Long Hot Summer Page 13

  “Ted...” He was covered in dust and sticks and stones and when he saw her, he didn’t leap up and run to her, but he sat on his butt, his eyes lowered, his ears drooping. Hannie’s heart sank. What was wrong with him? When she reached him, she threw her arms around him and sobbed. Her Ted. Her poor, slobbery Ted. He licked her face and burrowed into the crook of her neck, whimpering.

  “You big duffer,” she cried out. “What have you done?” She slipped a finger under his collar and tried to get him to stand, but he flopped back down on to his butt. She tried again but he seemed to have lost feeling in his hind legs. She looked up to the sky. It was a swirling cloud. There was only one thing to do.

  She was going to have to carry Ted back up the steep incline to her car. At a weight of forty kilograms, it was going to test her, but she had no other choice. She wasn’t living without Ted.

  “Come on,” she said, taking a deep breath. The smoke in the air almost choked her. “We’re going to get out of here.” She slipped one arm under his belly and the other around his back and lifted him, using her knee to get him higher so she had more control. She made it ten feet before stopping. She looked up. There was at least a hundred feet to go. She tried again, got a little further. And then lifted him again and again.

  When Hannie was halfway up, she heard someone calling. She looked up, tried to flick away the sweat that had drizzled into her eyes, tried to hear above the roar of the wind.

  “Hannie!”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Hannie? What are you doing down there?”

  Hannie looked up, squinted, tried to make out who it was. “Mel?”

  “Yeah, it’s me. We’ve closed up the café and we’re checking on everyone on our way out. What’s going on?”

  Hannie lifted Ted again and then froze. A pain stabbed across her whole lower back, as if she’d stuck her fingers into an electric socket. It contorted every muscle in her abdomen and she gasped.

  “Oh... fuck.” Her breath escaped her and she couldn’t seem to draw any back into her lungs.

  “Kaz, come quick,” Mel yelled over her shoulder. Mel and Kaz, who owned the famous Organic Café on the main road running through Reynolds Ridge – the only cafe in Reynolds Ridge – were also her neighbours from a few clicks down the road.

  “Something’s wrong with Ted,” Hannie called out as Mel scampered down to her. Kaz was only a moment behind. “He can’t seem to move. He had surgery on one knee a few weeks ago.” Hannie stopped, gasping for breath and flinching at the agonising pain. She tried to straighten her back but couldn’t. She suddenly felt hot and cold all at once and fought the strong urge to vomit.

  Mel looked her up and down with concern. “You’re white as a sheet, Hannie. It looks like you can’t walk either. Don’t lift him again. We’ll take him. You wait here. We’ll come back for you.” Mel and Kaz stood on each side of Ted and lifted him up. They bent at the knees like people who knew how to protect themselves from a lifting injury, something Hannie realised she hadn’t done, and she watched them move up the hill as they moved out of sight over the top of the incline. A few moments later, Mel and Kaz had scrambled down back to her.

  “I’m all packed and ready to go but I couldn’t leave him. I couldn’t.” Tears welled in Hannie’s eyes, from fear or pain, or both. “Thank you.”

  “It’s nothing.” Mel and Kaz exchanged a serious look. “Can you move at all?”

  “I’ll try.” Hannie took a step. Another stab of pain. She gasped and reached out for support from her friends’ shoulders. “It hurts like fuck, excuse the French. But we have to get out of here. The fire’s close. I saw the flames over the ridge.”

  Kaz nodded. “That’s why we’re getting out. It’s headed right for us, Hannie.”

  Hannie summoned every bit of strength she had and clenched her jaw so tight it ached. She took another step, half carried up the hill by her friends. Each footfall was like a knife across her back. It took a five full minutes, but they finally made it. When Hannie saw Ted in Mel and Kaz’s four-wheel drive, leaning out the window barking like a maniac at the sight of her, fresh tears welled in her eyes.

  “You’re coming with us,” Kaz said. “There’s no way you can drive. We’ve got room.”

  They led Hannie to their vehicle and opened one of the rear passenger doors, slowly urging her inside. She half expected Ted to leap all over her but he was secured with his leash to the headrest so he wouldn’t go bouncing around the car as they fled.

  “All my stuff is in my car,” Hannie said urgently.

  “I’ve got it.” Mel raced over and grabbed the two tubs of possessions Hannie had loaded earlier that day and stowed them in the back of her own.

  Hannie felt dizzy but was scared to close her eyes. She stared out the car window at her cottage. Would it still be standing when the fire was finally out? She couldn’t know. She couldn’t think about it now.

  They had to get out.

  “Okay. Let’s go.” Kaz started the vehicle and it made a throaty rumble as she circled and headed back up the gravel driveway to the main road. The sprinklers were still going around Mandy’s house and Hannie choked up at the thought of Mandy losing her beloved place twice.

  “Wait!” she called sharply. “We’ve got to get Zelda.”

  “Zelda?” Mel asked over the back seat.

  “Mandy’s goat. I don’t think we can save all the chooks – there’s too many of them – but we have to get Mandy’s goat.”

  Twenty minutes later, Hannie, Mel, Kaz, Ted, and Zelda arrived at the evacuation centre at a community oval in the nearby town of Waters Gully. It was a football club in the winter, but in summer it became a makeshift evacuation point where people from surrounding townships could gather safely out of harm’s way. Sometimes roads were blocked by fallen trees, which made getting out of the hills impossible. Other times, like today, the smoke haze was so thick that they couldn’t see ten feet in front of them. The large oval, with its well-watered grass, was a safe haven and the local emergency services had set up there to care for people.

  Zelda and Ted were tethered to Mel and Kaz’s four-wheel drive, eyeing each other suspiciously. Ted sat quietly, his back legs still giving him some pain. Mel had walked over to the first aid station to see if anyone had anything for Hannie to take to settle her back. She should probably be in hospital with a knock-her-out pain-killing injection, but she was hardly a priority at the moment when there was the possibility of burns injuries – or worse.

  “Here.” Mel had returned with a portion of a blister pack in her hand.

  “What’s that?” Kaz asked, staring at it like it was a dead spider.

  “It’s paracetamol.”

  “You’re kidding,” Mel replied with a furious tone. “That won’t even touch the sides. Hannie could have a slipped disc, for god’s sake.”

  Hannie was listening from the back seat. They’d managed to lower her so she was lying down, her steel-capped booted feet dangling outside. If she didn’t breathe much and stayed completely still, it didn’t hurt quite so much. She was working hard to keep her breathing constant so the panic didn’t set in. A slipped disc? She didn’t even know what that meant but the pain was telling her it was something serious. If Mel and Kaz hadn’t come along when they had, if they hadn’t bothered to check where she was ... Hannie couldn’t think. Mandy was safe in the city and now she and Ted were safe. Her angels – Mel and Kaz – were fussing over Ted and Zelda, making sure they had a bucket of water to share in the heat.

  “You right there, Hannie?” Mel was by her feet looking into the car.

  “I’m good. Well, I’ll be fine.”

  “Let me get something to put under your head. It’ll make you more comfortable.”

  “And roll up that blanket there and tuck it under her knees,” Kaz added.

  Hannie swallowed the tablets they had given her with some lukewarm bottled water and thought about Dylan. She’d stared at her phone for a full five minutes waiting for
a signal to magically appear but there was nothing.

  Where was he?

  In the fire station command centre at Uraidla, Dylan was standing with Tim listening to reports coming in from the crews out fighting the fires.

  Tim looked grave. “When did the Emergency Management Centre say the water bomber would arrive?”

  Dylan checked the time. “About now. I tried to kick some arse, but we’re not the only front. There are fires in the plains north of Adelaide. A fire truck’s been lost on the Yorke Peninsula with ten crew injured. And six civilians are missing, mate.” Just relaying the information to Tim had Dylan’s stomach dropping into his boots.

  He’d been hearing all the field reports for an hour now. It was a shit storm out there in every direction. The fire in the hills was uncontrollable and raging, gobbling up homes and businesses in its path like a voracious beast whose hunger couldn’t be assuaged. The flames had jumped back-burned fire breaks in ten locations and were now spreading into the national park which ran alongside his property and Mandy’s. Dylan felt useless. He fished his phone out of his pocket. Still no signal.

  Hannie would have left by now. She’d grown up with the threat of fires. She’d said herself how prepared she was and he’d seen it around the property. It had been a matter of pride, in fact, that she was capable of looking after herself and Mandy and Mandy’s property. She would have got out. He was sure of it.

  But until he saw her with his own eyes, held her, kissed, told her he loved her, he couldn’t rest.

  “Hey, Knight.”

  Dylan looked up. Tim was holding a phone to his ear. His expression was grave. “One of my crew’s reporting that a house has been lost on the south end of Reynolds Ridge. That’s where you are, right?”

  “I’m up on the north side, on top of the ridge.” Pain contorted his jaw as he clenched it closed. “There’s a property on the other side of the gully, a big stone house and a cottage.” He drew in a deep breath. “Which one is it?”

  Tim relayed the question to his caller. He listened, waited.

  It felt to Dylan like it was ten years before Tim answered.

  “It’s the big stone house and the cottage. Mandy Reynolds’ place. Looks like it’s all gone. The fire moved across from the national park too quick. There was nothing they could do.”

  Dylan’s hands became fists. A headache throbbed behind his eyes that almost blinded him. He had a duty to Tim, their colleagues on the trucks and every volunteer out there fighting the fire. But he needed to know.

  “Tim. Let me go. I need to make sure Hannie got out.”

  “Nope,” Tim said sternly. “I’m sorry, mate, but I can’t let you go. Hannie’s smart. I’ve known her since high school, too. She will have got out hours ago. We’ve already got people injured and others are missing. It won’t be on my conscience to lose you too, you mad bastard.” Tim walked to Dylan, put a firm hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “Keep listening to the reports from the crews out at the fire front. When it’s safe to go, you can go. But in the meantime, find out where the fuck the water bomber is, will you?”

  Dylan was out of his mind, but he couldn’t show it to anyone at incident command. Every single person there feared for someone, for their own homes, for local businesses, for people they knew and loved in their communities. What made his terror worse than theirs? He had to pull himself up. He needed to do his job, to back up Tim, to pull crews out of places that were too dangerous and send them to other locations where they could do some good. The burden of sending men and women into a fire was one he’d never felt before, and the responsibility felt like a lead weight in the pit of his stomach. Everyone single person on the fire trucks had been well-trained, but fires had no logic or reason; they could jump from house to house to house along a road, incinerating every property but one. They could leave one animal untouched in a paddock when every other one around it was lost.

  Fires were cruel, unrelenting, unpredictable and hungry.

  He tried not to think about Hannie. And Ted. And that stupid, head-butting goat.

  Her cottage was gone. Mandy’s house was gone. She’d lost everything.

  Another pointless look at this phone. Still no reception.

  Where was she?

  Chapter Seventeen

  The fire raged for the next twenty-four hours, through the night and into the next day, running up gullies and along hilltop ridges, scorching tracts of grassed farm land, cherry and apple orchards, and a great swath of the national park in Reynolds Ridge.

  At the evacuation point, more help had arrived and tents had been erected, with mattresses and blankets inside, so all the families could have some privacy and get some sleep. The volunteer ambulance officers had wangled Hannie a tent so she could lie down and Mel and Kaz and Ted had moved in, too. Zelda was quite enjoying the grass of the oval and some of the local children, who’d been evacuated from their homes, had adopted her. The old goat was in heaven.

  It was a surreal place to be, as if they were in the eye of a storm. Silver-haired men behind a row of barbecues had been working day and night, cooking sausages and eggs and bacon for all those who were at the evacuation centre. The smell of it wafted through the entire makeshift campground, battling with the smell of the fire and burning gums.

  Hannie hadn’t left her tent, except to go to the bathroom in the football club’s change rooms on the edge of the oval and Ted was at her side. Her back was still agony, although some stronger painkillers from the ambulance crew had helped. There had been some pressure for her to be taken to hospital, but she’d refused, pretended the pain wasn’t as bad as it was. She couldn’t leave until she knew what had happened to her house and until she knew that Dylan was safe.

  “Hannie?” Kaz pushed aside one of the front flaps on the tent and peered inside.

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re awake.” Kaz and Mel came inside and sat down beside Hannie.

  She lifted her head to look at them but could only last a second or too. “You saying I was asleep?”

  “You’ve slept a bit. It must be the drugs for your back,” Mel said quietly. “Which is probably a good thing.”

  “There’s something I need to tell you,” Kaz said, and when she reached for Hannie’s hand, Hannie knew.

  “Oh no.”

  Mel and Kaz looked at each other, both crying. “Your place and Mandy’s. They’re gone.”

  Hannie reached her other hand out for Ted and urged him close. She’d faced this so many times before in her life but it was real now. Her home. All her possessions, except what crammed into the two plastic tubs in the back of Mel and Kaz’s car. Her jewellery tools and her bits and pieces of gems and metals and beads. Her drawings and sketches. Her clothes, her books, her CDs, her saucepans. She didn’t even have a knife and fork left to her name. Her bed, where she and Dylan had made love just a week ago.

  It was all ashes.

  How had her whole world collapsed in on her so quickly? And Mandy. Oh, god. She would be heartbroken.

  “Hannie, do you understand what I just said?” Kaz asked.

  Hannie nodded. She felt the warm sting of tears running down her face and into her ears. This was all too much. She closed her eyes and sobbed.

  At the fire station command, Dylan had just got word that the Reynolds Ridge fire had burnt pretty much everything in its path heading south and had already moved ten kilometres towards Maysville.

  “Am I good to go?” he asked Tim.

  “Go. Take the Kings track to the north of your place and you should be right. But don’t be long. I’ve still got crews everywhere.”

  Dylan bolted to his car and, as per Tim’s advice, took the rutted Kings track around the back of his place to the top of Reynolds Ridge. It wasn’t used by regular road users any more but was regularly graded and cleared in case it was needed for emergency access. The hills were full of winding roads that were often the only way in and out of a place. So the back tracks were needed if trees had blocked
roads or fallen power lines had made them life-threatening.

  Dylan noticed the singed trees on either side of the track. When he turned a corner, he looked up ahead and saw his place. His heart thudded in his chest. It was still there. The flood of relief was indescribable. He pulled into his driveway and leapt out of his car. He jogged around to the front of the house and looked across the valley.

  There was smoke rising from two stone buildings.

  He took off down into the gully, slowly jogging, checking where his feet fell for hazards which could bring him down. This was the quickest way across to Mandy’s property. At the bottom of the gully, the empty creek bed was dry as a bone. He crossed it, and began climbing up the other side, using his hands to crawl up. He was almost there when he could smell burning fuel and melted plastic.

  When he made it to the top, he propped his hands on his hips to get his breath. When he lifted his eyes, there was devastation. Hannie’s beautifully restored cottage was now nothing but a tall brick chimney, miraculously still standing, and half destroyed stone walls. They looked like ancient Roman ruins in the smouldering earth. Sheets of twisted galvanised iron lay on the ground inside the half-destroyed stone walls, as if they had toppled from a pile, and wisps of white smoke were swirling into the air from whatever was still smouldering underneath.

  He walked over to the ruin and that was when he saw Hannie’s four-wheel drive. The tyres had melted into black pools on the dirt; the rims were scorched and sitting flat on the ground. The smell of the burnt plastic interior burning was chemical and choking and overwhelming. Dylan pulled a kerchief from around his neck up over his mouth.

  Why the fuck was her car still here?

  “Hannie?” he called out, walking faster now, looking inside the windows of the car for a sign, please god, that she hadn’t been in there.