“RUN!” Denny yelled.
Ellie and I scrabbled frantically to escape. As I stumbled down the slope, I turned back to see the rock monster’s hand coming down on Denny’s shoulder. I skidded to a halt. We couldn’t just leave him.
“Get out of here!” Denny cried out as he struggled helplessly in the rock monster’s granite grip. It was the bravest thing I’d ever seen. Certainly braver than the bravest thing I’d ever done (which, for the record, was the time I’d insulted Miller the Killer right to his face).
“We can’t just go!” Ellie said.
“Stop!” the rock monster growled. With Denny firmly in its grip, the creature took a step toward us.
“Aaaargh!” Ellie screamed and ran.
Okay, confession time: it was actually me who screamed and ran, not Ellie. But she wasn’t far behind. Being brave was one thing but being caught by a rock monster was another.
I didn’t even know what a rock monster would do in that situation. Eat me? Crush me? Crush me and then eat me? Turn me into rock? One thing was for sure: I didn’t want to hang around to find out. I felt sorry for Denny—like, really, really sorry—but there was no way Ellie and I could fight a thing like that. It was made of rock! Our only chance was to get back to the ravine and raise the alarm. Whatever scheme Brushes and The Suits were up to would have to wait until we’d tried to save Denny.
Denny didn’t reply. Instead, I heard a horrible grinding sound that I never, ever wanted to hear again.
I kept running and didn’t look back.
IT’S HARD ENOUGH trying to find your way around a desert at night without having to worry about crocodiles. Add a mutant killer rock monster to the mix and there’s only going to be one result: we got lost. It might have taken us an hour to get to Crocodile Rocks, but it took us waaaay longer to find our way back.
The adrenaline had left us both feeling weak as kittens. We were covered in dust and our ankles were bruised and scratched from our panicky getaway. Eventually, though, we saw the lights from the ravine and picked up the pace. We were sure that Denny had been crunched or eaten or turned into rock himself by now but we still had to let some grown-ups know.
About fifty yards from the ravine, Denny stepped out from behind a rock.
“Hi,” he said.
This is how surprised we looked:
I think I would have passed out if I hadn’t been so relieved.
“Denny!” I yelled, grabbing his shoulders to check he was real. “You’re alive!”
Denny put a finger to his lips. “Quiet. And yes, I’m alive.”
“What happened?” Ellie said. “The last we saw that … that thing had hold of you!”
“Riiiiight,” Denny said. “It’s probably easier to show you than explain. Just don’t freak out, okay?” He moved back to the rock he’d been hiding behind. “This is Barry.”
“What is Barry?” I asked, thinking Denny’s experience must have scrambled his brain.
“Me,” said the rock, moving forward and putting out a hand. “I’m Barry.”
THE ROCK MONSTER held out his hand.
“Rafe,” I replied, shaking it.
I didn’t freak out, but I got real close to it for a couple of seconds.
The rock monster had human hands, and now that I had a chance to look more closely I could see that the rock monster was actually a dude wearing some pretty convincing desert camouflage.
“Barry’s been doing the same as us,” Denny explained. “He’s trying to find out what’s happening at Crocodile Rocks. He’s a photographer.”
Barry held up an expensive-looking camera with a long zoom lens. “I was pretty close tonight,” he said. He took off his headgear and I could see Barry was a guy aged about thirty.
Or maybe fifty.
To be honest, I can’t really tell how old grown-ups are—especially when they’re disguised as a rock.
“Things have been getting busier around here over the past few weeks, so MegaGlobal have been getting sloppy. I think I might have got something on the camera tonight but I’m not sure,” Barry said.
Denny tapped his bag of digital goodies. “Only one way to find out.”
At a quiet spot, not too far from Kamp Kulture, Denny downloaded Barry’s pictures.
Most of them were shots of the inside of the entrance to Crocodile Rocks but they were all either too grainy or too fuzzy or too dark to see much of anything.
“Useless,” Barry said. He kicked a nearby stone, sending it flying across the desert. “I really thought tonight …” He trailed off miserably. He looked about as sad as someone dressed as a rock could look, which, for the record, is pretty sad.
Denny leaned back and flexed his fingers. “Don’t panic just yet, mates,” he said. “Stand back and watch a master at work.”
We watched as his fingers flew over the keyboard, feeding the images through different filters. After a minute or two, he stopped suddenly.
“What is it?” Ellie asked.
On-screen was a close-up of the inside of the cave. Most of the photo showed the back of a workman’s head and the wing mirror of a truck heading out of the cave.
“What is it?” I said, and Denny pointed to a squiggle on the wing mirror. He tapped a key three times and the image sharpened. Reflected in the truck’s mirror, plain as a pimple on Miller the Killer’s face, was the cave wall, and on it was an ancient painting …
… of an antelope’s butt.
WE WERE RIGHT! Brushes McGarrity, Cousin Vern, and The Suits were up to something!
We wanted to yell and shout but, because we had to keep everything quiet, we had to dance around silently, grinning like chimpanzees and waving our arms.
We must have looked nuts.
If that croc had wandered past right then, he’d have had second thoughts about attacking such a bunch of fruitloops.
Once we’d calmed down a bit, we put the story together.
“So McGarrity copied the paintings,” Barry said, “to deflect attention away from Crocodile Rocks. Once word got out that there were real Aboriginal cave paintings, MegaGlobal would never have got the license to dig.”
“Why would such a big mining company bother with an area like Crocodile Rocks?” Ellie asked. “It’s too small to develop as an iron ore mine even if they did find it there.”
“They’re not looking for iron ore,” Barry said. “They’re looking for diamonds—one particular diamond.”
AFTER A SLEEP so deep you’d have needed a nuclear-powered sub to wake me, I unglued my eyelids and lay back on my swag, looking up at a cloudy sky.
Clouds.
That was good.
I had never properly appreciated clouds until I went to the outback. With clouds around, today might not feel like I was an overdone brownie on the top shelf of the oven at Swifty’s, I thought.
My throat felt like a wombat had bedded down in there for the night and, without checking, I just knew this was a bad hair day to end all bad hair days. I had dreamt plenty but none of my dreams was as straight up batzoid as what had happened last night.
Or had it happened?
Was it possible I’d imagined everything? Did Barry the rock monster exist? Had we really uncovered evidence that Brushes McGarrity and MegaGlobal Industries were involved in some sort of crooked diamond scam? Had I missed breakfast?
It turned out I hadn’t, which was good because I was so hungry I could almost have eaten a vegemite sandwich.
Almost.
I staggered across to the food tent and took a seat at the table, trying to figure out last night.
Eric and Monique were just finishing up and they told me that today we’d all be doing our art. There would be no trips and no organized events. Brushes had taken himself off somewhere, which suited me just fine since I wasn’t looking forward to keeping my mouth shut all day.
Vern clattered a stack of bacon, eggs, and pancakes the size of Brisbane down in front of me. There was so much food on my plate that if it fell over it could easily
injure someone, so I spent a happy forty-two seconds relocating the pancakes to a safer location—my stomach.
I’ll say this for Big Vern: he might be a great hulking, dumb henchman but he sure knew how to drive a griddle.
Eric and Monique left, and while I ate I watched Vloot working on the sculpture of Brushes McGarrity. Somewhere from out behind the camp, I could hear what sounded like two cats fighting in a washing machine. I figured Yrsa was doing some experimenting … or maybe that’s just what Icelandic music sounds like. Linda had spread out a sheet of plastic and was grinding rocks into some kind of paint. There was no sign of Thiago and, judging from the snores coming from their swags, Ellie and Denny were still fast asleep.
This was how I’d kind of imagined the camp to be when I’d first got the invitation—everyone doing their arty thing under the big Australian sky.
I decided that, while we were waiting for news from Barry, that’s what I’d do too. After all, I wasn’t here to do battle with mining companies.
I was an artist.
I FOUND A quiet spot and started working on some paintings and drawings. It was a night scene of Crocodile Rocks. I hadn’t done much drawing and painting since I’d arrived, so it felt good to lose myself in it for a while.
From time to time I glanced up and saw Ellie and Denny chatting. After a while I saw them walk over to where Thiago’s swag was. Something about the way they were standing made me put down my paintbrush. Denny bent over and looked at the ground. He said something to Ellie.
I walked over to them, a bad feeling growing in the pit of my stomach … right next to that stack of pancakes. Now that I thought about it, I hadn’t seen (or smelled) Thiago since yesterday.
“What is it?” I said when I reached Thiago’s swag.
Ellie pointed at the ground. I couldn’t see much, just some footprints and marks in the red dirt.
“What?” I said.
Denny pulled me over to a couple of tracks about a shoulder-width apart. He squatted down and pointed at the dirt. “Looks to me like someone’s dragged Thiago out of his swag,” he said. “Look, here are some finger marks—that’d be Thiago. Large feet here and here, and two drag tracks going up and over there.”
“How did you work that out?” I said, impressed. “Is that some kind of ancient tracker knowledge thing?”
“Crooked Case Histories,” Denny replied.
“I love that show. They had one on a beach where a bloke had been dragged off his sun lounger.”
“Never mind how he knows,” Ellie said. “The big question is, what’s happened to Thiago?”
We followed the trail out of Kamp Kulture and toward the creek.
“I don’t like this one little bit,” Ellie said. She was filming the tracks and I had a quick flash forward—frrrrp!—to a courtroom with Ellie’s footage being shown as evidence.
Denny, who was a little in front of us, suddenly stopped. He bent down and came back up with a ripped piece of cloth.
“What’s that?” Ellie asked.
The tattered yellow-and-green cloth hung from Denny’s fingers and turned in the breeze to reveal a blue badge with a white logo. It was from a Brazilian soccer shirt—last seen on Thiago DaSilva.
Forget Crooked Case Histories, this looked like it could be Crocs Case Histories.
WE DID EXACTLY what we shouldn’t have done: we split up to search for Thiago.
I even heard myself saying “good idea, that way we can cover more ground”. Hadn’t I learned anything from watching scary movies?
We agreed to meet back at camp in an hour, hopefully with Thiago in tow. If we hadn’t found him by then, the plan was to get everyone else involved. If that failed, we’d have to talk to Brushes. There was no other option.
The area I was searching took me in the direction of the secret ravine. As I got closer I heard something that sounded a lot like one of Thiago’s parps. I kept my head down and crawled to the edge of the rise and peered at the ravine below.
I risked a peek. The sound I’d heard wasn’t Thiago farting. It was a truck horn.
The place seemed full of them. There were six MegaGlobal trucks along with a whole bunch more of men wearing suits. Brushes McGarrity was in the middle of a group of people studying a map spread out across the hood of one of the trucks.
I wished I had a pair of binoculars to get a closer look at that map.
I inched forward. As I did, a large stone came loose and bounced slowly down the hill, getting faster and faster as it neared the trucks.
The stone bounced hard on the flat part of the ravine, took a wicked swerve left, and clanged loudly against the fender of a truck. Everyone in the ravine stopped talking. Then they all looked at the truck and then back up the rise at me.
I ducked and rolled backwards down the hill, my feet scrabbling for balance. I didn’t think they’d seen me. Without looking back, I raced to Kamp Kulture. Behind me, I heard a truck engine start.
They were after me.
As I ran, I thought about Thiago’s shredded soccer jersey, about the croc Brushes McGarrity kept in a cage behind the trailer, about the astonishing amount of money The Blue Budgie might be worth, and about what bad people like MegaGlobal would do to nosy kids who poked around in things that were none of their business.
IF YOU’VE EVER wondered what it would be like to be able to run faster than an Olympic gold medalist, I can totally recommend being chased by a giant crocodile and a pack of MegaGlobal henchmen as a surefire way to find out.
Traveling at roughly the speed of light, I covered the distance from the ravine back to Kamp Kulture in about six seconds flat. With a last glance over my shoulder to check that I’d given them the slip—and unless they’d been strapped to the back of a heat-seeking missile, I was pretty sure I had—I hurtled into camp so fast that when I put on the brakes I dug a trench nine feet long.
Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little … but I was moving pretty fast. I waited a few seconds for my lungs to stop burning and then casually walked into camp.
Barry the rock monster was there along with two tough-looking police officers and a couple of regular guys talking to Vern. Yrsa was back from torturing her violin, Vloot was working on his sculpture, and Monique was still quietly folding paper.
And there, sitting to one side of this group at the table and wolfing down a plate of eggs, was Thiago.
I blinked.
Don’t get me wrong—I was real glad to see Thiago … I just hadn’t expected to ever see him again. I caught Ellie’s eye and she shrugged.
“What happened?” I asked when I was close enough.
“He got lost,” Denny said. “Had a UBI.”
“A UBI?”
“Urgent Bum Issue.” Denny pointed at the desert. “When you gotta go, you gotta go. Y’know?”
“Oh,” I said. “Uh, yeah.”
“Never mind all that,” Ellie said. “The big news is, the police are going to go out to Crocodile Rocks!”
Denny nodded and smiled. “Barry’s mate on the council pulled a few strings. The MegaGlobal people aren’t happy but they’re going anyway.”
“This will be epic,” Ellie said. She held up her camera. “I’m going to film the whole thing.”
“Looks like you’ve done it,” Leo said.
“Where have you been?” I asked. Until Leo appeared, I hadn’t really noticed I hadn’t seen much of him lately.
Leo shrugged. “You’ve been busy running all over the desert, fighting crocs, discovering crooks—exciting stuff.”
I nodded. Leo was right. I had been busy and it did look like we’d got a real result. It was exciting.
So why did I feel like I had an Urgent Bum Issue of my own?
WHEN WE REACHED the entrance of Crocodile Rocks, the place was deserted. No trucks. No suits. No henchmen. Nothing.
“I’m getting a weird feeling about this,” I said to Ellie, but she wasn’t listening. She had her camera out and was circling the scene, trying to get a good
angle. If we were right about Crocodile Rocks, this story was going to be HUGE.
Barry, the councilors, and the police walked over to the cave entrance. All the Kamp Kulture kids gathered around. For most of them, it was their first sight of Crocodile Rocks. I noticed Thiago hanging back. I didn’t blame him. It was fine by me if I never set foot inside a cave again.
“No sign of activity,” one of the cops said, looking at the red dirt. He glanced at Barry. “You say you saw trucks here?”
Barry nodded. “Plenty.”
“Let’s get on with it, Baz,” said one of the councilors. “It’s a long way back tonight.”
“The paintings are about fifty yards in,” Barry said, “as far as I can tell from the photos. They can’t be too far back.”
“Get the big torch out of the truck, Rollo,” one of the cops called. “It’s black as coal in here.”
As Rollo headed to the truck, everyone else entered the cave. I touched the lucky pebble in my pocket, took a deep breath, and followed them inside.
By the time Rollo got back, we’d all wandered about ten paces inside the cave entrance. Although you couldn’t see far, I got the sense that this cave was much, much bigger than the one nearer to our camp. A truck would have no problem getting inside.
“C’mon,” Barry said. “Let’s get some light.”
Rollo switched on the torch and pointed the beam up at the cave walls.
THIS WAS WHAT was on the walls:
A big, fat nothing. Zilch, nada, rien.
No antelope, no hunters, no crocodiles. Just a sheer wall of smooth, curved sandstone disappearing into deep shadow near the cave roof.
“They must be further back.” Barry picked up the torch and ran down the tunnel, the light dancing as he moved to show more and more blank rock. “They’ve got to be here!” Barry’s voice got more and more puzzled the further inside the cave he went. He said some words I can’t repeat here.