Chapter 3: Northbound

I dozed fitfully in the driver’s seat rather than slept. The full moon rose about 10pm and in a cloudless sky lit up the truck park almost as clear as day, what I think they call a hunter’s moon, not that I’d ever hunted before. I noticed by about two in the morning that most of the revellers had been driven inside by the cool breeze, it was still early summer in these southern climes, warm during the day but quite chilly at night. The lights were on inside all five vehicles, though, and the music was still wound up loud. I noticed that the Winnebagoes were closely parked one behind the other, with hardly room to squeeze a bloke through between them, which gave me an idea, so I reset my wristwatch alarm for three instead of four. This time I think I did get some quality sleep for the next hour. When I was woken up by the alarm on my wrist, I was so deep out of it that it took me a moment to work out where I was, after having a nice dream about walking the gentle foothills of the Andes without seeing a single bloody sheila, naked or otherwise. By the time I had fumbled off my alarm, my guest had thrown the curtain aside and had slipped herself into the shotgun seat.

“You all right, Mark?” she asked. “Your alarm went off early.”

“Yeah,” I growled, “I reset it.”

“Oh, are we off now?”

“Not quite, I had an idea last night around how we could ensure getting away clean and at the same time have a burl at ‘em and show these galahs that they can’t just bully us around.”

“Can I help?”

“Well, I dunno, I think it’s going to be pretty hard work for a sheila with a manicure like yours.” I grinned in the moonlight, to try and deflect any barb, but I wondered if I would’ve kept her out of it even if she looked like a swamp donkey.

“I’m stronger than I look, Mark,” she insisted. “Hey, if I can’t manage whatever you are planning, I’ll let you know, but I have a vested interest in getting well away from these skideriks. And seeing a little bit of revenge would be nice, especially if I played a significant part in it.”

“Righto, let’s get dressed.” I noticed then how good she looked, having slept in one of my tees, where her unfettered breasts failed to go unnoticed, and a pair of my shorts, where her long lean legs looked just great. Deffo no swamp-donk. “You’ve still got my dark blue sweat pants that you wore briefly yesterday, and I’ll look out a dark coloured but thick warm jumper to go over the tee. I don’t think I have any footwear for you, though, I’ve never got on with thongs.”

She laughed, “Me neither, but I assume by thongs you mean flip flops?”

“I guess so. We just call ‘em thongs.”

“I can go barefoot, I’ve been mostly going barefoot all this week at the photo shoots, this carpark has a smooth relatively new bitumen surface, and it’s still bright under the full moon, so I think I’ll be all right,” she said, “So, what is your idea?”

I opened the side door and briefly flashed a torch over the gutter and bank leading to a gully next to where we parked. There were dozens of worn out truck tyres dumped there and I knew from my earlier arrival during daylight, that there were dozens more in the shadows on the other side of the bank.

“This restaurant must once have been a servo station. Lots of these have closed down over the years as cars, trucks and utes go much longer distances and miles between services without breaking down. They must’ve left a few old rubber tyres out the back here and other lazy buggers’ve taken this a sign to dump their old tyres here, too. I saw them when I first came in. I propose we wheel some of these buggers over and pile them up in front and behind the line of parked Winnoes, and set light to them. That will block them in at least for long enough for us to get in the truck and get clean away. If there’s enough smoke, they may not even know which way we’re headed. I reckon on getting into Port Augusta and the police station there before they can catch up to us.”

I looked out a dark jumper for her and dark daks for me and I changed with the lights off, just by the light of the moon which was now pointing right into the cab. She took her clobber through the curtain at the front to get changed, to give her some privacy in the bed part. We got changed in the dark, to keep our night vision.

“How far away should we stack the tyres, how many do we need, and how you going to light them?” she asked as we stepped down to the tarmac.

“All good questions and I have given this some thought during the night. They don’t need to be so close to the Winnoes that we risk setting them on fire, we don’t want to set the trees alight, or have the burn extending into the bush. But close enough to make it difficult for them to manoeuvre, especially as burning tyres give off lots of thick black smoke. So, say we place them ten to fifteen metres away. I think we could spread out thirty tyres at front and back. We have two ten-litre containers of kerosene for a generator that we use to top up the batteries when parked up for any length of time using the aircon. We only need a couple of litres poured on each pile, I reckon. To set it off we have emergency flares that we put out if we’ve called out the Flying Doctor to land on the road, so we can set the blazes going from forty or fifty metres away. You get the engine going, warmed up and ready, I’ll light up the tyres, jump into the passenger seat and you drive us at 90 clicks an hour to the next town. We can swap seats on the outskirts and then I’ll drive onto the police station, where we can make our statements about the threats of sex and violence made to you and me respectively, as already shown on the cameras.”

“How long will that take us to move those sixty tyres?”

“I reckon that if you wheel one and I wheel two, it’s about eighty-five or ninety metres. Say it takes us about thirty seconds to wheel them, fifteen seconds to run back, another fifteen seconds to pick the next ones up and drop them in position. That’s three tyres a minute, so twenty minutes should do it, maybe a little longer if we start to tire towards the end.”

“I can run back and forth for twenty minutes easy, I work out far longer than that every morning.”

“I usually have a twenty to thirty minute run early mornings but can only fit that in at the weekends, but I think I can cope with twenty minutes. We would have to go together, though, I would hate for you to get caught by Max close to the Winnoes while I’m up here getting the next couple of tyres ready to roll.”

“Or I could wheel them one at a time about a third to half of the way from here and you could just shuffle between our piles. If we are discovered, I’ll be closer to the rig to get in and get it started, or we could just leave the motor running?”

“No, the motor’s too noisy for that, but the key’s already in the ignition. I could have the sixty tyres stacked up clear of the rig so we have them all ready before we start moving them. I only need one of the kero containers and we could both have a few flares ready to light. If I get taken, you could still light up the tyres and get away, and I might still get free in all the confusion. This will work.”

We rolled out enough tyres from the verge, plus one or two that were in a dry ditch beyond, into piles near the front of the rig, leaving room for us to drive by them if disturbed before we finished. It turned out handy practice for us. By the time we had done that we were both comfortable getting two tyres up and running together. There was a mixture of tyres, from cars as well as trucks and farm vehicles, the secret of rolling them was to roll a pair of equal sized tyres. We set out together with the first four tyres, with Bonnie letting hers drop just before halfway and turning back for more. She kept up the pace better than I thought, which spurred me on to keep up with her. Boy, was she fit! After stacking about half of what we needed, Bonnie carried the less full of the two kerosene containers from where they were stowed, it had about seven litres in it. I splashed about a third of of it on each of the two tyre stacks and passed the near empty container back to Bonnie, before piling up the rest. Soon we had all the tyres in place, and we still hadn’t heard a peep out of the slumbering Winnoes. We grinned at each other in the moonlight, although the sky was beginning to lighten up faintly in the east. I took the last two tyres from her at the halfway point. I was puffing and panting by then but she looked like she was still full of energy.

“That’s the lot, Mark, all sixty, the kerosene is stowed away, so we’re ready to roll,” she said, “This was a great idea, you know, I really feel like I am getting some of my own back on how I’ve been treated these last two days. Thank you, you’re my white knight.”

I mumbled something like “anyone would,” but don’t think she heard. Louder I said, “No, I should thank you, I’d never have managed to do this on my own. For a sheila, you’re a bonzer bloke, one solid Bluey. I’ll wait until I hear you start the engine, then I’ll light up and toss the flares, all right?”

“Right,” she grinned. She raced back to the driver’s cab, while I rolled the final pair of tyres in place and trotted almost half of the way back, to an area I felt confident I could ignite the tyres from. There was still no sign of life from the slumbering calendar crew. Then I heard my engine turn, kick and fire behind me, the throaty rumble sounded quite loud in the still dark night. I twisted and lit a flare and threw it thirty metres into the pile of tyres furthest from me, towards the rear of the parked vehicles. I twisted the second and threw it about twenty-five metres to the front pile. The rear pile flared up quickly and engulfed the tyres, the second pile ignited just a second or two later. I only hesitated for a moment. Within seconds the whole of both piles were flaming nicely end to end. I didn’t need the spare flares, so I held onto them and ran as fast as I could back to the truck, the passenger door left open for me. I dived in, shut the door and glanced back as Bonnie switched on the main headlights, then carefully and deliberately moved us off smoothly, changing up through the gears as we gained momentum. I looked back as I fastened my seatbelt and the initial kero flames had clearly started ignited the tyres as thick black smoke completely enveloped the Winnoes, hiding them from view from the highway, so they wouldn’t even see which way we were heading.

We hit the road, heading up the highway north to Port Augusta and soon Bonnie had us up and cruising to the 90 click speed limit. Looking at her profile, illuminated by the dashboard dials, her face was full of smiles, a smudge of dirt on her cheek made her look even more naturally beautiful, rather than detracting anything from her looks.

“You all right to carry on driving?” I asked.

“Yes, this is brilliant. I’ve never had so much fun in the dark before, ever.” She laughed at her joke.

“Ha! I used to like to give a lady a good time, but at a guess we’ve both led sheltered lives, it felt good for me, too. Well, seeing as you are driving like a pro, I am going to get a cold drink from the fridge, do you want some water or a fizzy drink?”

“Please, could I have a bottle of water?”

“Sure. Flat or fizzy?”

“Just flat, thanks.”

I grabbed us each a bottle of water and opened hers for her as I turned back to strap myself back into my seat.

“We’re not being followed so far,” she reported, “and there’s little traffic on the road, except we have just been waved through by a police road block just back there without them slowing us down. Looks like they’re expecting us.”

“I’ll give them a bell ... wait, I don’t have their number. I’ll ring Mike.”

“It’s early, will he be up?”

“Too bloody right he will be, it’s Crissie morning and he’s got four female ankle biters and a house full of his missus’s rellies, he’ll be up all right ... G’day, Mike, owyagoin’? ... yeah, really average at this end, mate ... look, can you let the sheila you’ve been reporting to at Port Augusta know that we’re on our way up to see her? ... oh, they’ve seen it on the webcams and are sending the firies? ... hold off for an hour? ... righto ... give me the coordinates.” I typed them into the sat nav. “Catch you later, Merry Crissie, Mike ... hooroo.”

I turned to Bonnie. “We are to go directly to the police station, to each give them a statement, but they want us to keep clear for at least an hour, as they are getting the drug and swat teams together large enough to cope what we reckon they have here to deal with.”

“So we need to park up for a bit?”

“Yeah, we’ll do it near the police station, say a couple of blocks away, and we can get cleaned up again after all that running about. My hands are black from those tyres. Looks like I’m going to have to do some clobber washing, soon. I normally live like a slob when I’m driving so I only have a minimum amount of clobber with me.”

“Yes, my hands are filthy and I’ve ruined my nails, as you might have guessed. I do need a shower. And you need to shave, too. Make yourself presentable to the police or they’ll think you’re a crazy arsonist bum, right?”

“Yeah, we call bums ‘swaggers’ round here. I was going to let my beard grow, but the longest I usually leave it is over a weekend. This is only the third day since I last shaved and it’s feeling scratchy already.”

We saw flashing lights coming towards us, a convoy of half a dozen police cars and divvy vans, preceded by a fire engine, all headed southward at speed. We passed two more stragglers heading south with all their blues and twos on, just as we reached the outskirts of the city.

We drove into Port Augusta and were directed by the sat nav off the A1 down Flinders Terrace into an industrial park. Bonnie parked up the truck on the roadside outside the Cheap As Chips retail store.