Wildfire (8 page)

Kelly stopped and slipped her orange baseball cap off. Her blonde hair billowed out behind her and she tilted her head back. ‘Mmm, that is nice.’

Then the wind changed direction. Suddenly it was a lot stronger. The vines flapped the other way, straining against their tethers. Big leaves plunged down on Kelly’s face like fingers trying to gather her up. She jumped backwards. The wind pushed her back even further and she staggered into Ben. Ben would have fallen over, but the wind changed again and for a moment they were stuck together, unable to move forwards. The wind had to be over sixty miles an hour – it was impossible to take even a step. Then, as quickly as it had sprung up, the wind dropped to a dead calm.

Kelly bundled her hair up and put her hat back on. ‘Man, this weather is freaky today. It’s a good thing we’re down here and not trying to fly in it.’

* * *

Matt and Jenny Forrest, and their army of helpers, stood around the picnic tables. All the guests had arrived and Matt was pouring glasses of last year’s vintage while Jenny handed them out.

Suddenly the checked rug on the table billowed up like a sail. Matt tried to grab the wine glasses but they crashed over, sending Chardonnay and broken glass all over his bare legs. The chairs set out in a row next to the decking folded up by themselves and keeled over. Sun hats were snatched off the visitors’ heads and whirled into the air.

There was a sound of screeching, like fingernails down a blackboard. Moments later a tangle of metal landed on the parched earth. The wind had torn the TV aerial off the roof.

‘Inside!’ Jenny yelled. Her voice was a tiny thing against the wind roaring in her ears. She waved her arms towards the house.

Her guests, half blinded by dust blowing in off the vineyards, struggled after her.

Once they were all inside, Matt pulled the door shut with difficulty. They looked out at the hillside. The vines were shaking violently. Dark
clouds were drifting across the sapphire-blue sky.

Jenny’s father shook dust out of his grey hair. ‘Of all days to get rain …’

‘Maybe it isn’t rain,’ said Matt. ‘It wasn’t earlier.’

‘Dust or rain …’ Jenny sighed. ‘Someone up there must have it in for us …’

The clouds massed up from behind the hill, hugging the ground. There was another vineyard there, belonging to the Forrests’ neighbour.

‘I’ve never seen rain looking like that,’ said Jenny’s father.

In the distance, the cloud began to creep over the hill. The landscape looked like someone had smudged its edges with charcoal.

Jenny grabbed the binoculars they kept on the windowsill. As she turned the focus wheel she saw flickering tongues of orange flame.

It wasn’t rain approaching …

The binoculars fell from her hand as she gasped: ‘Fire!’

Alex Porter and his wife Jacquetta were on holiday, over from New Zealand. They’d hired a Toyota
Corolla in Adelaide and had headed out into the hills to tour the wine-growing region.

The air conditioning was on full blast in the car, but it was barely coping with the heat. Jacquetta fanned herself with the map on her knee. Outside, the rows of vines looked like they were wilting. The grapes hung in tight clusters, a blue bloom on the skins, ready for picking.

‘Those grapes must be tough,’ she said. ‘I can’t understand why they’re not shrivelled to raisins by now.’

Suddenly Alex found he couldn’t see the dials on the dashboard. The sky outside had gone dark. He flicked the lights on. ‘Hey, looks like we’re in for a storm.’

‘We certainly could use it.’ Jacquetta turned the dial on the air conditioning but it was already at maximum. ‘Look at the temperature,’ she said, pointing to the dashboard display. ‘It’s fifty degrees outside. I thought it was supposed to get colder before a storm, not hotter.’

‘Fifty degrees?’ Alex tapped the display. ‘That can’t be right. There must be something wrong with it.’ He swung the car round the corner.

Then they saw why it was getting so hot and so
dark. In front of them, the vineyard was a wall of flame the height of a two-storey building. It rolled towards them, roaring and crackling.

Jacquetta screamed.

Alex slammed on the brakes, jammed the car into reverse, screeched through a turn, then when they were facing back the way they came, he gunned the accelerator.

Jacquetta twisted in her seat, staring back through the rear windscreen. The fire was an orange ball, boiling towards them.

‘Faster, Alex! It’s going to catch us!’

Alex kept his foot flat on the floor. They reached 80 kph, then 90. A bend came up. He was going too fast. The back end of the car swung like an opening gate and crunched into some vines. The impact knocked Jacquetta’s head hard against the window. She slumped down, unconscious.

They had come to a standstill. Alex revved the engine. The wheels spun on the dusty track. In his rear-view mirror he caught a glimpse of the flames drawing nearer. Smoke started to seep into the car.

Then the tyres bit and the Toyota moved off again.

But the fire was gaining. Flames began to light up the darkened interior of the car, flickering over Jacquetta’s face. She was moving her head groggily and muttering. There was blood coming out of one of her ears. That shocked him for a moment and he stopped concentrating on driving.

His hesitation cost them vital seconds. The flames in the rear-view mirror were now much closer. Alex pushed the pedal to the floor. Another corner was coming up. He threw the steering wheel to the side – – and saw the headlights of the pick-up truck coming towards him. He didn’t have time to stop or swerve. There was nowhere to go anyway. Alex glimpsed the horrified face of the driver in the cab, then the two vehicles crunched together. Jacquetta and Alex were thrown against the windscreen.

Their seat belts stopped them going all the way through, but the impact knocked them out cold. The truck driver looked up and saw the wall of flames boiling over the car towards him.

As the heat ignited their petrol tank, Alex and Jacquetta were mercifully no longer aware.

Kelly only just managed to grab her hat in time. The wind was gusting one way and then another like it was playing with them.

‘You see,’ she said, ‘you can’t possibly fly a microlight in these conditions.’

Even a half-wit would know that, thought Ben. She was obviously thinking,
He’s thirteen, he must be a moron
. Well, he knew how to deal with that. Putting on an innocent face, he said: ‘What if we can’t take off again?’

‘Of course we can take off,’ said Kelly. ‘We have to wait till the weather changes, though.’

‘I know that,’ said Ben, still acting innocent. ‘But George’s shift ends at three. And we’ve still got to get back.’

‘If I miss him today there’s always tomorrow. Then I’ll be footloose and fancy free.’

Ben played his trump card. ‘George is going on holiday tomorrow.’

Kelly looked at him sceptically.

‘It said so in his records,’ said Ben.

He couldn’t help laughing. But as he did so, he got a lungful of smoke that kicked off a coughing fit. All of a sudden his eyes were watering. Through the tears he saw thick black smoke and smelled burning. Where was that coming from? Had somebody lit a bonfire in the middle of the vineyard?

Kelly grabbed him and shrieked, ‘Fire!’

A mass of tumbling, burning branches blasted towards them.

They turned and hared back the way they’d come. It was uphill, and strenuous going in the strong mid-afternoon heat. Ben could feel the smoke in his throat. It was hard to get his breath but adrenaline gave him a burst of speed.

Kelly looked back. From the vantage point of the brow of the hill, she saw a wall of flame stretching right across the vineyard. The wind was fanning it towards them.

‘The whole place is on fire!’ she yelled. ‘We can’t outrun it!’

They turned the corner by the signpost and saw the microlight a little further up, that funny glass-pod body with a white fabric wing on top and a tricycle underneath. It looked flimsy, but with flames raging at gale-speed through the tinder-dry vegetation, their only chance was to get airborne.

A flaming branch whirled past Ben’s ear. It landed in the vines. He heard the crackle as the dry leaves started to smoulder.

He reached the plane before Kelly and tried to undo the catch on the door one-handed, his other arm up, shielding his face from more burning debris.

Kelly got her door open, but then another gust of wind brought hot stinging sparks.

She screamed and climbed up onto the wing.

Ben hoisted himself up on the other side to see what
was wrong and saw that the wing was covered in debris, glowing like hot coals.

Kelly grabbed a blackened branch as big as a butcher’s bone and hurled it away. ‘Get them off! They’ll burn a hole and then the plane’s useless!’

Ben pulled his sleeve down over his arm and swept it over the wing. The embers left sooty marks on the stiff white material, but luckily there were no burn holes. Kelly cleared the other side.

They got down and scrambled into the plane.

The engine spluttered into life. To their right, the vines were starting to burn. Ben could feel the heat through the back of the cockpit. Kelly increased the revs and took the plane jolting up the path. Her headset was still around her neck – there wasn’t a second to waste. Ben was sorry he’d made jokes about not being able to take off in that wind. Would they manage it now?

They started to lift off the ground, but the wind blew them sideways and Ben felt the vines swish along the undercarriage like a row of hands trying to grab the wheels. Kelly had the throttle all the way forwards but the microlight was still trying to go
sideways. Then suddenly it soared upwards and they were leaving the vegetation behind.

Ben breathed a silent prayer of relief.

They climbed up into the sky. Clouds of smoke turned the windscreen black, filling their mouths with a gritty, pungent taste. Glowing embers like red fire-flies whirled past them. Then the black clouds were behind them and they were flying into sunlight again.

Down below, smoke was billowing up out of the vineyard.

The plane suddenly dropped like a stone.

‘A thermal!’ Kelly screamed. ‘You have control! More throttle! More throttle now!’

Ben felt beside him. His fingers grasped the handle and he pulled it upwards. The engine grew louder. He didn’t even have time to question why she wanted him to take control now, of all times.

‘Grab the stick! Get the nose up!’ called Kelly.

Ben pulled the stick back. He felt the pedals moving beside his feet as Kelly operated them. The microlight stopped plummeting and started to climb. There was another moment of dark smoke clouds, then bright sunshine.

Ben suddenly realized there was rather a lot of blue sky on his side of the plane, while through Kelly’s window there was a dramatic view of the ground.

Kelly whacked the stick with her left forearm. The view out of the windows evened out, with a proper amount of sky on each side.

‘Level out! Let the stick go!’ She was still shouting – she hadn’t yet put her headset on. It was still around her neck. Then Ben noticed she was holding her hands oddly, like she was trying to avoid touching the palms to anything.

And why was she making him do the flying at such a crucial stage?

He reached across and placed her headset over her ears so that he could talk to her.

‘Kelly, why am I in control?’

Kelly looked down at the palms of her hands. Ben reached over to see what was wrong but she flinched and pulled them away before he’d even touched her.

‘You’ve burned your hands.’

Kelly nodded. ‘You’re going to have to go from basic training to graduation in one lesson. I’ll tell you what to do – but you’ve got to fly this thing home.’

* * *

The hills around Adelaide were covered in vineyards. Nobody knew which one started burning first, and how exactly the fire had begun. But once it took hold it roared easily through the endless lines of parched, dry plants in a matter of minutes. Even where the leaves were not in direct contact with flames, the surrounding heat scorched them. This made the vegetation give off gases, which, because of the heat, started to burn spontaneously. The blazing hills created their own weather system, sucking in air to feed the flames, like a fire drawing air from a chimney. The fire gobbled up acre after acre until it reached the red, dusty outback.

And as well as travelling outwards, the fire also swept inwards. The first places it reached were Adelaide’s many parks and green spaces on the out-skirts of the town.

Victoria Shilton stood in the circle of emerald-green grass. Her eyes were on only one thing: the little dimpled ball in front of her feet, just metres away from the seventeenth hole. On the fairways, the grass of the golf course was parched to the colour of straw,
but around the holes it had been watered to keep the surface perfect.

A gust of wind tugged at Victoria’s hat, sending the brim flopping down over one eye. The wind had been getting more and more erratic since they’d set off from the clubhouse after lunch, but they were nearly at the end of the course and Victoria was determined to finish. She had noticed a scent of smoke and heard the distant wail of sirens, but she was a dedicated sports-woman and had learned to let nothing distract her. She pushed the hat back off her brow to concentrate better, and the wind snatched it right off her head.