Scorpion Sting Read online

  And I had to go now.

  A scorpion sting won’t kill you, I told myself as I pulled my socks up over the cuffs of my jeans. But these were big scorpions. And there were hundreds of them. If I fell over …

  ‘I’m not going to fall over!’ I said aloud, tying my boot laces in two firm double knots.

  I was wearing a pair of Nathan’s jungle boots. They were half-a-size too big for me, but my brother wouldn’t let me go into the cave in my sneakers.

  ‘Number one rule in adventuring,’ he’d said, tossing the boots to me as we got out of the Land Cruiser. ‘Take care of your feet.’

  At the time I’d thought he was being too fussy, but now I was grateful to be wearing Nathan’s tall leather boots. Already they had saved me from being stung when I’d accidentally trodden on a scorpion. Could they save me again? Several hundred times?

  I stood up. Thirty metres up the tunnel was the slit of starlight that marked the mouth of the cave. Focusing on the stars, I took several deep breaths, wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans and nervously wet my lips. Then I began a slow countdown. Five, four, three, two, one.

  ‘COMING THROUGH!’ I yelled.

  5

  HEADLIGHTS

  It didn’t seem like twenty metres – it seemed like two hundred. I ran in slow-motion, like someone in a nightmare with nightmare creatures snapping at their heels. But this wasn’t a bad dream and the creatures weren’t imaginary. They were real. And they were deadly.

  I’m dead! I thought, with every crunching, sliding, heart-stopping step.

  Despite what I’d told myself earlier, I knew the risk I was taking. I’m allergic to bee venom, which means I’m probably allergic to scorpion venom as well. And scorpions have much more venom than bees. All it would take was a single one to get flicked up onto my calf and sting me through my jeans, and I’d be cactus. And so would Nathan, because his life depended on my survival.

  ‘YΑΑΑΑΑΑΑΑΑΑΗ!’ I yelled across the last ten metres. My voice echoed through the cave and mostly drowned out the horrible crunching of my boots across the squirming carpet of arachnids beneath me.

  When I burst out of the cave, the illusion of being in a dream suddenly deserted me. It was replaced by a heart-in-the-mouth sensation of zero gravity.

  I was falling.

  In my panic to get across the army of scorpions, I’d forgotten where the cave mouth was situated: on the side of a small rocky escarpment, three metres above the surrounding desert.

  I landed in a thicket of spinifex. That’s what saved me. Three metres is a long way to fall and land flat on your back, but the spinifex cushioned my landing. No bones were broken. I wasn’t even winded. But landing on spinifex is like landing in a cactus garden. Several thousand tiny needles jabbed through my clothing. Luckily I was wearing my bike helmet – it protected my head and the top of my neck – but the rest of me, fifty percent of my body, legs, arms, even the backs of my hands, felt like it had just received a giant tattoo.

  For a few seconds I lay there in shock, spread-eagled, staring up at the wide starry sky through a pool of gathering tears. Then I screamed.

  Sound travels a long way in the desert at night. If there was anyone within ten kilometres, they probably would have heard me. But I was all alone. There was only Nathan, deep underground, and I didn’t think my scream would have carried all the way down the long, winding tunnel to where he lay. At least, I hoped not. He wouldn’t have known what was going on. He might have thought I had just died.

  I felt like I’d died. The pain was that bad. Clenching my teeth, I rolled slowly out of the spinifex. With every movement, a hundred new prickles spiked me through my clothes. It was agony. By the time I was clear of the thicket, there was hardly a square centimetre of skin on my body that hadn’t received the pins and needles treatment. Only my head and feet had been spared, thanks to my helmet and the boots I had on – and thanks to Nathan, for insisting I wear them before we went underground. My jeans had helped a little, too – especially where there were seams or double layers of denim like zippers and pockets – and again it was Nathan who’d made me change out of my shorts. I owed him a lot.

  But for a while I forgot all about him. I was in too much pain. Twisting and squirming like a demented belly dancer in the desert starlight, I could think only about removing prickles. It was nearly impossible. I’d lost my torch in the spinifex and couldn’t see what I was doing. I shuffled over to the Land Cruiser and opened the door. The interior light didn’t work (good one, Nathan!) so I had to turn on the headlights.

  Even being able to see didn’t help much. Standing in front of the vehicle, I discovered that most of the prickles had broken off beneath the skin. The best I could do was rub them. It seemed to help. After a few minutes, the pain began to subside to an all-over itch. I stopped scratching long enough to unhook one of the waterbags hanging from the Land Cruiser’s bullbar because my mouth was dry.

  But I didn’t get to drink. I didn’t even get the cap off the big, damp waterbag. Because I saw something on the horizon that made me forget about my thirst.

  Headlights!

  Hitching the waterbag back where it came from, I jumped into the Land Cruiser, started it up and swung it round in a wide, bumpy U-turn. Don’t drive more than forty kilometres per hour, Nathan had told me. But this was an emergency. The other vehicle was so far away that its headlights appeared as one single bright light on the horizon. It wasn’t coming directly towards me, but seemed to be moving slowly from right to left. I had to catch up with it before it went past. I steered a course slightly ahead of the distant vehicle and, dismissing Nathan’s advice, planted my foot.

  Big mistake. You can’t drive at full speed in the desert at night, especially if you’re not on a road or a track. There are bushes, straggly trees, dry creek beds.

  And animals.

  The kangaroos came out of nowhere. Suddenly they were directly ahead, a group of tall ghostly shapes that went gliding in front of the Land Cruiser. I don’t know how many there were. Six or seven. I slammed on the brakes, but the big four-wheel drive was travelling too fast. It went into a long, shuddering skid. The leading animals managed to leap out of the way, but there were two more bounding along behind. We were on a collision course. One kangaroo jumped high in the air. It flew right over the Land Cruiser without even touching the roof-rack. The last one wasn’t so lucky. Blinded by the headlights, it swerved the wrong way. I couldn’t do anything. It was too late to turn. The brake pedal was pressed right to the floor. I closed my eyes and hoped for the best.

  There was a sickening thud.

  6

  CAR CHASE

  At first I was more annoyed than upset. Why had the kangaroo jumped across the path of the Land Cruiser? It must have seen my headlights and heard me coming. Now I had to stop. With every wasted second, the vehicle crossing the horizon was getting further away. If I didn’t catch up, I would have to drive all the way to Gibson Station to get help.

  But I couldn’t drive on without first checking the kangaroo. It might just be injured, rather than dead. I had run into the poor creature, now it was my responsibility to help it.

  The kangaroo wasn’t moving. I dragged it out from under the bullbar. Crouching in the Land Cruiser’s bright headlights, I checked the lifeless body for a pulse. Nothing. I felt a bit sick. And guilty. The kangaroo had died because of me. I had ignored Nathan’s advice and driven too fast.

  The other headlights were still there, moving slowly along the horizon. They didn’t seem any closer than before. But they didn’t seem further away, either. Weird.

  I hopped back into the Land Cruiser and reversed four or five metres so I could drive around the carcass. But a tiny movement in its red-brown flank made me pause. Leaning forward against the steering wheel, I strained my eyes through the dusty windscreen. There it was again: a slight twitch in the kangaroo’s side. My skin prickled. I’d checked for a heartbeat and felt nothing. But I wasn’t a vet; I could have been mis
taken. I put the handbrake on and got out. As I walked slowly towards the carcass, I saw another twitch. My heart skipped a beat. The kangaroo was alive!

  I was right and wrong. Something was alive, but not the kangaroo I’d hit. Seconds later, the mystery resolved itself. From out of the dead animal’s fur, two tiny ears appeared, followed by a pair of wet black eyes. Then a tiny triangular head popped up.

  A joey!

  I gently lifted the baby kangaroo from its mother’s pouch. ‘Hey, Joey,’ I whispered as it softly nuzzled my thumb. ‘I’m sorry about your mum.’

  It was the size of a rat, with a pencil-thin tail and long, ridiculously gangly back legs. From the way it sucked at my fingers, I realised the miniature roo still needed its mother’s milk. But she was dead – I’d killed her. So it was up to me to take her place.

  Nathan had packed some condensed milk with our supplies, but there wasn’t time to dig it out. Joey would have to wait until I caught up with the vehicle on the horizon. My brother was still my number one priority. I tucked in my shirt, then undid the three top buttons and slid Joey inside, hoping it would make a passable pouch. Then I jumped back into the Land Cruiser and set off in pursuit of the distant headlights.

  This time I drove slower. I’d learned my lesson. Joey was an orphan because of my reckless driving. Now his survival depended on me. As did Nathan’s. I wasn’t going to take any more risks.

  I followed the headlights for another fifteen or twenty minutes, but didn’t seem to be getting any closer. It was weird. The other vehicle was moving away from me, yet I could see its headlights, not its tail-lights. Was it reversing? Whenever I came to the top of a small rise, I flashed my own headlights and beeped the horn, but I couldn’t attract the other driver’s attention. He was too far away. He was always too far away. What was going on?

  Finally I’d had enough. I couldn’t spend the whole night involved in a bizarre car chase with a crazy driver who was speeding through the desert in reverse. The way things were going, I might run out of petrol before I caught up with him. I couldn’t take that risk. Nathan’s life depended on me getting help. I stopped the Land Cruiser at the top of a small sand dune and got out.

  ‘HΕΕΕΕΥ!’ I yelled, in a last-ditch effort to attract the other driver’s attention. My shouting caused Joey to change position inside my shirt, but made no difference to the lights. They kept moving slowly away from me across the dark desert landscape.

  Now that I was on higher ground, I noticed something strange. The other car was no longer on the horizon. In fact, it seemed quite close. Being careful not to squash Joey, I clambered up onto the Land Cruiser’s roof-rack for a better view. What I saw gave me quite a shock.

  It wasn’t headlights. It was just a single ball of bluish-white light. Totally confused, I watched it moving up a sand dune no more than three hundred metres away. When it reached the top, it rose clear of the dunes and hung suspended in the sky. It seemed to wobble for a moment, then it slowly faded away until nothing was left but stars.

  I started shivering, even though it wasn’t cold. Now I knew what I’d been following for the past half-hour.

  The Min Min light.

  7

  TOTALLY LOST

  Lots of people have seen the Min Min light, but nobody can explain what it is. Some scientists think it’s a kind of mirage caused by thermal layers in the air that bend light sources from a long way away and make them appear somewhere else. Other people reckon it’s fireflies. Or flying saucers. There are even those who say it’s a ghost.

  I don’t know what to believe. All I know is this: I saw it. For half an hour I followed the Min Min light through the desert. It led me on a wild goose chase, then disappeared into thin air.

  I stood on the Land Cruiser’s roof and turned in a slow circle. Where was Camel’s Hump? When Nathan gave me directions to Gibson Station, he was in shock from the accident and hadn’t remembered that it would be dark by the time I found my way out from underground. I had no idea where I was. No idea which way I’d driven when I left the cave, nor how far I’d come. And Nathan was back there (wherever ‘there’ was), half a kilometre below ground. Waiting for me to get help.

  Now I needed help. I lifted Joey out of my shirt.

  ‘We’re lost,’ I whispered.

  A meteor fell through the sky, trailing a long line of sparks all the way to the horizon. I made a silent wish. But I was fourteen, too old for wishes. And too young to be stuck in the middle of a desert with the responsibility of my brother’s life on my shoulders.

  A small section of the horizon was clearly visible where the meteor had disappeared. It was where the sun must have set, leaving a faint trace of daylight in the sky. Suddenly something occurred to me. The sun sets in the west. I turned ninety degrees to my right. Now I was facing north.

  I had got my wish.

  ‘Joey,’ I said, carefully replacing the little kangaroo inside my shirt, ‘we’re in business.’

  I drove in first gear. Every two or three minutes I would stop and switch the headlights off to check that the pale section of sky was still to my left. After stopping a few times, I noticed something weird. Instead of growing darker as the sun moved further around the other side of the earth, the pale patch of sky was becoming steadily brighter. I couldn’t figure it out.

  Then the rim of a large yellow disk slowly nudged up over the horizon.

  I jammed on the brakes. Sam Fox, you’re an idiot! I thought. For twenty minutes I’d been navigating by the light of the rising moon.

  Where did the moon rise? Did it rise in the east like the sun? I wondered. Or in the west? Or in the south? I had no idea. Now I was totally lost. I switched off the engine and sat back in my seat.

  ‘Face it, Fox,’ I muttered aloud. ‘You’ve stuffed up big time.’

  It was partly Nathan’s fault, I decided (I was looking for someone else to blame). He was a tour guide, he should have had a two-way radio in his Land Cruiser. Or a compass, at the very least. But this wasn’t his work vehicle. All he’d brought along was his mobile phone and his GPS. Both were in his backpack, buried underneath him at the bottom of the cave.

  He’d brought a map, too, I suddenly remembered. It was on the dashboard. I unfolded it on the seat beside me, then rummaged in the glove box for the cigarette lighter Nathan kept there for lighting camp fires. I used its flickering flame to study the map.

  Nathan had marked the cave and its GPS coordinates in blue biro. Camel’s Hump was about two centimetres to the north-east, and Gibson Station homestead was another twenty centimetres above that. Apart from those two landmarks, it was mostly empty desert in all directions. Particularly to the south, where the desert ran right off the edge of the map. I hoped with all my heart that I hadn’t driven south.

  As I refolded the map and stuck it in my pocket, Joey began wriggling inside my shirt. He started about fifty spinifex tips itching beneath my skin. I lifted him out and had a scratch. When the worst of the itching had subsided, I became aware of another discomfort – inside my stomach, not outside. I was hungry.

  ‘I think it’s dinnertime, Joey,’ I said.

  Nathan reckons there’s nothing better than big hearty meals when you’re out bush. We’d planned to camp overnight at the cave, but my brother had packed enough food to last a week! I felt a bit guilty tucking into an enormous salami, cheese and baked bean sandwich when he only had two muesli bars and some M&M’s, but I figured I should keep my strength up – who knew what tomorrow would bring.

  Joey was hungry, too. After my third sandwich, I opened a can of condensed milk and fed him by dipping my finger in and letting him lick it off. The little kangaroo seemed to like the thick, sweet liquid and polished off nearly half the can before he snuggled up inside my shirt and fell asleep. I finished off the rest of the condensed milk with some canned peaches for dessert, then washed everything down with some orange juice straight from the two-litre bottle. Afterwards, I packed all the food away and dragged out my swag.
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  I had decided to stay where I was overnight, rather than drive on blindly and risk getting even more lost. But as I unrolled my swag on the Land Cruiser’s back seat, I heard something that changed my plans.

  Thumpa thumpa thumpa thumpa.

  I knew that noise. Twice in the past it had spelled the difference between me living or dying. With my heart belting like a punching bag inside my rib cage, I searched the night sky. There it was! A tiny blinking light, paler than the surrounding stars, moved swiftly across the sky. Even though it was several thousand metres above me, the sound of the helicopter’s rotor was loud in the huge, empty desert. I jumped into the front seat and began madly blinking the Land Cruiser’s headlights. Three short flashes, three long flashes, then three short: morse code for SOS.

  The helicopter changed course. For a few moments I thought the pilot had seen me. But instead of circling back in my direction, the blinking light descended at a sharp angle, dropping straight down into the desert. It sank from view below the distant sand dunes and the thump of its rotor faded into silence.

  It had landed!

  I clambered back up onto the roof-rack. I couldn’t see the helicopter, but I knew it was in the desert just over the horizon. Five or six kilometres away, I estimated. Ten, maximum. Even driving in first gear, I could be there in half an hour.

  Swinging down into the driver’s seat, I set the Land Cruiser on a course directly towards three bright stars that pointed in a line to the place where the helicopter had disappeared. As long as it didn’t take off again in the next thirty minutes, Nathan would be rescued within a matter of hours.

  8

  HORROR MOVIE

  Flump, flump, flump, flump went the flat tyre.

  Twice before I’d been in a vehicle when a tyre went flat, but on those occasions I hadn’t been driving. The Land Cruiser felt like it was drunk. It swayed and lurched. The steering wheel dragged hard to the left, then pulled wickedly to the right. I couldn’t drive in a straight line. The engine roared. The doors rattled. Tools and cooking equipment crashed about in the back. Finally, halfway down a sand dune, the vehicle slewed sharply sideways and nearly rolled.