Death is Forever

the Rover down to sixty miles an hour.
    “How big is it all together?”
    “Can’t tell head on. Some of the rigs are a hundred feet long.”
    For a minute Erin was silent. The roadtrain hurtled closer and closer, filling the single-lane road to both edges, sending clouds of grit boiling up from the dirt shoulder on either side. The monster was going as fast as the Rover.
    “There isn’t enough room for both of us,” she said.
    “No worries, love,” he said, smiling as he used the common Aussie reassurance. “There’s plenty of verge.”
    With that he whipped the Rover to the left, putting two wheels off the road into the dirt. The roadtrain did the same with its left-hand wheels. The vehicles hurtled past each other. The Rover bucked and rattled with the force of the much larger roadtrain’s passage.
    The dust had barely settled when sunset came in a swift, slanting cataract of light that turned clouds from cream to crimson to ink with startling suddenness. No sooner had Erin started to admire the colors than they vanished.
    Cole flipped on the headlights, then threw a second switch on the dashboard. A powerful spotlight mounted above the windshield cut a wide swath through the darkness ahead, reaching out half again as far as the headlights.
    “Something big on the right,” she said, catching a flash of light that could only come from the reflective pupil of an animal’s eye. “A cow?”
    “Bloody stupid animals,” he muttered, braking hard and simultaneously turning off the overhead spotlight. “May they all go to those great Golden Arches in the sky.”
    “As in hamburgers?”
    He grunted, slid the Rover past the cow in a shower of dirt, and drove on, picking up the speed he’d lost. He drove hard and fast, but he never outran his lights, for at dusk Kimberley shorthorns began wandering out from the bush’s thin shade to graze along the road’s edge, where water from the blacktop ran off to create relatively lush feed.
    As it grew darker, spotting shadows looming at the edges of the Rover’s headlights became a kind of adrenaline-filled game that distracted Erin and Cole from the clinging heat that hung on far longer than sunlight had. Overhead a carpet of stars condensed. The sky was as alien as the land had been. Except for the Southern Cross, the stars were evenly spaced and of the same brightness.
    Time and again Cole braked, reached up to turn off the spotlight, and cut the headlights down to low. Dense shadows moved slowly across the road ahead. When one of the cows turned toward them, its eyes flashed eerily in the light.
    “Why do you turn down the lights?” she asked finally.
    “It blinds the cattle. They freeze if they’re on the road, and if they’re not, they’re as likely to jump toward the light as away from it. I stay off the horn, too. It panics them, and a panicked cow will run right into a car.”
    Then, although she had promised herself she wouldn’t, she heard herself asking, “Any lights behind us?”
    “No.”
    “Could he be running without lights?”
    Cole smiled coldly. “I hope so. That little Tojo he was driving doesn’t weigh much more than a cow.”
    In the darkness ahead, what at first had seemed an extension of the star-packed southern sky resolved into a cluster of artificial lights. They were the first fixed lights Erin had seen on the landscape since leaving Derby behind.
    “Fitzroy Crossing?” she asked.
    “Nothing else is out here.”
    Fitzroy Crossing was the place where the Great Northern Highway’s single lane crossed the Fitzroy River. That, and year-round water trapped in the huge billabongs gouged out by floodwaters, supported a town of a few hundred whites, a varying population of Aborigines, and uncounted crocodiles.
    Cole drove into a ramshackle service station, shut off the engine, and said as he got out, “Stay in the car. If you see anything that makes you nervous, hit the horn. The shotgun is under my seat.”
    “I’m a lousy shot.”
    His teeth flashed whitely. “Doesn’t matter. The barrels are just long enough to be legal and just right for close work against superior odds. The load is double-aught buckshot. Just point, pull the trigger, and watch the odds improve.”
    Without a word she reached under the seat and put the shotgun across her lap.
    He filled the gas tank and the spare fuel cans that had been depleted by high-speed driving, added oil and water, checked various cables, hoses, and reservoirs, and finally