Ellie's Heroes

Chapter 07

by Technomad

One thing our trainers had hammered into us was patience. "Planning and patience prevent piss-poor performance," they had emphasised, and we had found that they were exactly right. Another thing they had harped on was "K.I.S.S. - keep it simple, stupid," and that also served us well. As we worked out our plan, I often found myself remembering our instructors, and blessing them for the time and effort they'd spent on us.

The weather was uninviting, which suited us just fine. Since our rain cloaks resembled those used by the enemy, we could move about the countryside by day, and appear to be nothing but a normal enemy patrol. Of course, we did take precautions against being seen, but the chances were that anybody seeing us would write us off as normal. We also scouted by night frequently, but there were things we had to see by daylight to figure out correctly.

There were plenty of abandoned stations and houses to hole up in, and we never stayed in one place for too long. We moved some of our food supplies up from Hell and stored them here and there, so that we wouldn't be short of tucker. The canned rations weren't too inviting, but they beat starving by a mile.

As we compared our maps with what we found on the ground, our plans began to assume firmer shape. Once or twice, we even ventured into Monmouth itself, on nights when the rain was particularly fierce. Like most towns, the street lights weren't in too good shape, thanks to the power generation stations being favorite targets of the RNZAF's raiders, so we had plenty of shadows to use without being obvious that that was what we were trying to do.

Unlike poor Wirrawee, Monmouth had begun the process of re-settlement by the invaders. Signs in their incomprehensible gibberish were up, announcing that stores and businesses were under new management. So far, the goods I saw on sale were all familiar, but I knew that they'd be bringing in or making their own stuff as soon as they could. Seeing those signs, and the foreign faces behind the counters, made me grind my teeth with fury. I couldn't see one of them without remembering Corrie, and wanting to avenge her a thousandfold.

One of the reasons that the enemy wanted Monmouth was because of its main industry. Monmouth had one of the largest petroleum refineries in Australia, and the invaders were short of petrol, lubricants and other such things. They had the refinery up and running full blast, and the oil fields outside of town were also going.

When Homer and Lee saw that, their eyes lit up. "Imagine what a huge fire we could make," murmured Lee. Whispering carried farther and sounded more like something was wrong than murmuring, so we'd been trained out of it in New Zealand.

Homer looked like a starving man staring at a huge feast. "Oh, wouldn't that be an ANZAC Day to remember?" I had to think about it, but then I nodded. It was close to ANZAC Day, and we had forgotten! This would be the best one we'd ever had in our lives.

I was thinking about Corrie again. I was also thinking about my mum, and my dad. We'd heard that a lot of Wirrawee people had been put to labour, working for the invaders in various capacities. For my proud dad, having to slave for invaders would be like battery acid eating up his soul. And I didn't like thinking about what might be happening to my gentle mum. Kevin's story about the game the invaders had played with him had given me some very nasty images about what might happen to an unprotected woman in the hands of the invading forces. There were reasons I kept a small pistol on me at all times. If necessary, the last bullet would be for me, but I'd not be taken alive. Not ever again.

On one of our scouting expeditions, we ran across something we hadn't expected to see. In retrospect, that was stupid of us; the people in Monmouth had had to go somewhere, after all, and they'd been celebrating Commem Day when they were hit, too.

It was a fairground-turned-concentration-camp, just like the one outside Wirrawee, but much larger. From a vantage point on a nearby hill, we crouched under bushes, scoping the place out with binoculars. It was a grey, miserable day, but at least it wasn't raining just then. If it had been sunny, we'd have had to be much more cautious; an enemy soldier seeing the sun reflecting off our binocs' lenses would have meant that the hunt would be up for us, with a vengeance. We were well-camouflaged, but it had been pounded into us that one little mistake could be the death of us all.

"I make it about 80 hectares," Lee said, and Fi wrote that down in a notebook. We knew that the population of Monmouth was roughly about 150,000 people, and from what we could see, they were all crammed in behind the razor-wire tangles that surrounded their fairground. It was crowded enough to make my skin crawl when I took my turn scanning with the binoculars.

The fairgrounds' buildings had apparently all been converted into makeshift living quarters, and someone or other had rigged tents out of canvas, but it looked hellishly uncomfortable. I felt a little bit guilty about my nice, roomy tent in Hell, which I only had to share with one person. Seeing the way they were piled in on top of each other made me shudder. I'm a rural…I'm not used to having so many people about, particularly so close. Having to deal with that, in a place where I couldn't get away from people and be alone, would drive me mad in short order. The thought alone made me shudder.

We settled in to watch the fairgrounds/camp, and noticed that while some people were let out in groups to work, as Kevin had been in Wirrawee, most of them just stayed in the camp. They mooched about, not seeming to do much; from their body language, I got the impression that a lot of them had despaired.

Of course, that could have been because they were on very short commons. We talked with Kevin at length, gently eliciting every bit of memory he had of the conditions at the Wirrawee Fairgrounds, to try to figure out just what we were dealing with.

Once we got him talking, Kevin was able to tell us a great deal. "Yeah, food's short, and what you generally get is nasty," he said, shuddering at the memory. "A lot of what we got was converted from animal feed, or so people said. I never was able to confirm it myself, but I know people were getting sick. You had people with the runs who'd be in the dunny all day. Those generally didn't last too long, since we didn't get more than a minimum of water. The medics we had in with us said that they dehydrated themselves. It was hot in there, and we didn't have too much shelter, which didn't help that situation any."

Kevin stared into nothingness, lost in his terrible memories. We were holed up in one of our hidey-holes, on an abandoned station some miles from Monmouth; we didn't fancy being interrupted. It was a bright, sunshiny day, which meant that we had to stay hidden. Once or twice we'd seen helicopters flying by in the distance, and we knew that from a chopper, we could easily be seen. While we might look, at first glance, like enemy soldiers, there were probably signals they used among themselves that we didn't know, and not displaying those when scrutinized would mean that the jig was up.

We were in a barn, where we could see outside fairly easily without being seen ourselves. The main house had been burnt, and was of no use to us. Homer was on guard, and was sweeping the horizons for possible trouble. The rest of us were gathered on the main floor, talking and tucking into some of the canned food we'd brought from Hell.

"Did they make you work?" asked Lee. He sipped carefully at a canteen of water. At least the well here still worked, and there was a hand pump we could use to pull up clean fresh water. That was one of the reasons we favored this place.

"Not really. We were supposed to keep the place clean, but they weren't any too fussy about that. After all, we were just prisoners," Kevin said bitterly. "If we got sick, if we died, who really cared? It'd save them work when they brought in their own lot to settle this country."

Fi put her arm around Kevin's shoulders, offering him what comfort she could. I wished I'd thought of that myself. I hated the enemy even more, the more I heard from Kevin.

"After a while, they started asking for volunteers to go out on work details," Kevin took up his tale, his voice a monotone. "Like a lot of other damned fools, I volunteered; they said that the work details would get more food. They hadn't lied. They just didn't tell us exactly how much more food we'd get, or how hard and long the work would be. The extra food wasn't really enough to balance out the energy we spent slaving away for those bastards. And God help you if you tried to run!"

He paused for a minute, visibly gathering his strength to go on. "I saw what they did to one poor bloke who tried to get away. They tracked him down right quick, and decided to have some fun. They first shot at his feet, making him dance like in a Western movie. Then when they got bored with that, they shot him in the legs, and finished him off with their bayonets…taking their time and really enjoying themselves." He gave us a haunted look. "The idea was to make it clear that running off was a bad idea. If you lot hadn't turned up when and where you did, I was planning to off myself as soon as I could figure out a way to do it that they couldn't stop in time. Trying to off yourself was another really bad idea."

"Those people are monsters!" Lee growled.

"No, a lot of them are just blokes doing a job," Kevin answered, to my surprise. "The ones who volunteered for work-detail duty were bad, but quite a few of them struck me as not too different from anybody else. And after what I saw in the camp…" He gave us a haunted grin…"nobody can ever tell me that Australians aren't just as bad as anybody else!"

"What do you mean?"

"Being in that place did a lot of things to people, and a lot of them weren't nice," Kevin explained. "Some of them went in for dobbing. They'd dob you in to the guards for anything at all, even if they didn't get anything out of it, just for the pleasure of getting someone else in trouble. Others would steal anything they could, no matter who owned it. They'd have stolen the shit from under a squatting dog."

"Were they all like that?" I gasped in horror. I tried to imagine my dad and mum being such mongrels, and couldn't picture it. My dad hated theft, and had no time for people who'd dob each other in to the police. Oh, he'd have reported a real criminal, no question about that…but running tattling to the constables about minor stuff disgusted him. And my gentle, loving mum would sooner have died than steal anything.

"Oh no," Kevin shook his head hard. "There were people who tried to hold things together, but they had a real uphill fight. A lot of the people in there had just more-or-less given up. They withdrew into themselves, and just sat there, day after day. If their rellies or friends didn't see that they ate, they wouldn't eat and just wasted away." He clearly didn't want to talk any more about it, and we respected his wishes.

That evening, we decided to alter our plans. Along with getting that lovely gold, we'd do our best to crack open that camp and at least give our people in there a fighting chance of heading for the bush.

END Chapter 07