AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I’d never brought anyone special to the bunker before, and now I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to come back alone.
Now that I knew how good it could be to share it with someone.
I emptied the last of the jerry can of petrol into the Jeep and jumped in behind the driver’s seat. The rain was still coming down steadily and I had to shake my hair like a dog, just for good measure.
Jeremiah gave me a shove. “Ugh.”
He wiped his face melodramatically as I started the engine. “You ready?”
“Not really. How bad will these roads be?”
“Drivable,” I answered. “But if we leave it any longer, we’d need a hovercraft.”
He sighed. “You said every road we’ve been on was drivable. I can assure you, we have differing opinions on what is drivable.”
“It won’t be so bad,” I said, trying to help him relax. “We just gotta outrun the rain.”
I grinned and began the slow drive out. The road out was wet and slippery, and I didn’t want to risk putting us in a ditch. The rain was constant and heavy, dangerous even. We probably should have left yesterday after the storm.
“I guess I should be grateful you put the roof on,” he said, one hand on the oh-shit bar as we bounced down into one particularly rough part.
“You hate it now,” I said. “But you’ll miss this.”
He shot me a glare that was half ‘I absolutely will not’ and half ‘shut up I know I will.’
At the fork in the track, this time we turned right. We’d gone left to the mangroves and we could see now that all that area to the west was nowveryswampy.
“Oh god. Is that where we were?”
I nodded. “Ten kilometres further into that.”
“Jesus,” he whispered. “I’d have died out here for sure.”
I laughed. “That’s why you have me. So maybe next time when I say, ‘hey, it’s not a good idea to go into the mangroves at this time of year,’ you might listen. Because when it comes to being out here, I’m the expert.”
I just then happened to hit a very large, very deep, very wet pothole, and we bounced so hard we both almost hit our heads on the roof.
He held on with two hands and shot me a harrowed look. “You were saying?”
* * *
It still rained,but the further southeast we went, the better the track became until we turned onto an actual road. And the sadder it made me. I didn’t want my time with him to be over, and every mile we drove, it felt like we were leaving our time together behind us.
Sure, he’d agreed to another two days in Darwin. But being out here at the bunker with him had been special, and it was only when we were leaving that I truly realised that.
When we’d reached a tarred road, the rain had eased, and Jeremiah asked me to pull the Jeep over. “Why?”
“I want to roll the top back,” he said with a grin. “If I have two more days of freedom, I want to feel it.”
So we rolled the roof back, and as we drove back toward civilisation, through the ancient green forests of Kakadu, the wind tousled our hair and Jeremiah put his hands up into the wind and laughed.
Yeah. I was going to miss him so fucking much.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
JEREMIAH
We refuelled in Jabiru,and I met Tully at the counter of the service station. “You two made it out before the rains,” the man behind the counter said. “Was wondering how you were gettin’ on out there.”
