Burning for Revenge by John Marsden Read Free Book Online Page A

door.
    I started breathing again. The itching in my hair stopped, so I assumed that maybe I didn't have lice.
    I sat up, throwing off the covers. It was too dark to see what the others were doing, but gradually my eyes got more used to it. I realised Fi was next to me, like I'd thought, and she too was sitting up.
    The truck shook as the driver got in and slammed the door, then it shuddered as he started the engine. We moved forward, but only about fifty metres, and sat there for another five minutes, with the engine running. I thought he was probably waiting for the other trucks. No one dared speak. We couldn't be sure how thin the wall was between us and the driver. Above the throbbing of the engine I heard the whoop of a truck horn. It seemed like this was the signal, because a moment later our truck lurched into gear—I don't think he had a lot of synchromesh in his gearbox—and away we went.
    In peacetime, BTW, the airlines offered mystery flights, to fill their empty seats. You'd arrive at the airport and only then would they tell you where you were going. It was at the big city airports that they offered it of course, not at Stratton, and certainly not at Wirrawee, but Mr. and Mrs. Mathers had gone on a few of them.
    And now we were on our own mystery flight.
    My mind headed into full-on panic. I knew the first thing was to get control of my mind, control of myself. I breathed deeply and tried to concentrate. It took a while, but at last I felt calmer and able to think. I wriggled over to the middle of the van. By grabbing any limbs I could find I got the others to meet me there. And so we held our strangest ever meeting, whispering to each other as we lay in a star shape on the hot jolting floor of the truck.

    "What are we going to do?" Fi asked.
    It was one of Fi's standard questions. No one answered.
    Finally, however, Homer said: "It's pretty easy to open the door from the inside."
    "Can you do it quietly?" I asked.
    "I think so. It didn't make much noise when he shut it."
    "But we can't open it as we go along, because the trucks behind will see us," Lee said.
    He'd obviously had the same idea as Homer, that we could jump from the moving truck, but he'd also realised that it was hopeless.
    "All we can do is hide again under the felt when they stop," I whispered, "and hope the driver doesn't come in the back here."
    "And then what?" Fi asked.
    "Wait for a while and then try to get out. Maybe wait till dark."
    "There's one thing I noticed when I got in," Lee said.
    "What?"
    "There's a little hatch between this part and the driver's cab. So if we knew the driver had got out we could get through that and into the front while he was coming round to the back."
    I was silent. It was a useful piece of information. It mightn't save us—nothing might—but it did give us an extra glimmer of hope. I was grateful for any glimmer at that stage, however slight.

    The truck kept going. It was quite a straight road and it was bitumen. That could mean Wirrawee, but there was no certainty about it. It could equally mean Risdon, or West Stratton. The only thing I was sure of was that we weren't on the main road to Stratton itself.
    Lee took a look through a crack in the door and came back to report that he could see at least one truck behind us. That finally closed the option of jumping out. Even if it hadn't, did we have the guts to do it? I doubted it. At best we'd break nine ankles between the five of us. The truck was doing a good speed.
    "We'd better get any weapons we can find," said Homer. "Or anything we can use as a weapon."
    "OK," I said. "But hide them in the felt. If we're caught, we want to look innocent. Don't have anything in your pockets that they could call a weapon."
    I don't know what the others came up with but I didn't have much: a fruit knife, a box of matches, and a fairly heavy torch that maybe I could bounce off someone's skull. I moved the torch into the side pocket of my pack, the matches