Ash Road Read Online Free

said.
    â€˜Yes,’ said Graham.
    â€˜What are you doin’?’
    â€˜Making coffee.’
    Wallace sat up, panting. He felt giddy. ‘What are you makin’ coffee for?’
    â€˜I’m thirsty. Do you want a cup?’
    â€˜What’s the time?’
    â€˜Twenty past one.’
    â€˜Yeh. I’ll have a cup.’
    Wallace peeled his sleeping-bag down to the waist, and felt better. ‘Twenty past one!’
    â€˜About that.’
    â€˜Harry’s sleepin’ all right.’
    â€˜Trust Harry,’ said Graham. ‘He could sleep anywhere.’
    Wallace thought he had heard something like that before, but couldn’t remember when. ‘Funny in the bush at night, isn’t it? Awful dark.’
    â€˜Noisy, too. I heard a tree fall down. Not far away either. Woke me up.’
    â€˜It’s the wind.’
    â€˜Guess so.’
    â€˜Stinkin’ hot, isn’t it?’
    â€˜You can say that again. But this water’s awful slow coming to the boil.’
    â€˜The wind, I suppose.’
    â€˜It’s taken two lots of metho already,’ said Graham.
    â€˜Have you got the lid on?’
    â€˜Can’t see when it boils if you’ve got the lid on.’
    â€˜Put the lid on, I reckon, or it’ll never boil.’
    â€˜Don’t know where the lid is, do you?’
    â€˜
Feel
for it. It’s there somewhere. Use your torch.’
    â€˜The battery’s flat. Blooming thing. Must have been a crook battery. Hardly used it at all.
Now
look what I’ve done! There’s the metho bottle knocked for six.’
    â€˜You dope,’ cried Wallace. ‘Pick it up quick. Or we’ll lose it all.’
    â€˜The cork’s in it.’ Graham groped for it, feeling a bit of a fool, and said, ‘Crumbs.’
    â€˜Now what?’
    â€˜The cork’s
not
in it, that’s what. It must have come out.’
    â€˜How could it come out? Honest to goodness—’
    â€˜It’s
burning
,’ howled Graham.
    A blue flame snaked from the little heater up through the rocks towards the bottle in the boy’s hand; or at least that was how it seemed to happen. It happened so swiftly it may have deceived the eye. Instinctively, to protect himself, Graham threw the bottle away. There was a shower of fire from its neck, as from the nozzle of a hose.
    â€˜Oh my gosh,’ yelled Wallace and tore off his sleeping-bag. ‘Harry!’ he screamed. ‘Wake up, Harry!’
    They tried to stamp on the fire, but their feet were bare and they couldn’t find their shoes. They tried to smother it with their sleeping-bags, but
it
seemed to be everywhere. Harry couldn’t even escape from his bag; he couldn’t find the zip fastener, and for a few awful moments in his confusion between sleep and wakefulness he thought he was in his bed at home and the house had burst into flames around him. He couldn’t come to grips with the situation; he knew only dismay and the wildest kind of alarm. Graham and Wallace, panicking, were throwing themselves from place to place, almost sobbing, beating futilely at a widening arc of fire. Every desperate blow they made seemed to fan the fire, to scatter it farther, to feed it.
    â€˜Put it out,’ shouted Graham. ‘Put it out.’
    It wasn’t dark any longer. It was a flickering world of tree trunks and twisted boughs, of scrub and saplings and stones, of shouts and wind and smoke and frantic fear. It was so quick. It was terrible.
    â€˜Put it out,’ cried Graham, and Harry fought out of his sleeping-bag, knowing somehow that they’d never get it out by beating at it, that they’d have to get water up from the creek. But all they had was a four-pint billy-can.
    The fire was getting away from them in all directions, crackling through the scrub down-wind, burning fiercely back into the wind. Even the ground was burning; grass, roots, and fallen leaves were