About Running the Nullarbor
by Laney Cairo
134 pages / 50000 words
ISBN: 978-1-60370-517-2, 1-60370-517-1
Available file types - html, lit, pdf, prc, paperback
Times are tough in Western Australia. There's a war on, though nobody will call it that yet. Dan, injured in the line of duty, now takes in orphaned children until the Red Cross can find a place for them. He's become an old hand at looking after the kids, running his little hand crank radio, and just surviving.
That is until Sid rolls up to his house on a motorcycle, claiming to be the uncle of the baby girl Dan is currently looking after. It isn't that Dan doesn't believe Sid, it's just that the man knows nothing about taking care of babies and Dan doesn't see how Sid is going to manage taking the child across the outback on his bike.
Heavy bombing in the area prompts Dan to flee eastward with Sid and the baby, but neither Sid nor the baby are your ordinary humans and the so-called police action is becoming more and more of a war every day. Will Dan and his companions survive the army, the war, the outback, and, worst of all, Sid's relatives to become something more than they are?
Stay tuned to this exciting futuristic tale and find out!
Review
Anah Crow, author of Uneven, writes: Running the Nullarbor by Laney Cairo is an all-out dash across Australia’s no-man’s land in the last days of that civilization. This beautifully written story is full of twists and near-disasters, yet there is always hope on the horizon. Laney Cairo has spun a gripping, future wartime tale in an amazing setting with engaging, larger-than-life characters.
The presence of a tiny orphan in the middle of a war adds an extra dimension of urgency to the run for safety while bringing out the best in the characters around her. When Dan, a former soldier turned aid worker, takes her into his care, we learn the best of his character in a single moment. In a hell of war and poverty, Dan has hoarded everything a person could need to take care of infants and children. Throughout the course of the story Dan sustains this nobility of spirit, and exceeds it, without ever becoming tiresome or two-dimensional.
Just when Dan has settled into a make-do routine with his little bundle of responsibility, his life is interrupted by a stranger with the same pale green eyes as the baby girl. Sid has made it all the way across the dangerous lands of the Nullarbor by motorcycle to find the child that Dan has taken in, and he wants to take her home to her family. There’s no way Dan can let Sid take that chance with the child but, before they have time to argue about it, the worst case scenario around them takes a sudden turn toward disaster. They have no choice but to flee together and hope that, between the two of them, they can make it back across the Nullarbor alive with the baby.
The characters are drawn with as much attention to detail as the richly realized landscape and the twisted politics that threaten their lives. Without ever delving into sentimentality or melodrama, Cairo creates romance in the midst of crisis. This is not merely the bonding between companions on the road, but genuine attraction, real chemistry between Dan and Sid. Their encounters are infused with deeper meaning for both of them, hot and ardent, and each time they touch feels intensely necessary.
Running the Nullarbor is a journey not just across a broken country, but through a pair of fractured lives, a wounded spirit, and a damaged body. The course of the men’s escape picks up the loose ends of their pasts and weaves them in until both men are as whole as one could hope for in a time of chaos. Laney Cairo brings together magic, technology, romance, war, and the drive to preserve the future in one unforgettable journey that sweeps a reader along for the ride, all the way to a place of safety from which Dan and Sid can turn and, together, face the rising tide of war.
Sample
The rumble of automatic fire faded, a Doppler shift of reassurance as the rolling street combat moved away from Dan’s house. He put down his Steyr rifle, checked the locks on his steel plated door, then slumped back into the chair, gun within easy reach and his damaged leg propped up on the sticky surface of the kitchen table, easing the gnawing ache in his knee.
He could tell, based on the sporadic thwumps, that it was a street gang engaged with the military; too much petrol, not enough automatic weapons fire.
Idiots, wasting petrol.
He had some power, the electric light overhead flickered between yellow and brown, but it wasn’t enough to run his short wave radio set. That would take hand cranking, but he didn’t mind doing it by hand if it kept him in contact with the rest of the world.
The radio set hummed, building up charge as he whirred the crank, and he began the slow scan of the bands, looking for his regular contacts.
Mikey, cab driver and black marketeer, mad enough to run blockades while charging by the kilometer, ran his empire by shortwave radio. Dan’s parents had a radio, too, in the four wheel drive they’d fled east in. Dan’s father, a ’Nam veteran, had packed up Dan’s mother, the two farm dogs, and all the food they could carry and headed for safety after the first bombing run. Dan didn’t expect to be able to make radio contact with them any time soon. The Red Cross base at the Merredin refugee camp had a listening post. And there was Jake, his ex, who would be on patrol with his unit, somewhere in the city.
The set crackled, and Jake’s voice was tinny. “Hey,” Jake said. “I’ve been waiting for you to appear.”
“Sorry,” Dan said. “But someone was trying to blow up my neighborhood. Glad you waited around for me.”
The set crackled and hummed, switching back to Jake. “Have you got room at the moment?” Jake asked. “For a baby?”
This was what Dan did; he fostered children orphaned by the hostilities: police action, not war. No one was supposed to call the war a war. He could have been safe on his parents’ abandoned farm at Wyalkatchem, but the only orphans out there were lambs, and he was over lambs.
“Sure,” Dan said, and the set hissed and spat, then went silent.
Jake hadn’t said when he’d bring the child over, but Dan wouldn’t have minded betting that he’d be caring for a traumatized toddler for the rest of that night.
It took him time, hobbling with a walking stick, to check the spare bedroom. He had a clean bed, made up ready, and a cot, too. He had a pile of cloth squares, familiar khaki, made from cut up sheets, which worked as nappies. The Red Cross kept him supplied with formula. They considered Dan a field worker and delivered food and essentials erratically.
Water on to boil. Second pan on, too. Drop his meagre supply of feeding bottles and teats in. Jake had said ‘baby,’ but Dan knew that Jake called everyone under the age of twelve a baby. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to be prepared, and sometimes an older child who was deeply shocked wanted a bottle for the comfort.
The water had just started to roil around the glass bottles when Dan caught the sound of an APC approaching, rumbling closer, then grinding to a halt outside his house. The rest of the street was unoccupied; he was the only resident left, but he still picked up his rifle, and checked that his ex-Army Browning pistol was tucked into his belt.
He didn’t have electronic security, but that was definitely Jake’s pound on the door, three thuds, two, and then four. The steel bar across the door was heavy to lift one-handed, but even if he’d doubted the thuds, there was a persistent wail from an infant coming through the steel.
“All right,” he called out, propping the bar against the wall, then pulling the door open. “All right.”
Jake’s eyes were visible through the flipped up visor of his helmet, but it was the baby in Jake’s arms that Dan was interested in.
“Hey sweetie,” he crooned, taking the infant, wrapped in someone’s sweater, out of Jake’s arms. “Don’t be scared, you’re safe now.”
Safer. There wasn’t anywhere in the city that was actually safe.