Bushfire Refugee

The worst part about knowing that you're going to die is seeing it coming. Maya knew as soon as she saw the wall of black smoke rising from over the next hill. Auntie Gertrude lived a day's ride out that way. The fire would be upon her in much less than that.

Maya knew death. It was plain to see everywhere. Everyone she knew were farmers in one way or another; but crops would wilt to nothing in the heat, animals were thinner than people, chooks laid no eggs, cows gave no milk. Famine was the natural state of a world that once had such plenty it had forgotten its own bounty. Maya remembered her mother's stories of Back Then, how things used to be. How she said they should have been for Maya. Places called Supermarkets had long ago been raided first by those desperate for comfort, then those desperate to make profit, then those desperate only to live. When Maya was younger she used to dream of visiting a Supermarket. A place where you could find and buy anything you needed for the day, from plucked chickens and bedsheets to packets of powder that turned into soup by pouring hot water into them. You could get a sandwich with four different ingredients on it, not even including the bread! You could even buy food already preserved in cans or jars, ready to be popped open at any time without having to spend days preserving your own crop. Nowadays Supermarkets didn't exist. Even normal markets were hard to find, and nobody took money anymore; not nearly as valuable as food or water. Maya had her own emergency preserves buried out back in the roots of a once-proud tree's skeleton. A few jars of pickled turnip, beetroots, salted kale, and a sack of ground cornmeal. You had to hide things if the police came around. Burying them under trees was the best place for a lot of people, if their properties still had trees anywhere. The police took things in lieu of money as taxes from the Community, but they didn't usually bring shovels.

Maya moved away from the window facing the burning hill and looked out to the dead tree to the south of the house. A rope hung from one of its lower branches. Maya supposed it used to have a tire on it, back before when a real family lived on this property, back before rubber blistered and decayed too easily in the sun to let it stay there. For some reason no one bothered to remove the rope.

Maya looked down at the crops she'd been trusted to plant by her local Community, planted under the imaginary shade of a tree only in name. A large shadecloth tent housed what crops she'd managed to grow. Turnips, kale, corn, all these needed a little sunlight in the morning of course, but keeping them uncovered for more than a few hours past sunup would shrivel them before too long.

Maya looked at the locket hanging on a hook by the south-facing window. Her mother's, a heart-shaped e-locket. One of the few pieces of technology anyone in the Community had left. Electricity was too much of a hazard to keep around. Too easy to cause sparks. Too easy to start fires. But this one needed no recharging. It still worked from when her mum had it, same battery and everything. Though it didn't used to be black. Maya had tried her best to clean it but it seemed like no amount of scrubbing would remove the black char from its metal surface. But every time she opened it up, it worked just the same. The tiny epaper display showed the same few seconds of her parents, over and over like a last memory flashing before her eyes. Her father, a brawny figure with muscles bursting out of a flannel a size too small, getting hefted up by her mother, straining with the effort, but both of them smiling laughing like nothing else. Maya closed the locket and put it around her neck.

She walked away from the window, picking up her uncle's worn and battered Akubra off a hook by the door to her room. He said it was older than he was when he gave it to her. She believed him. She'd made sure to keep good care of it, like he had. There were only four holes in it, and only one had been from an attacker. A bushranger had tried to shoot her uncle in the head to knock him off his horse, but he leaned out of the way just in time. He still fell off his horse — which bolted — but he didn't lose his life. That would slip from his grasp when he died of an infection in his broken arm, a few weeks after the attack. The day after he gave Maya his hat.

Descending the stairs, Maya looked around the house she'd been living in. She supposed it was hers, though it really belonged to the Community. She supposed it'd be nothing but ash soon. Would that ash still belong to the Community? Helped make for good fertilizer anyhow. Dusty sunlight filtered through the windows, covered with newspaper so the most blinding of the light couldn't get through. That was why Auntie Gertrude stopped planting here. One day she sat on her sunglasses, crushing the lenses. She still worked without them, stubborn as anything, but it wasn't long before the cataracts started to form. It took until she got a melanoma on her neck before she finally let go of her mattock. Maya felt bad for Auntie Gertrude. She could only imagine how terrifying it could be hearing the rush of a bushfire, knowing it was about to kill you, but being unable to see it, and even if she survived it knowing the poison growing on her neck would kill her later. She only hoped that Auntie Gertrude's husband could have led her to safety. Even if Auntie Gertrude couldn't plant, she could still work. It would be a sad day when she eventually would pass, if she hadn't already perished in the fire. The Community needed people. Without people to work or to fend off the bushrangers, the police would come, offering to take further crops in exchange for "protection", which would only ever turn out to be revenge carried out a few days later, if ever.

Maya looked for her own sunglasses in a hard case. Black circle-glasses, given to her as a present from the greater Community when she turned old enough to plant. The lenses were good, if a little fragile being made of glass. This was probably the third most valuable of her possessions, next to her mother's locket and uncle's hat. You needed a good pair of sunglasses if you didn't want to end up like Auntie Gertrude. You didn't need them quite as much as a good hat though, to keep the sun from boiling your brain inside your head. Good clothes were more important than food most of the time. Light colours kept you from getting too hot, and you needed to cover every inch of skin you could. Maya thought about her mum's stories of buying sunscreen at the Supermarket as a kid, which they used instead of covering cloth, Back Then when they went out into the sunlight for fun. The way she described the texture of it and its smell, it sounded both at once repulsive but endearing in their own way.

Maya marched to the kitchen and filled her rucksack with things. Food to eat, food to trade, water to hide, the first aid kit she prayed she wouldn't have to use, and a half-empty box of 45-70 Govt. rounds she knew she may have to. Before stuffing the rest of the box into the rucksack she took out four rounds and stuffed two in her pocket, leaving two on the kitchenette. Opening a cupboard that might have once held spices, she retrieved her father's double rifle. It was the only other thing to survive the fire that killed her parents, and had only survived as Maya had borrowed — stolen — it at the time the fire happened. She was out hunting a fox that had killed the last of their chooks, her favourite pet. Her mother warned her not to get attached to animals. She didn't find the fox. It was better that way, she didn't waste any ammunition on something as petty and stupid as revenge, especially on something that was just an animal trying to survive a dying world it never asked to be born in.

Maya sometimes fantasised about having miraculous powers, like in those stories of Jesus her uncle always talked about whenever she helped work the property he tended. If only her father's rifle could work a miracle. If only she could send a bullet back through time, if only she could kill the evil person who made the world like this. It had to be one truly evil person, couldn't it? Surely only one person could be evil enough to allow the world to become this way, to dry up under the hate of the sun. It could never have been an accident, this slow death. Only one truly evil and all-powerful person could see what the world was becoming and decide, all by themselves, that this is how humanity dies. And if anyone else knew of this evil person at the time, they could have tried to stop them. That kind of evil can only be kept inside one mind, couldn't it? But would killing them even stop the world becoming like this? Was this fantasy just as useless as hunting down that starving fox? Maya didn't have answers, only grief that soaked through her hands and skin as sweat, as she worked hard land into something resembling life-bearing soil. But soil would become dust again with the sweeping roar of flame.

Maya opened her father's rifle, inserted the two rounds, and snapped it shut. Hopefully the sight of her armaments would be enough to ward away any skulking bushrangers, even if it would attract the attention of the police. They might do all the same things as the bushrangers would if they found her, but at least they wouldn't kill her if she gave up without a fight. Fishing the long holster from the cupboard she slid the rifle inside before slinging on the holster and her rucksack. She was ready to leave. She might not survive but she wasn't about to let herself die. The Community still needed her. She strode to the front door, undid the sturdy locks, and — bracing herself — opened it wide. A blast of wind and heat almost knocked her uncle's hat from her head, an instinctive hand keeping it on. It was worse than she thought. She could already see the fire cresting the tinder-dry hill, a formless wave of red and orange that spread unceasingly with hunger and hatred. She had to move faster.

Running to the animal pen, she saw the one other living creature for kilometres around, kept under thick canvas shadecloth. Her horse, Marshal. He was spooked, terrified by the roar and crackle of the fire, vicious embers carried by hot wind fast approaching. Maya hopped the fence and did her best to calm Marshal enough to attach the reins. There'd be no time for the saddle. Maya threw the fence gate open, leapt onto Marshal's back from a fencepost, and began the hard ride in the opposite direction of the fire. The last thing of that old house she saw was the rope hanging from the tree; waving in the ferocious wind, as if it were waving goodbye and wished her a fond farewell. She rode past it, hoping there was still room at the Community Centre for one more bushfire refugee.