Catherine Jinks TheRoad (28 page)

‘Suppose he ran out of petrol? Like that family did?’

‘Verlie.’ Ross gave a long-suffering sigh. ‘Just tell me what you’re worrying about.’

‘I’m worrying that we’ll run out of petrol.’

‘Well don’t. We won’t run out of petrol because we’re nearly there.’

He sounded absolutely convinced, but Verlie knew that he wasn’t. How could he be? She stared ahead, noting the distant shapes of two familiar rock formations. They had a name, but she couldn’t remember what it was.

‘Ross,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Do we have enough petrol to get back to Wentworth?’

‘No.’ His tone was flat. Forbidding.

‘What about Coombah?’

‘No.’

So that was that. They had no choice but to go on. Those little peaks, however, were a comforting sight. Verlie seemed to recall that those peaks were quite close to Broken Hill.

‘Ross?’

‘Mmm.’

‘Can you turn on the radio, please?’

He obliged her, leaning forward to punch buttons and spin dials. A noisy electronic crackle filled the car. Ranging up and down both the FM and AM bands, Ross made a fruitless attempt to isolate some kind of station – to locate a stream of chatter or a flood of music.

After a while, he gave up.

‘Bad reception,’ he mumbled. ‘Doesn’t surprise me.’

It surprised Verlie. She wondered why, if they were so close to Broken Hill, they weren’t picking up one of the local radio stations. But she didn’t say anything.

They drove on in silence, towards the ever-receding outline of the Pinnacles.

Chris kept his word. At half past four, the Pinnacles were no closer than they had been at three thirty, so he stopped the car and addressed its other two occupants.

‘Okay,’ he said, turning a little in his seat. ‘What now?’

Alec gave a shuddering sigh. He had been watching the clock and wondering what Chris would do; would he, or would he not, concede that something was very, very wrong? Alec wasn’t an intellectual, but he was smart enough to trust his instincts. Chris was a vet – he’d mentioned that – but for all his education he acted like a guy who wouldn’t believe what was under his nose unless it could be scientifically proven to exist.

Alec had progressed beyond science. He already understood that they had somehow strayed into the Twilight Zone, and he was scared. Tucked away at the back of his mind was the thought that they had hit a kink in the fabric of Time, like the people in
Star Trek
, or that movie
Groundhog Day.
(He had seen that movie twice because he loved Andie MacDowell.) Of course he knew it was crazy, but what other explanation could there be? Unless he had gone schizo. Unless this was all one big hallucination. That was possible.

Or was it a genuine case for
The X-Files
? Were aliens involved, somehow? Was there a secret army base out here, attracting interstellar attention?

‘We should have been there by now,’ Graham declared, studying his map.

‘I know,’ Chris replied. ‘So what do we do? Suggestions, please.’