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“I meant seriously injured. Like a compound fracture. Or if one of us is bitten by... well, anything out here.”
“Serious answer—the other one drives us out the long flat way. I have a satellite phone for emergencies. We call 000. You’d be surprised, we’re about as remote out here as it gets, but therearepeople around. They’ll come. And same goes for us. If we get a call from someone for help, we go to them. It’s what you do out here.”
He nodded, seemingly pleased with this. “Have you ever had an emergency before?”
“Nope. Don’t intend to start now. Even though you probably wanna go holdin’ metal rods at lightning bolts or somethin’ like that.”
He smiled. “Something like that.”
We hit a particularly big divot in the road and both of us bounced in our seats. He grabbed the oh-shit bar again. “At risk of sounding like a small child, how much further?”
I laughed. “We got a ways to go. We haven’t even crossed the river yet.”
He stared at me, those blue eyes trying to determine if I was joking or not. “A river? Please tell me it has a bridge.”
I snorted. “A bridge out here? You’re funny.”
He sat back in his seat. “I should start counting regrets and see how many it takes before I tap out.”
I burst out laughing. “Regrets? How many are ya up to already?”
“One, coming down that bloody mountain. I’ll let you know after the river, if we survive, if it earned a second regret.”
I found myself smiling at him. “Well, with a bit of luck, the water won’t be too high yet.” I knew it wasn’t, but I couldn’t help playing with him just a little bit. “But if we do get into trouble, whatever you do, don’t get out of the Jeep. And if you do end up in the drink, don’t cling to any logs.” I paused for effect. “Cause those logs are the bitin’ kind.”
Those blue eyes almost popped right out of his head. “There are crocodiles here?”
I laughed and shook my head. “Just kidding.”
He paled and shrank back in his seat. “That was not funny.”
I thought it was hilarious. “I mean, it was a little bit,” I said as we jostled along.
He held up two fingers. “You. You just became my second regret.”
* * *
The riverbed was filling nicely,but the causeway was still easily passable. It wouldn’t be in a week or so. At all. I still took it slow across the causeway; jokes aside, there was no room for stupid mistakes out here.
Jeremiah’s hand tightened on the door as he peered out.
“The river will start to come down now. Over the next two months, we’ll get anything up to fifteen hundred millimetres of rain. This whole track’ll be underwater for two months. All road access will have to come from the east. Choppers come from Darwin, which is due west from here. And I joked about the crocs before. There won’t be any here yet, but when all this is water, this’ll be full of them.”
“But we don’t come back this way,” he said, almost to reassure himself.
“No. We don’t. And the bunker, the spot where we’re staying, is on a rise. Like a plateau. There are no waterways close by. Unless the rains get real bad.”
I stopped short on saying anything else, because the rains were expected to get bad, and he knew this.
It was why he was here.
“But this is Kakadu,” he said with a sigh. “The tropical Top End. There are crocodiles.”
“True.”
“And the place where we’re staying,” he said. “The bunker. You stay there often?”
“Yep. Once or twice a year.”
