They would need a distraction.
The wind was blowing steadily from the west.
Heather pulled up ten little bundles of the kangaroo grass and spaced them each a yard apart. She took out Jacko’s lighter and set fire to every mound. The conditions were perfect. New growth after the rain; dry fuel; steady wind.
The fire caught fast and ran east the way it was supposed to do.
Fire wasn’t scary. If you stood on the windward side of the fire, you could watch it work.
For two thousand generations the Indigenous people had used fire as a tool for managing this terrain. Fire became an enemy only if you couldn’t move.
If, for example, you had to defend a house.
“Come on, kids,” Heather said and they cut south up a small hill.
It was only an hour past dawn and the sun was low in the sky but there was plenty of light for them to see the fire tear through the undergrowth toward the O’Neill farmstead.
Someone started yelling, and men and women and children began heading to the west of the compound. They must have had an emergency generator stored away somewhere because a firehose was produced and it started pumping water from the well.
She wasn’t too disappointed by that. It would give them something to do other than just abandon ship.
“Let’s move,” she said.
They kept low until they were a few hundred yards away and then they got on their bellies and crawled.
They had become good at this.
They crawled to within fifty feet of the farmyard.
Are you sure this is going to work, kids? Heather was tempted to ask but did not. What choice did they have?
They made it to the farmyard and hid behind the big barn. Everyone was out fighting the fire. And there were no dogs sounding the alarm.
“What do we do if it’s locked?” Owen asked.
Heather bit her lip. No other car would do. It had to be the hideous Porsche Cayenne with its big, ugly-beautiful snorkel.
She tried the handle.
The door opened. This particular vehicle had a key and a push-button start. It was a Wi-Fi proximity key. As long as the key was somewhere in the car, all you needed to do was put your foot on the brake and press the start button.
The kids climbed inside. She put her foot on the brake and pressed the start button.
Nothing happened. She pressed it again. Nothing. A third time—nothing. She searched the car but there was no sign of the key.
“The key must be inside the house. Wait here, stay low, keep the doors closed, I’ll be back in a second,” Heather said. She handed Olivia Matt’s .22 rifle. “I think there’s two rounds left in this thing. Stay in the car. If anyone tries to drag you out, shoot them.”
Olivia nodded. “I will,” she said.
Heather closed the driver’s-side door and took the empty Lee-Enfield rifle and ran to the house. Everyone was outside attending to the fire. Where would they keep a key? She looked for hooks on the wall or a little dish by the front door. Nothing like that. If she didn’t find that key, they were lost. You couldn’t hot-wire a modern car the way you could an older model. The proximity key needed to be in the goddamn car.
She remembered the stairs up to Ma’s room.
She took them three at a time.
At the top of the steps there was a very long hall with half a dozen doors.
“Shit.”
The first door she opened was a man’s bedroom with a pair of jeans lying on the floor.
The second room was a bathroom.
She was running out of time.
“What are you looking for?” a voice said.
It was a very little girl with big brown eyes.
“I’m looking for my car keys and my phone,” Heather said.
“Did you set the grass on fire?” the girl asked.
“Yes. I’m sorry about that. I probably shouldn’t have done that. I thought everyone would go and fight the fire and we could escape.”
“It’s OK. It goes like that every year in the summer. We’re used to it. I’m Niamh, by the way,” the girl said, offering her hand.
Heather shook the hand. “Heather,” she said solemnly.
“Your phone and the keys will be in Ma’s room. At the end there.”
“Thank you, Niamh,” Heather said.
She walked to the end of the hallway. The door opened onto a hot, dusty, stuffy room with a massive four-poster bed, a tallboy, and other ancient pieces of wooden furniture. The walls were covered with faded black-and-white photographs of men with elaborate beards and women with elaborate dresses. There was a framed ship’s ticket from Liverpool to Sydney and next to it a photo of a pretty, ridiculously young girl with a suitcase trying to look like a grown-up.