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Under the blanket of a pitch-black night, Amber Martin slowed and deviated from the rough dirt track running through the centre of the vast open countryside. She steered the Great Southern Rail Toyota Landcruiser several hundred metres into a low, dense patch of dry scrub off to one side of the road. The going was difficult, and although she drove at little more than crawling speed over the terrain, the vehicle bucked and skewed in a stop-start fashion across the hard, stony ground. Her hands and shoulders ached as she wrestled with the steering. Parched, spindly scrub, like black, skeletal hands reaching from the surrounding blackness, brushed against the sides of the vehicle with loud, ghostly, screeching sounds.
Amber had never driven a four-wheel drive vehicle in her life; she had
