Chapter 2: She'll be right.
"You screwed me, Auntie. Screwed me hard." Snarled Lizzie.
Following the announcement, most of the crowd had quietly dispersed with amiability of people who can be confident that, whatever the issue, it was now firmly someone elses problem and they could be sure of having success or, failing that, a suitable scapegoat. The few whose problem it still was had retreated to the old stone cottage to discuss vital issues such as who was really to blame. And thus Lizzie stood on one side of the ancient wooden desk while Stephanie sat on the other, lounging in her chair with everyone else involved trying their damndest to keep a distance from the pair without appearing unduly terrified.
"Screwed you?" Stephanie lent in, hands clapsed beneath her chin. "No, I just made you. And after you dropped a pile of shit on my plate this morning." She theatrically slid an empty glass across the desk, motioning for someone – anyone – to pour out a drink. "Listen Lizzie. You pull this off, you'll run this little town till you're ready to hang up the hat."
"If I pull this off? Fuck, I can't believe you're even talking like that'll happen. Last caravan went down there was twenty strong and ain't one of them came back. You just sold me up the river to save your own lousy hide." She snatched the closest bottle from the wall and took a deep draught. It burned like hell, colliding with the ice in her gut and churning up hard.
"Ain't no if about it. You'll do it. Because you haven't got a damned choice, any more than I did."
"Damned right I don't. You held this shit behind your back because you knew I'd never agree to slitting my own throat like this." Lizzie took another swig and shifted her grip on the bottle. As if on cue, the Mayors off hand slid below the desk, her other tightening around the glass.
The town council took a small step back. Elizabeth Uraidla was notorious for keeping order in the pub with whatever came to hand. Old Stephie Cho had been the regions most notorious brawler before age and responsibility had confined her violence towards the enemies of the town. No-one wanted to get between the pair. No-one wanted to miss the fight by bolting early.
"Course I did. If I'd told you, you'd have been halfway to bloody Meningie before the meeting even got started. You're not stupid Lizzie. Which is half the reason you're gonna go and the whole reason you're gonna come back".
"Still stupid enough to trust you. Whats the other half of the reason you think I'm gonna go through with this idea of yours?",
"Because you're as local as the bridge, the pub and the glowing sludge that passes for a river. You might walk for a bit but you ain't gonna settle anywhere else, and you certainly ain't gonna live the rest of your short life staring into the sheer fucking disappointment in the eyes of everyone you serve a pint to. Maggsy raised a better gal than that. Or just a more prideful one, I ain't ever been able to tell which".
Lizzy glared at the floor, as though every speck of dirt had personally offended her. Seconds passed.
"I hate it when you're right."
"Think I'd have lasted an arvo running this place if I wasn't?"
Dark fell upon the Bridge. Most everyone had turned in for the night, leaving only Johnno and Lizzy to continue poring through the aged and crumbling boxes that held the towns only record of a time before the war, before the world had bathed in nuclear fire. Those documents could have been a treasure trove for some scribe a world away, but the pair had eyes on a more pressing issue: Finding a god damn map of old Adelaide, the dead city to the south. At least they hoped it was dead, the tendency for traders to disappear down the cracked remnants of the road and never return was much less intimidating if you could imagine they merely found nothing and took the short route back home. The work was slow, mindless and yet somehow demanded their full attention. Lizzy was grateful for this, because it kept unfortunate questions from her mind. Questions like "where in the blazes is our third man?" and "How many pieces am I going to cut Stephanie into once this is all over?".
From somewhere in the archive stacks at the back of the dusty old council building that smelled of must and bluey shit came a strangled gasp, and Johnno's raspy voice rang out.
"Got something back here, Lizzy. Might want to take a look at it."
"You gonna bring it out here, or do I have to walk back there and risk breaking my neck on all this crap?"
"This isn't something you can move"
"Fine, I'm coming" she said, stepping carefully around piles of refuse and stacks of half decayed old books, fumbling in the near dark.
'Something', in this case, turned out to be an enormous old pinboard wedged between the back wall and a rather unsteady stack of old paper, the foam having long rotted away leaving a frame of wooden stakes holding together sheets of crumbling particle board. Stuck to it were dozens of paper scraps, scrawled on in a faded blue ink that was barely visible in the candlelight.
"Impressive. So what the hell is it?" Lizzy muttered. She's barked her shin on a hidden desk and the throbbing pain had done little for her temperament.
"Don't know entirely. Half of its illegible. But it appears to be an old inventory list. Sort of."
"You mean we've found the bloody storekeepers diary from fifty years ago? How's that help us."
"I think the old tradesman-general wrote it. Big lists of what we had and where to scrounge replacements."
"Any use to us?"
"I haven't read half of it. I don't know how long it's been here. I don't rightly know what I'm even looking for or what half these words are for."
"Thought you knew everything about machines."
"Almost. These are anatomical words. I don't think the old tradie liked the mayor much. Or the sergeant. Or anyone really".
"Guess what you're doing tonight then."
"Reading?"
"Reading. Let me know when you've got something worth scraping a shin over". And with that, Lizzy walked slowly and carefully back towards the door, retracing her steps as though at any moment a wild desk might leap out to savage her knee.
Hours passed. Dawn had come, lazed around for breakfast and then duly departed for the rigours of the day. Lizzy slept fitfully in her bed above the pub. Johnno pored over scribblings and stared at scraps, willing the arrangement to make some sort of sense. Stephanie reclined in her office, sleep abandoned, wondering just when the Sergeant would manage to drag Darryl around so the two of them could quietly explain to the trapper just why he'd be giving up his regular job for a special round. The kid was already two days late getting back. Any longer and they'd have to start thinking about what to do if he'd caught wind of the plan, made the smart choice and done a runner for Meningie. Or if he'd died out there, as so many others had over the years.
Hours later, the sun settling comfortably into its midday heat, Elisabeth stirred. The memories of the last day hit her hard, and she cringed as the argument with the Mayor played through her head again. She'd lost afore she even knew there was a fight and that stung her heart as much as the fear ahead stung her head. But Steph had been right, there was no option but to get moving as soon as possible. And so Lizzy resolved to do what she could before anything else went wrong. Packing was the order of the day. Clothes, petty cash from the tip jar, a first aid kit pried loose from the bathroom wall, the heavy metal-shod hunk of jarrah wood she used as a club kept hidden under the counter, the immaculately maintained revolver plucked from its home in the cash register, even the rough, stained and thoroughly vile-looking leather vest she had hung out the back (it had to be kept out there. Customers complained that it smelled as though someone had died in it. They weren't wrong, as a hastily sewn up set of holes in the back would attest). If she had to go, Liz thought, she was going to go with everything she could possibly need. Especially if she decided not to come back. Satisfied that she had stashed everything relevant in her swag or on it, she left it on the unmade bed and walked out to greet the people she was about to risk her life for.
Across the other side of the town, a tall, lithe and rather scruffy looking bloke tanned even darker than his normal ruddy skin was having a terrible day. Darryl – Dazza to his mates, who were few and far between – was as puzzled as a man could be. He1 had been looking forward to the few luxuries of town life, spending his fresh coin from the uncured hides in his pack on a bath and bath partner, a few tins of Barry's booze, maybe even a meal he hadn't had to cook on a spluttering campfire. But the Mayor herself had shown up at the general store looking for him and, with nary a word, dragged him back to her office. Things had rapidly gone downhill from there. He'd been berated for his lateness, verbally bludgeoned into agreeing to an obviously suicidal adventure, given merely a day to enjoy himself before heading back out and, worst of all, cheerily informed by the old curmudgeon that this was entirely his fault. She figured young Ronny for the shooter and Ronny was definitely a mate of Darryl's, a younger son of a 'rino farmer that had taken to the barely older wildmans laconic tales of bush survival. Course, Ronny was too much of a kid (and his father too much of an important man) to be sent on something like this. So in his place, Darryl was going. Whether he relished the idea or not.
He'd almost stormed out of her office. He had settled for draining her entire pint glass. She'd glared at him for that and then dropped her bombshell.
"Look, kiddo, I know you don't like this one bloody bit. Neither do I but someones gotta go and I ain't exactly spoiled for choice." She paused, refilling her glass from a dark longnecked bottle. "I figure you for an honest bloke, so I'm not gonna cuff you to the ute or anything. But fair's fair. You make a run for Meningie or try to cut out by the Bend, I'm gonna tell Ronny you sold him out. Then I'm gonna tell his old man just why Ronny's so cut up over you leaving. Do we have an understanding?"
Darryl stared back. He felt a lot of things. Betrayed, hurt that she'd suggested he might actually betray the town, hurt that she'd even had a pretty good idea of his escape plan.
"Ok." He drained her glass again. "You're like a fucking drop bear, you know that? Always ambushin people"
"Drop bears don't charge for their beer. If they even exist." She said, with a wry grin creeping across her features. "Chuck a couple of Kanga's on the table before you leave".
Johnno was having a much better day than Lizzy or Darryl. He still hadn't deciphered parts of the paper trail that stood across from him, but the night had been productive. He now knew at least twenty more terms for various anatomically improbable – if not impossible – acts but more importantly he had an idea. The old tradie who'd put together the inventory hadn't exactly been anticipating any need to dig out the well, but he had been something of a car nut. Various sketches of complicated manufacturing equipment and rambling screeds about the worth of different models made up perhaps half the undamaged bits nailed to the pinboard. Enough, in fact, for Johnno to begin his own sketches on how to adapt parts from that machinery to dig a big ol' hole in the ground. While he still couldn't read large chunks of the old mans atrocious scrawl, it had been hard to mistake the printed map he'd found jammed under one corner of the pinboard. It clearly marked the location of various factories around the area that the tradie thought might still have contained spare parts, machinery or even just plans. A few hours spent cross-referencing that with the hand drawn maps maintained by the towns few trappers had yielded results. He now had the beginnings of a route.
It was perhaps late afternoon now, the sun continuing its leisurely stroll across the burnt sky. Lizzy stood behind the counter at the pub, serving pints for perhaps the last time. Stephanie had been right about that too – Lizzy could barely stomach the look of fear and pride in the customers faces, she didn't want to think about the pity, the disappointment that would've been written across their eyes if she'd refused the call. It was still quiet in the bar, an hour or two before the evening rush and Lizzy settled in to polish glasses, joke with the few regulars already present and keep an eye on the travellers who'd set up shop in one corner of the place. Barry was already well into his cups, gesticulating wildly and discussing some new idea or experiment with ancient Bernard, a fat old drunk whose face sported wrinkles that might have come from before the bombs. Kerry paced back and forth, taking meals from the kitchen out to the travellers and scraping away empty plates. A few scattered others roamed in and out. A typical afternoon for the bar. Except for the presence of Darryl up the back, steadily pounding away shots from a bottle of Barry's moonshine. The trapper never drank in the bar, always preferring to grab a handful of tinnies to take away and drink up on the hill. He also wasn't one to drink so alone or so grimly, slamming back drinks like a man hell bent on blacking himself out as efficiently as possible. Still, Lizzy couldn't complain. Darryl had paid good money for that bottle, even if he had paid in a small pile of silver coins.
That was when the doors opened, admitting the bustling for of Stephanie Cho, who strode straight through the saloon doors and up to the bar as though she owned the entire place.
"Johnno's got something, Lizzy. He'll be here in a few minutes to talk it out, reckons we should use the back room."
"Fine, I'll get Kerry to watch the bar. Hope its worth dying over." Lizzy said, throwing her hands up in frustration
"Relax, kid. Dying's the last thing I want you to do".
"That wasn't funny the first time you said it Auntie, hasn't got any funnier in the fifteen years since".
"Really, Lizzy, you just don't appreciate the classics. Now grab Darryl, you'll need him in this as well".
Elisabeth and Stephanie stood in the back of the council office, craning over the pinboard and trying without much luck to interpret both the original scrawl and Johnno's impossible chicken scratch notes. Luckily the mechanical genius was on hand to translate both.
"I'll have to run the route past Darryl when he wakes up" Johnno said, pointing out the slumped form of the towns trapper, passed out in the corner "but I think we've got it. The old timers never foresaw this so I've had to adapt a few of my own ideas but I know what I need to make the well digger. And now I know where to get the gear. There's an old manufacturing plant, perhaps thirty k's north of Adelaide proper. That'll have what we need, I guarantee it."
"You sure it'll actually be there? Cos that sounds like something you'd loot for a few coins" Lizzy butted in.
"It'll be there. This is specialist technology, no good for repairs . Just manufacturing. Its bulky, you'd need to cut it out of its mountings and cart it off in parts."
"And if its not there?"
Johnno glared back, the annoyance mounting. "I can rig it up from other parts. I just need the site. This will work".
"Congratulations everyone. You have a plan. Be ready to leave at dawn, I've already had Johnno chuck the stuff you need in the ute so just grab what ya have at home.
"What kind of stuff?"
"Rations, fuel, water – what little we have -, weapons and bullets. Had him lay in a couple of bangsticks for you Lizzy, and a plinking rifle for Darryl if he's sobered up enough to use it."
Stephanie stretched against the wall theatrically and stifled a yawn.
"Course, the ute's only got two seats. Hope one of you likes riding shotgun".