the window was vaguely human. As Bel went closer, the heat suddenly shattered the plate-glass window. It cobwebbed with cracks and then exploded out into the street, showering her with glass. Smoke billowed out, blinding and choking her.

In the midst of the smoke stood the human figure. It had its arms up towards her. And it was melting …

That tripped a switch in her brain. She screamed and ran towards a square of parched grass beyond the precinct. Here she fell to her knees: she couldn’t run any further. Her lungs were burning and she couldn’t get any oxygen. She stayed there on her hands and knees, gasping. Gradually, common sense began to return. The melting figure must have been a mannequin. All this smoke and heat must be playing tricks with her head. She would give anything to breathe some cool, clear air.

She looked down. Her eyes were watering, blurring her vision, but she couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing. She had assumed she was kneeling on grass, but instead it seemed to be a mass of strange shapes and colours: browns and blacks and reds. Was she in the middle of a flowerbed? She blinked several times, trying to work out what it was.

As her vision settled, she saw that the blobs were moving.

She felt something run over her hand. Looking down, she saw a grey blob of hair. Long furry legs stretched out from the blob and a tiny pair of pinpoint eyes looked out over a pair of pulsing mandibles.

It was a huntsman spider – the legs were longer than her fingers. And it had company. Those other strange shapes around her were more spiders, cockroaches, giant caterpillars and other huge insects … and rats.

The entire square of grass was covered in these creatures. Driven from the surrounding buildings and sewers by the heat, they’d all ended up on this one patch of damp grass.

Bel screamed and jumped to her feet. The spider fell
off her hand; she didn’t see where it landed. She stepped backwards, felt something crunch under her feet, then caught a glimpse of yellow innards under the toe of her sandal and leaped back in disgust.

Something was tickling her bare leg. A caterpillar, nearly as long as her hand, was rippling over her ankle. It had green stripes and black hair and was twice as thick as the strap of her shoe. She shook her leg violently, then froze as she remembered the caterpillars were just as likely to be poisonous as the spiders. The caterpillar tumbled to the ground.

She started to pick her way back to the pavement. Every step she took, she felt feelers and legs and bristles. Her strappy sandals gave no protection – she might as well not have been wearing shoes at all. There was a lawnmower standing on the patch of grass, and the caterpillars and spiders were swarming all over it. She nearly tripped and her heart turned a complete somersault. She imagined herself sprawled on the ground, the creatures crawling all over her. Bel had a strong stomach, but this much poisonous antipodean wildlife was enough to unsettle even her.

A deafening noise in the sky made her look up. The
silver underbelly of an airliner flashed above the rooftops. It was close enough for her to see the red and white lights on its wings, and the winged insignia of the Royal Australian Air Force. Why was it flying so low? And in such difficult conditions? It must be at barely five hundred feet.

Her flyer’s instinct told her that the plane was in trouble. No pilot would bring a big plane like that in so low, particularly near buildings.

If the airliner came down on the town, the destruction would be terrible. All that aviation fuel would be like spraying a bonfire with gasoline.

A hatch opened in the plane’s underbelly. Were people baling out?

Suddenly a wall of water slammed into her: it was as if several inches of rainfall had all come down in a split second. She was knocked off her feet. When she got up again, the smoky air had turned to steam and she was soaked to the skin.

She looked up. The water was such a relief in the heat. All around her, the pavements and the buildings were hissing. Even better, Bel realized the grass around her was clear. The water had driven all those dreadful
creatures away. She imagined them swept into the gutters, their furry legs and feelers twitching helplessly. Her heart suddenly leaped. Was it a tropical storm? Was this nightmare ending at last? A storm would do the trick. She turned her face up to the skies, expecting to feel rain on her skin.

But there was no rain. There was only the plane, climbing now into the dark sky, disappearing into the clouds of smoke.

Bel understood. The pilot’s reckless flight pattern made sense now. The plane had dropped the water – the equivalent of the contents of a small plunge pool. Now the plane was climbing again, soaring away into the smoky black sky. Moments later she heard another gigantic splash followed by a hiss as it dropped another load.

She waited to see if the water would help clear the black pall of smoke, but it didn’t. It was going to take a lot more water than that to stop the city burning. But rain seemed like a dream on a swelteringly dry day like this. Bel didn’t believe in God, but she had never been more tempted to try a prayer just for luck.

She had reached the edge of the green and could see
an outdoor activities shop. Its front window was broken but it seemed to have escaped the flames. She got up and strode purposefully towards it. It was time she got some boots. Her sandal-wearing days were behind her, she decided.

As she walked, she took her phone out and tried to call Ben. She couldn’t get through. After a few tries she had to give up. It was hardly surprising. There were probably a half million other people all trying to place calls at the exact same moment.

Bel put the phone back in her pocket. Where was

Ben? Had he managed to land somewhere safely?

How would she ever find him again in all this chaos?

In the desert below, the railway line snaked up to a small cluster of buildings. ‘I can see a station,’ said Ben. ‘And a couple of huts.’

Kelly consulted the map on her knee. ‘It’s Coober Pedy.’

‘I think we should land,’ Ben said. ‘We can ask if the police have found my mum or your dad.’

Kelly mulled over the idea, biting her lip. She seemed reluctant.

‘If we don’t land here,’ said Ben, ‘how far are we going to go? All the way to Darwin?’

Kelly straightened up in her seat. ‘OK, give me control. I might be able to land.’

Ben was surprised she was going to try it. He was a bit disappointed too. He felt he had got the hang of flying and was looking forward to trying a landing. With a sigh he took his hands away. Kelly reached for the controls.

As soon as her left hand touched the stick her mouth twisted with pain. She folded her arms into her body, hunching over them protectively.

‘No good. My hands are too painful,’ she gasped.

‘That’s another reason for landing. There ought to be a doctor around here.’

‘One station building and two huts? You’re being optimistic.’

Ben shrugged. ‘At least they’d have a proper firstaid kit. Look, can you talk me through landing?’

Kelly thought about it. Instead of answering, she said, ‘You’ve got control.’

‘I’ve got control.’ Ben took back the stick and the throttle. He felt a bit guilty, but all the same he was pleased to get the chance.