Land of Fences Read online

  About the Book

  Finn and Kas are surviving on the coast–more than surviving: they’re enjoying the surf, the summer and being together. And now, the lights of Wentworth mean life could soon be back to normal. Finn is cautiously optimistic, but Kas knows she can never escape her status as a Siley, and that a return to slavery is a very real possibility. She’s nervous. And it turns out she’s right to be. When Kas is captured and taken inside the fences, Finn faces his greatest challenge yet.

  Land of Fences is the compelling third and final novel in Mark Smith’s highly acclaimed action-packed trilogy that began with The Road to Winter.

  Contents

  Cover Page

  About the Book

  Title Page

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  For Albert Johnston Smith (1927–2017)

  Kas and I take the track along the clifftops and down to the point. It’s another perfect summer day. She’s almost running, eager to get to the beach and the rock pools, grabbing my hand and pulling me along. Rowdy is miles ahead of us. He’ll be in the water by now.

  ‘Come on! The tide won’t wait,’ she says over her shoulder.

  In the three months since we arrived back in Angowrie, Kas has fallen in love with the sea. She’s learnt to swim and surf. She’s comfortable dropping off the edge of the reef with me, into the deep waters of the bay. She knows how to prise abalone off the rocks and where to look for crays on the ledges and in the crevices. We compete for who can hold their breath the longest. She’s getting better, but I’ve still got her covered. Years of surfing have taught me how to relax underwater to conserve oxygen.

  Now, she laughs and swings around behind me, jumping onto my back. I piggyback her for a few seconds then let her drop her feet to the ground.

  ‘How good is this?’ she says. ‘Just the two of us and Rowdy and an empty beach.’

  ‘All the beaches are empty remember. And, anyway, we’re here to collect food, too,’ I say.

  The path opens onto the beach at the point. The sand sweeps out towards the reef, where rock pools trap the water from the high tide. It seems like an age ago that we were here with Willow, in the days before Rose died. So much has happened since then—the winter of storms, the journey north into Wilder country, finding Hope and taking her to Harry and Stella in the valley. Then returning to Angowrie to find Ray alive. Kas and I carry the scars—the ones we can see and the ones we can’t—to remind us how close we came to losing everything.

  This summer we’ve been able to relax a little. Kas and I hunt and fish and swim and surf, while Ray tends the veggie gardens and helps out skinning the rabbits and cooking meals. It almost seems like a normal life—except we’re still on our own here. There have been no more drifters finding their way into our quarantined town and, more importantly, we haven’t seen any Wilders since their defeat at the valley farm. Some of them were killed, others fled into the forest and Ramage retreated towards Longley, alone and wounded. We’ve got no way of knowing if he survived or whether the Wilders have been able to reorganise.

  Each day we check the road into town, watching for JT, Daymu and any of the feedstore kids who may have escaped from the No-landers’ farm. We figure they would’ve been here by now if the No-landers had allowed them to leave, as they promised. We both feel a nagging sense of guilt that our escape may have led to them becoming prisoners.

  Kas and I have given up wearing clothes at the beach. The summer has turned my skin a deep brown and the sun and saltwater have bleached my hair almost white. Kas is lean and muscled and her black hair is a tangle of knots and braids that fall down her back. I love watching her underwater, her body flexing and rippling in the light when she dives off the point. We’re more modest at home with Ray around, wearing shorts and singlets, but each night we lie together with our shoulders touching, skin on skin, salt from our hair crusting the pillow.

  Kas leads me out to her favourite pool, a deep sinkhole that hides crabs and sea anemone on its sandy bottom. She dives straight in and surfaces with a smile. She splashes water at Rowdy, who leaps up, trying to snap it out of the air.

  ‘It’s so warm this morning,’ she says. ‘Like a bath.’ She duck dives and the water slides over her back and legs. I jump in and follow her down. We’ll have to get back to the business of finding food before the tide turns, but for now we can steal half an hour and enjoy ourselves. Straightaway, I know this is one of our breath-holding competitions. Kas sits cross-legged on the sand at the base of the pool, eyes closed, index fingers touching her thumbs, pretending to meditate. Her hair forms a black halo around her head. I ease my way down next to her and wait. Finally, her eyes spring open and she tries to grab me, to push the air out of my lungs. But I’m too quick for her and she strokes for the surface with me at her heels. We burst into the warm blue air and gasp for oxygen.

  ‘Not fair!’ she yells. ‘I was down there before you.’

  ‘Your mistake, not mine.’

  She swims to the edge of the pool and lifts herself onto the rocks. Leaning down to offer me her hand, she pulls me most of the way out before suddenly letting go. I fall back and resurface to hear her laughing.

  ‘You’ll never learn, will you?’ she says.

  I haul myself out and find a flat spot to lie next to her on the rocks. The sun dries us quickly and my skin prickles with little crystals of salt. ‘Come on,’ I say, getting to my feet. ‘Let’s get the snorkelling gear and see what we can catch for dinner.’

  We fit our masks, and pindrop off the reef. We find the surface, fill our lungs and dive. The summer currents have brought new life to the reef. There are abalone clinging to the rocks, fish of all colours and sizes flitting around just out of reach and the ledges hold crayfish bigger than my forearm. We separate by a few metres and begin to fill our bags, being careful not to take too much. It’s a natural foodstore down here, one that has replenished itself in the three years since the virus. It makes me wonder how much better off the planet might be without humans stuffing it up.

  Back on the rocks we compare catches. One of my crays has eggs tucked under it so we carefully return it to the water. Kas still marvels at their shells and sharp pincers. ‘They’re almost too beautiful to eat,’ she says.

  We make our way to our clothes on the beach. Rowdy struggles to his feet. He’s okay once he gets going, but the damage to his hip where he was shot makes it hard for him to get his legs working sometimes. Kas drops to her knees and nuzzles her face into his coat.

  ‘We’d better get back to Ray,’ I say.

  ‘Not yet,’ she says. ‘Let’s stay a little bit longer.’

  We stretch ourselves out on the sand.

  ‘Do you remember that first day we came down here?’ she asks.

  ‘Yeah, of course.’ How could I forget? We’d only known each other for a few days but already I was falling for her. And that afternoon we kissed for the first time. ‘You and Wils swam in the shallow pool and I dived off the reef.’

  ‘I was so sus of you—this wild boy I could hardly understand.’

  I smile. ‘When you squatted down next to me to look at the crays I’d bagged, I just wanted to touch you.’

  ‘Ha! I know. I felt it.’

  I glance at her and she’s looking straight up into the
endless sky. She rolls onto her side and lies her hand on my chest. She’s mulling something over.

  ‘What is it?’ I ask.

  She thinks for a while longer then says, ‘How long can it go on, Finn?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘This summer, I’ve been so…’

  ‘Happy?’

  ‘My life’s never been like this. You, me, Ray, Rowdy—we’re a family. Is this what it was like for you before the virus?’

  ‘Kinda.’

  She lets the conversation sit for a while, but I can tell there’s something else eating at her.

  ‘The lights,’ she says, at last. ‘Do they worry you?’

  Since that first night we saw the streetlights flickering, it’s happened at least a dozen times, like someone is testing the network.

  ‘Why should it? Remember what the No-landers said about Wentworth, that they were starting to rebuild. The power must be coming from there. That’s gotta be good.’

  ‘Not for me,’ she says.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She holds up her left hand and runs her fingers over the tracker sitting under the skin.

  ‘It’s only streetlights, Kas. They’re a long way from being able to track you.’

  ‘If they get a power supply organised who knows what they’ll be able to do?’

  ‘We’re in a quarantined area. They won’t be coming here in a hurry.’

  Unconvinced, she avoids eye contact.

  We have time for one more swim. The tide is starting to breach the outer reef and before long waves will be swamping the rock pools. We hold hands and jump in, dragging each other to the bottom. Sometimes I make believe we’ll swim back to the surface to find the beach crowded with holiday-makers, families with kids lathered in sunscreen and old couples sitting in deckchairs under shade shelters. The smell of barbeques will waft across the beach and someone will have a radio on, listening to the cricket. We’ll be forced to do a nude run back to our clothes, while everyone stops and looks and whistles. I don’t know why I hang onto these stupid ideas. Maybe it’s because I’m afraid of forgetting what life was like before the virus, what a normal day looked like.

  Of course, when we climb out there’s just Rowdy waiting for us. We pick our way over the reef that’s now hot from the sun, dress quickly and make our way into the trees and up the path.

  Our bags are bulging with abalone and crays, but I feel guilty for leaving Ray for so long. He’s come to the beach with us a couple of times, but he’s not interested in going in the water. At most he’ll take off his shirt, the deep brown of his sun-struck arms meeting the white skin of his shoulders. As a farmer, he’s spent his life hiding from the sun under clothes and hats. ‘Buggered if I know why you kids want to expose yourselves to it like you do,’ he always says.

  Ray is waiting for us in the backyard. He looks excited, pacing up and down, muttering to himself.

  ‘Took your bloody time,’ he says. ‘Been waitin’ ages.’

  ‘What’s up?’ I ask.

  He takes a deep breath. ‘You’d better come and see this,’ he says.

  We leave our dive bags on the porch and follow him to the storage shed. He’s spent a lot of time in here recently, making an inventory of our supplies and setting out a plan to ration them. Inside he squeezes past the shelving and stands in front of the workbench. There’s a vice bolted to one end and cans of nails and screws line the back wall. And there’s an old radio.

  ‘I was muckin’ around with this,’ he says. He flips the radio over and pulls the back off it. There’s a thick tube of batteries. ‘We used to listen to these when we were out on the tractors all day, hay baling. I took some batteries out of the torch in the kitchen.’ He settles the radio on the bench and pulls a retractable aerial from the top. He turns and looks at us. ‘Now listen,’ he says.

  He pushes the switch on the side and begins fiddling with the tuning dial. At first there’s just static, white noise from nowhere. But then, a voice that sounds like it’s coming from a million miles away, low and hard to hear. We lean closer and Ray turns the volume up as high as it will go.

  ‘This is government radio 3HST, broadcasting from the Central Coordination Zone. A critical service announcement will be made by the Regional Director at 1900 hours.’

  The message repeats, over and over.

  ‘How will we know when it’s seven o’clock?’ Kas is agitated.

  I take her hand and weave my fingers into hers. ‘Don’t get too excited,’ I say, though I can’t think of any logical reason not to—things might have progressed further than the No-landers knew.

  ‘Seven in the evening. It shouldn’t be too hard to work out,’ Ray says. We’ve moved to the kitchen and he’s set the radio on the table, handling it like it’s some sort of sacred object. ‘We’re about two-thirds of the way through summer, I reckon, so seven would be an hour before sunset.’

  We’ve become used to living without time. My old life before the virus was ruled by it—what time to get up, catch the bus, arrive at school, move between classes, come home, surf, eat, sleep. Now the sun and moon tell us everything we need to know. We go to bed with the dark and get up with the light.

  Waiting for the broadcast, the rest of the day seems to drag. In the afternoon, Kas and I shell the abalone and tenderise them with the hammer. We put the crays in a tank with seawater bucketed over from the beach. Kas is quiet, and there’s not much I can say to reassure her. At dinner, she moves her abalone around the plate. Ray has cooked them up in garlic and chillies from the garden. It’s her favourite meal but she barely touches it.

  We don’t want to waste the batteries, but we can’t miss the broadcast either, so we turn the radio on after we’ve finished eating. The same message is playing. Kas pushes her chair away from the table and walks out onto the porch.

  She has her back against the railing, her arms hugging her chest. ‘Can’t stand this,’ she says. ‘I’m gonna take Yogi for a ride along the beach.’

  ‘What?’ I can’t believe what I’m hearing. ‘You don’t want to listen to the broadcast? Why?’

  ‘Because it’ll change everything. It’ll change us, you and me,’ she says.

  ‘You’re guessing, Kas.’

  ‘Come on, Finn. They’re reorganising. They’ve got power and radio. How long until they reach Angowrie? And then what happens to me?’

  ‘Even if—and that’s a big if—they get someone down here, the whole Siley situation could’ve changed.’ I know I’m making this up, but I’m looking for any argument to make her feel better.

  She shakes her head, walks down the steps, lifts the bridle from its hook by the shed door and disappears through the sheoaks towards the paddock on Parker Street. There’s no point following her. She’ll slip onto Yogi’s back and canter him along the riverbank. With the tide high, she won’t have a lot of beach to ride on, but she’ll do laps until Yogi’s exhausted.

  ‘Finn,’ Ray calls from the kitchen.

  I sit opposite him at the table. The repeated message has stopped, replaced by metallic beeps at regular intervals.

  Then it starts. The reception fades in and out and Ray and I strain to hear what’s being said above the static. After about ten minutes, there’s silence. Ray flicks the switch and we sit looking at each other across the table.

  Our part of the country has been divided into coordination zones, each with a hub at its centre. We’re in the western zone and Wentworth is our hub. But there are also satellite towns in each zone—and Longley is in ours.

  The only time Angowrie is mentioned is when quarantined areas are listed. No one is allowed to enter them and, while survivors from other areas are encouraged to try to get to their nearest hub, people in quarantined zones are told to stay put until further notice.

  ‘What do you make of all that?’ Ray asks.

  ‘Pretty light on detail,’ I say. ‘Nothing about what’s happening in places like Wentworth, no mention of how many people have surv
ived or whether any sort of government’s been set up. Nothing about the virus either.’

  ‘And nothing about Sileys,’ he says.

  ‘Do you reckon that’s good, or bad?’

  ‘I’ve got no idea, son. It all sounds pretty sketchy and it’s hard to tell if that’s deliberate or not. It kind of depends on who it is making the broadcasts.’

  ‘The message this arvo said it was government radio.’

  ‘Could be anybody saying that, though.’

  It’s a beautiful, still evening outside. The sun slants into the yard from the west, catching the yellow tips on the sheoaks, making them glow like firesticks. At the beach, I sit on the platform to watch Kas riding Yogi in the shallows. She has him at a trot and the spray rises in little explosions as his hooves hit the water. She looks so comfortable on his back, like she’s part of him. I remember the first conversation in the kitchen with Rose when she told me about watching Kas escape from Swan’s Marsh. Kas was just a distant figure on horseback but Rose knew it was her by the way she rode.

  When they reach the river mouth, it’s flowing deep with the tide so Kas wheels Yogi around to come back. Now she urges him into a canter, her body leaning forward, her face close to his mane. I walk down onto the sand and wait for them to turn again at the rocks below the cliffs. Kas brings him round in a wide arc and lets him slow his pace.

  Yogi is blowing hard and sweat glistens on his flanks. Kas pulls him to a halt but stays on his back.

  ‘So?’ she says.

  ‘Why don’t you come home, and Ray and I’ll try to make sense of it with you.’

  ‘Tell me now,’ she demands.

  ‘At least get off Yogi. I can’t see you properly. The sun’s behind you.’

  She gives Yogi a nudge with her heels and brings him around so they’re facing into the sun.

  ‘Shit, you’re stubborn,’ I say.

  She doesn’t say anything, just tucks her hair behind her ears and waits.

  I fill her in on everything we heard in the broadcast. I have to talk over Yogi’s breathing and the regular crashing of the waves on the bar. Kas listens in silence, her eyes locked on mine.