Free Underground by Chris Morphew Page B

‘Sorry. Sorry, I was …’
    She smiled. ‘No worries.’
    â€˜She’s hurt,’ I said. ‘Her arm. Do you have anything?’
    â€˜Wait. Not yet,’ said Jordan. ‘We’re making too much noise. We need to get away from here.’
    I glanced at the dark blotch on the arm of her jumper.
    â€˜We’ll get worse than this if security find us,’ she said, catching me looking at her. ‘C’mon.’
    We pushed on for a few minutes, deeper into the bush. Eventually, Jordan stopped at a massive fallen tree, sat down, and stretched out her arms so Dad could cut her free.
    Dad shrugged off a worn-out old backpack and handed it to me. ‘There should be a couple of bandages in there somewhere.’
    I zipped open the bag and shone the torch inside. Dirty clothes, a couple of half-empty water bottles …
    â€˜How did you get here?’ asked Jordan, her arms unbound now, taking off her jumper for a better look at the wound. ‘The night we called you, Shackleton – the guy in charge here – he was going to trace our call and send some of his guys out to, you know, deal with you.’
    â€˜Yes,’ Dad said darkly. ‘He did. Thankfully, I wasn’t home when you called. I was in Melbourne on business. They came to the hotel. But there was a conference on, and by then the morning crowd was up.’ He breathed a long sigh. ‘I got away.’
    â€˜Here,’ I said, finally finding the bandages. I handed Dad one of the little white rolls and flashed the torch onto Jordan’s arm. There was blood everywhere.
    I went back to Dad’s bag for a water bottle. Jordan flinched as I poured the water out over her arm, washing away the blood.
    â€˜It doesn’t look too bad,’ said Dad, examining the gash. ‘It could do with a few stitches.’ He glanced up, catching my eye. ‘But that’s not an option, is it?’
    I shook my head. ‘We’re not very popular with the doctor right now.’
    Dad stretched out the end of the bandage and started wrapping it around Jordan’s arm.
    â€˜So you got away from Shackleton’s guys …’ Jordan prompted.
    â€˜Yeah,’ said Dad. ‘I tried going to the police, but all I had was a couple of unidentified stalkers and a rumour of trouble in a town that – as far as the rest of the world is concerned – doesn’t even exist. I guess I can’t really blame them for being unconvinced.’
    I was settling down enough by now to start taking in the details of what he was saying, but it still took me a second to see what it meant.
    â€˜So … they’re not coming,’ I said. ‘The police or the army or whoever. This isn’t – We’re not getting rescued?’
    â€˜No.’ Dad gave me the same sad, defeated look he used to get whenever Mum would end an argument by storming out of the house. ‘No, it’s just me.’
    That should have disappointed me more than it did. But right now, ‘just him’ felt like plenty.
    â€˜Anyway,’ Dad went on, ‘I left the police station. Took a cab straight to Melbourne Airport. It was a public place and – Well, your mum could never even get a nail file into the terminal, so I thought I’d be at least a bit safer there. I called Dorothy from a courtesy phone. Our neighbour,’ he added, for Jordan’s benefit. ‘And she told me a couple of “repairmen” had arrived at the flat that morning. I put two and two together and figured it wasn’t safe to go back home.’
    â€˜It’s still out there,’ Jordan marvelled, as Dad fastened the bandage. ‘The world. It’s still …’
    â€˜Yeah. For now.’ I slipped off my own backpack, which had somehow managed to stay with me this whole time, and took out another jumper. ‘Here, you want one that doesn’t have blood all over