Burning for Revenge Read Free

said.
    Lee didn't say anything. That hurt too. I thought he would have stuck up for me, especially against Kevin, who he didn't like much.
    So that was why I was lying in my tent listening to the summer storm smashing into the bush, watching the thrashing and threshing of the tent, crying out in fear as a small branch landed on the nylon fly. The thunder boomed and blasted, the rain had never fallen more heavily, and I never felt more alone in my life.

Two
    We were all paralysed by the tension between Kevin and me. I thought it would blow over in an hour or two, like most of our arguments, like the summer storms. But Kevin wouldn't talk to me and no matter how keen the others were to get out of Hell they didn't seem able to make a move while this coldness went on. I tried to apologise to Kevin, but he wouldn't listen. That made me feel I was definitely in the right now, which didn't help settle things, as it made me less interested in trying again.

    On the third day though Lee settled it, in a kind of way, by saying suddenly and aggressively: "Look, I said to Ellie the other day that I was going, whether anyone else came or not. I should have gone then, when I said I was. So the hell with the lot of you, I'm going now."
    "I'll come," Homer said, straight away.
    "So will I," Fi said.
    "I will if you want me," I said.
    "Of course I bloody want you," Lee said, looking irritated.
    No one looked at Kevin, who was trying to clean a fry-pan that had some burnt rice stuck to it. I don't know what recipe he'd used for his fried rice, but it hadn't worked too well. His face was red, but probably not from the sweat he put into his scrubbing. He didn't say anything for so long that we gave up and assumed he wasn't going to speak at all. Instead we started talking about what we needed to take with us. Suddenly Kevin interrupted. "You could at least include me in this," he grumbled.
    We looked at each other. This time I wasn't going to be the one to say something. No one else seemed in a hurry either. Finally Fi, the peacemaker, said: "Well, we weren't sure if you wanted to come."
    "Of course I'm coming," Kevin snapped. "What, did you think I was going to stay here on my own? I'm not that stupid. You saw what happened to Chris."

    There was another pause, then we kept going with our plans, with Kevin making the occasional comment, usually negative. For once though we didn't have many plans. I didn't like that. Normally we gave a lot of thought to what we were doing. The longer the war lasted, the more we seemed to make things up as we went along. It made me feel insecure.
    There was only one thing I wanted, and that was to go in the direction of Holloway, to look for my mother. The others had no particular objection to that. Homer's parents were thought to be somewhere near Stratton, and we didn't want to go that way. The country there was too built up, too closely settled. It seemed too dangerous for us. We didn't have much clue where Kevin's family was—somewhere to the north apparently. All we knew was that his mother was in the Showground, like my father. We had no hope of getting into the Showground. Anyway, we weren't keen on going towards Wirrawee or Cobbler's Bay for a while. We'd made things a bit hot for ourselves in these places. If we went the long way towards Holloway—via the Wirrawee-Holloway road instead of taking the shortcut through the mountains—we would then have a choice of going to Goonardoo or Holloway. Goonardoo was on the main north-south railway line, so we might be able to do a bit of damage there, and they were both big towns.
    That was as far as our actual plans went. The rest of the time we just threw ideas at each other. Lots of sentences beginning with "Maybe we could..." or "What about if we...." It was like playing "if only" with the future, instead of the past.

    Fi wanted to call Colonel Finley, to tell him we were leaving Hell. There was no particular objection to that either. That was the