Imprisoned By Iron

Chapter One

Chapter One

Lightning filled the car with a flash of light, making Audrey temporarily squeeze her eyes closed against the brightness. She breathed out heavily. So much for sleeping through the trip home. She glared at her younger brother, Jordan, who was asleep, his mouth partly open, his breathing even. How could he sleep through the thunder and lightning? She jumped slightly when lightning forked across the sky again, making her brother’s sandy brown hair appear nearly white.

She leaned forward, looking at her parents in the light from the dash, the eerie green glow preferable to the bright streaks of light. “How much longer? It seems to be taking longer than usual.”

“The roads are wet,” Fred said. “Just because it’s stopped raining, doesn’t mean they’re dry.”

“It is longer?” Audrey frowned. “Do the headlights look dim to you?” Maybe it was the lack of streetlights and traffic on the rural roads.

“They’re fading,” Fred said. “The battery isn’t charging.”

“How long until we’re home?” Audrey peered through the windscreen, trying to see past the dim light on the bitumen in front of the car.

Joan turned in the seat, casting her face in shadows. “We won’t be getting home tonight.”

The car filled with a flash of light. Audrey jumped again. The dark scenery outside was momentarily highlighted, a landscape devoid of colour. Even her brown hair lacked its various shades of gold, bronze and copper that were naturally scattered throughout it. “What do you mean we won’t get home?” Tomorrow was her seventeenth birthday. Her plans had already been put on hold for a visit to her great-grandma’s place. All because they shared a birth date and a name. With how little her mum liked being named after Great-Grandma’s sister, she would have thought her mum wouldn’t have done the same to one of her kids.

Fred’s attention remained on the road ahead and he didn’t answer immediately. “We can’t keep driving in the dark. Not once the headlights go. That’d be too dangerous.”

Audrey sat back to peer out the window on her left. A flash of light forked across the sky, lighting up the landscape and draining it of colour. There was absolutely nothing out there. Only sparsely treed, rocky hills in the distance with bare paddocks stretching back from the road towards them. “We’re going to pull up on the side of the road?” What if someone ran into them? There wasn’t that much space with a gully running the length of the roadside, only a couple of metres in from the bitumen. The visibility outside was terrible. Not that she’d seen any traffic. It felt like they were the only ones left in the world. A world without colour and only the occasional flash of light.

“We don’t have a choice,” Fred said.

Joan leaned forward, pointing to the left when lightning lit the sky again. “I see a house over there. Who knows, we might get lucky and they’ll have a phone we can use to call for help.”

Frowning, Audrey took out her mobile phone and checked the coverage. There was none. Could the night get any worse? She was meant to be meeting up with her friends first thing in the morning. They had the whole day planned. Her gaze focused on the time. Less than two hours until her birthday. Being stuck on the side of the road in an electrical storm wasn’t her idea of a great birthday. But she was beginning to think she couldn’t expect anything else when it came to her birthday.

Jordan made unintelligible sounds, his noises eventually making sense. “Trying to sleep. Can’t you stop talking? What happened to leaving before dark so we’d be home early? Should have known the plans would change. They always do.”

Audrey looked at her brother as the night lit up. His eyes were mostly closed and he was yawning, his hand barely covering his mouth. “You might want to wake up for this. It looks like we’re going to be stranded out here.” She thought of the empty esky in the boot of the car. The one they’d packed early that morning with food to have while they were out. “Stuck on the side of a deserted road with no food and very little water.”

“We’re what?” Jordan peered out the window on his right, cupping his hands on either side of his face, the edge of them pressed against the glass. “Where are we?”

Fred slowed further. “Too far from home to keep going.”

“It’s anyone’s guess,” Joan said.

Audrey looked from her mum to her dad. “What’s going on?”

“We’re not lost,” Fred stated.

Audrey sighed. The night kept getting better by the second. “We’re lost?”

Jordan echoed her as the car was again filled with a flash of light. “How can we be lost? We’ve been out here a million times.”

“Eight times.” Audrey could remember every single birthday she’d been forced to visit her great-grandmother rather than celebrate how she wanted to celebrate. It was always the Saturday around her birthday. Or on it. Like last year and the year she’d turned eleven.

The crunching sound of the tyres going over the loose rocks of a narrow driveway was drowned out by the crack of thunder, light again filling the sky. Joan grabbed the dash. “Look out.”

A figure appeared in front of them, lurching to the side, swallowed by darkness when the lightning display ended.

Fred, who’d slammed on the brakes, hunched over the steering wheel as he peered into the night. “I swear he wasn’t there a moment ago. It was like he came out of nowhere.”

“People don’t just appear out of nowhere.” Joan gestured to the side of the driveway. “Pull over. We’ll walk the rest of the way.”

Fred slowly continued up the driveway. “It has to be a hundred metres away. Maybe more.”

“Pull over.” Joan gestured towards the side of the driveway again.

“That means we’ll have to walk that far again in the morning.” Jordan leaned forward to peer between the two front seats as lightning lit up the sky. “The place looks like something out of a horror movie.”

“Pull over.” Joan’s words were terse.

Audrey sighed heavily. They were both right. The lights were too dim to see properly and they couldn’t leave the car parked halfway down the long driveway. “The sooner we find a landline, the better.” Taking out her phone, she unbuckled her seat belt and swung the car door open.

Joan turned in her seat. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Dealing with the problem.” Audrey stepped out of the car, which was barely moving, and turned her flashlight app on to brightest. Closing the door on her mum’s demands to get in the car, she strode past it, remaining to the side as she held her phone up so the light fell on the driveway in front of the bonnet. She glanced at the car when she heard the sound of a door opening and closing on the other side.

Jordan joined her, striding across in front of the car to reach her. “Do you think we’ll be stuck out here long?”

Audrey shrugged, the splash of light on the driveway moving with the action.

“You do remember the esky is empty,” Jordan said.

“I haven’t forgotten.” She also hadn’t forgotten her mum had told her not to go overboard when she’d helped pack it early that morning.

“We’re never home on time,” Jordan said.

She answered him with a shrug. There was no point going over things both of them already knew. Occasionally, they did make it home on time. Except for the yearly trek to see their great-grandma. They seemed to return from that later each year.

“Mike reckons they’re headed for a divorce.” Jordan glanced over his shoulder. “Do you think they are?”

“Mike is an i***t. You need better friends.” She flinched when thunder sounded and the night lit up.

“So he’s not right?”

She glanced at her brother, taking a second look at him. She was surprised at how worried he seemed. He was eighteen months younger than her and sometimes, like now, she could have believed he was at least five years younger. “Didn’t I already tell you Mike’s an i***t?”

Jordan chuckled. “Yeah, but he is fun to hang out with.”

The comment she’d been about to make, banished when lightning again filled the sky, highlighting the house ahead of them. She tried not to think of her brother’s earlier words. The house did look like it belonged in a horror movie. It was two storeys high, made of weather beaten timber with flaking paint and had a high peaked roof. A verandah ran across the front, a couple of the railings broken, and the curtains were drawn, dim light seeping around the edges. “Does your phone have coverage?”

Jordan shook his head. “I checked before.” He remained silent for a moment. “They drill us about stranger danger all the time and yet we’re about to go knock on that door.” He glanced at the car that continued to follow them.

“If we stick together, we should be right.” She tried not to focus on his words. Any of his words. Yet they played over in her mind. Horror movies. Stranger danger. What else could they do? It wasn’t like they could sit on the side of the road all night. Daylight was hours away. And being late March, the evenings were cool, the temperature dropping further in the early hours of the morning.

“Great-Grandma should visit us in Brisbane like she used to,” Jordan said.

“Aunt Patty doesn’t like to drive in the city,” Audrey said absently. The woman wasn’t exactly their aunt. She was the daughter of their great-grandma’s sister, the three of them living together on the old farm that mainly consisted of the farmhouse and house yards, the rest of the land having been sold years ago.

Jordan looked up at the house when they stopped in front of it. “Does it feel like someone is watching you?”

She lowered the brightness of her flashlight app, not wanting to flatten the battery. His words made a chill travel down her spine. “Will you shut up? You’re wasting your breath. No matter what you say, you’re not going to creep me out.” Or at least she wasn’t about to admit to it.

“I wasn’t trying to creep you out.” Jordan looked over his shoulder at the sound of two car doors opening and closing.

Audrey turned to watch their parents walk towards them. She faced the light from her phone at the ground. “Find out if they have a cordless phone they can bring to the door.”

“I was the one who taught you what to do in an emergency,” Joan said. “You don’t need to remind me of anything.”

Audrey started to point out that both of them had a tendency to tell them one thing then do another. She closed her mouth, words unspoken. She was tired and wanted to sleep rather than get in an argument.

Joan strode up the three steps leading to the verandah. “Bring the light closer.” She knocked sharply on the door.

“What if they’re asleep?” Audrey stepped onto the bottom step, not wanting to go any closer to the door. Why had Jordan asked if it felt like the house was watching her? Couldn’t he have kept that to himself?

Joan knocked on the door again. “There are lights on.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Jordan said softly.

Audrey grinned at her brother, reminded of the amount of times their mum had fallen asleep watching a movie. Before she could comment on the memory, the door swung open.