Catch a Kiwi (New Zealand Ever After Book 6)
1. Failure to Failure
Summer
“We could totally crash right now,” my cousin Delilah informed me from the passenger seat. “Meet somebody coming around a corner, and—boom. That would be just the crowning glory. After another job bites the dust, because a café can’t be open when it’s flooded. And, of course, when our last shower was two days ago and our worldly possessions have been reduced to a campervan. We’re like the ‘before’ scene in a movie. Do you still count as homeless if you have a campervan? I’m guessing yes.”
Breathe, I told myself, and redoubled my focus on the winding road, ignoring the fern trees that were whipping around on the downhill side like they were auditioning to be in a hurricane on the news. There were no roads as narrow as New Zealand roads, which meant that Delilah was right. If anybody came around the corner, just a little over the nonexistent center line …
I’d have rubbed my forehead with trembling fingers like somebody in a book, but my death grip on the steering wheel had other ideas. “Why would we crash?” I asked Delilah. “Because it’s raining? And we’re living in a campervan because we’re on a working holiday. A working holiday in New Zealand. That’s not homeless. That’s a dream life.”
“No, because it’s pouring,” she said. “Brilliant idea to drive to the beach. Hello? It’s a cyclone. That means a hurricane. Have you ever watched TV? Palm trees whipping in the wind much?”
“It’s raining practically everywhere in the South Island,” I reminded her as the ancient gray van did some more groaning—what was that?—and the windshield wipers slapped frantically in a futile attempt to keep up with the sheets of water. “Things aren’t flooded here, though, you notice, unlike in Fiordland. The road isn’t closed, and nobody’s evacuating over here last I checked. Onward and upward. Whoops. We turn here.” I could barely see to make the turn onto Purakaunui Bay Road, and once I did, I realized the road was gravel. That was OK, though, right? Gravel drained the water. That was the whole reason for gravel.
“I hate your new looking-on-the-bright-side thing, so you know,” Delilah said. “I liked you better when you were snarky and dark, like me.”
I inched around a hairpin curve as the headlights flickered. So did the dash illumination. The windshield wipers faltered, and my heart skipped a beat. They restarted, and I breathed again. Never mind. I could look out the window to drive if I had to, right? Right?
I thought about it for two seconds, until the horn let out a blast and startled me.
Wait. I hadn’t pressed it. Had I?
It stopped. Good. “Too bad you’re stuck with me, then,” I said. “Darkness is for teenagers who can afford it. Which you are. Sort of. Except for the affording it part. Teenagers who can existentially afford it, I guess. ‘Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.’ Winston Churchill. The guy knew something about adversity.”
“Now you’re just messing with me,” Delilah said. “The campground will probably be closed, too, or if it’s open, it’ll be a sea of mud. Also, you notice what there isn’t around here? Cafés, that’s what. Or, oh, let’s see. Anything else, job-wise, other than possibly cleaning motel rooms again, if there even are any motels. Somehow, you can always get that job, you notice? Nothing else that could employ one marginally employable barely-woman and one woman who won’t use her most valuable skills, because—why, exactly?”
“We have a campervan, though,” I said. “We don’t really need a campground.” The van did some more groaning, at least I thought that was what it was. It was hard to tell, with the rain and wind and all. The lights were still flickering, too. Could your headlights get waterlogged and short out? I had no idea. It didn’t seem possible, or everybody would constantly be driving through the rain in a blackout.
Cars can be fixed.
With what money? And out here, in the middle of possibly the most remote spot in New Zealand? Who’s going to do it?
Never mind that. “What was I saying? Oh, yeah. We don’t care about mud, or whether the campground’s closed. We have gumboots and a campervan with a toilet and fridge. If the campground’s closed, we park on the road. Who’s going to stop us, in the pouring rain? And there’s a town here, just north of where we turned off. Owaka.”
“Sounds like the teeming metropolis,” Delilah said. “I’m sure there are tons of jobs there.”
“Cafés, though, I’ll bet. Tourism is mighty. We’ll check it out as soon as it stops raining. It’s summer, it’s New Zealand, and I’m sure it’s extremely beautiful here. It’s the Catlins. Famous undiscovered beauty spot.”
“Undiscovered is right,” Delilah said. “There’s literally nobody out here.”
“This is a very popular area,” I informed her, mostly to distract myself from the blinking headlights. “Ninety minutes from Dunedin. Undiscovered to tourists, not to Kiwis. Day trips! Holiday weekends away! But we’re not worrying about that now. We’re stopping for the night and then looking around.”
“I notice you didn’t address the valuable-skills part,” Delilah said. “I noticed that because I’m very bright and have an excellent memory. Like you.”
“Yeah, well, for me to get a job in software engineering, I told you, we’d need to be in the city. Not too many campsites in the middle of Auckland. Besides, I’m enjoying the cafés. It’s like a vacation.” There, that sounded good.
“Other than that we’re not, you know, on vacation,” Delilah said, “and are washing dishes and cleaning toilets and serving lattes all day, it’s exactly like that. You’re being cheerful again. You realize that just makes me more irritable. I hope this place has hot showers. Why do you keep honking the horn?”
“I’m not. It’s doing it by itself. That must be a thing.” It was getting hard to see, although it wasn’t close to sundown yet, but we couldn’t be far from the coast, even driving as slowly as we were. I wasn’t going to tell Delilah that the campground didn’t have showers. We’d figure something out tomorrow. We always had so far, more or less.
“Great,” Delilah said. “That’ll make us extra-popular, honking our horn through the countryside. Like farting your way through a crowd.”
“That’s refined,” I said. “You can disable the horn, I’m pretty sure. I’ll look it up when we get there.”
“There you go again,” Delilah said. “You used to be sarcastic. I distinctly remember sarcasm. And don’t tell me I don’t remember. You’re only twelve years older.”
I started to say, “I’m still sarcastic in my head, but people don’t appreciate sarcasm as much as you think,” but I didn’t manage it. That was because the car started lurching like a drunk on a sidewalk. The lights were flashing like crazy, the horn was honking, and all the warning lights on the dashboard were on. Like, all of them. Also, the windshield wipers had stopped.
“It’s possessed,” Delilah said. “Oh, my god. You bought the Devil’s campervan.”
A bubble of hilarity rose in my throat, but this was no time to laugh. Why did my emotions never do the right thing? “We’re going to have to stop.”
“On the road?” Delilah asked over the incessant honking, as the car shuddered, lurched, and shuddered some more. “There is zero shoulder. There’s almost zero road. We’re going to die. Somebody’s going to hit us, and we’re going to?—”
I was already pulling on my raincoat. That was because the van had died. Stone-cold dead, stopped on the road with no lights and no flashers. “We’ll be beautiful corpses,” I said. “Except we won’t, because you’re going to climb over the console and steer while I push. It’s downhill. I think. Sort of downhill. All we have to do is get to a driveway. A wide spot in the road. Anything.”
If I couldn’t push it, somebody would stop and help. Right? Somebody would drive by, or drive up behind me, and help me push, or?—
Or crush me into the back of the van, of course, since we had no lights, the van was gray, and it was pouring. Probably send the van down the hill with Delilah inside, too. A twofer. This was why they told you to carry flares. Well, too late now. “Put on your seatbelt,” I told her.
“Excuse me,” she said. “I don’t think I’m in danger of a high-speed collision here.”
“Put it on anyway,” I said. The left side of the road, which we were driving on, was the downhill side. The other side was a steep cut bank, so no hope of a turnout there. There’d been driveways along the road, though. Mailboxes. This was probably desirable real estate. Or the stomping grounds of backwoods hillbillies, Kiwi style. Deliverance, anyone?
Stop it. New Zealand doesn’t have backwoods hillbillies, and nobody plays the banjo. We are ninety minutes’ drive from a city with over a hundred thousand people. Holiday houses, is what these will be. I got out of the car.
I’d put my hood up, but the wind instantly whipped it off. Didn’t matter, because I’d have been soaked anyway. The rain was really pounding down out here, and gravel or not, the road was swimming in mud. I opened the door again, and Delilah said, “Shut the door! Shit, that’s wet.”
“I’m going to start pushing,” I said. “Letting you know. And don’t swear. It’s too easy to do it by accident, and then we’re out of a job.”
Delilah sighed. “That happened once.” She had put on her seatbelt, though. Good.
“Release the emergency brake,” I said, “because I pulled it when we stopped, but get ready to brake again. They won’t work as well without the engine. No power brakes or power steering, so you’ll really have to haul on the wheel and stomp the brakes. If you get rolling too fast, use the emergency brake.” Did that still work if you had no power? I wished I knew more about cars.
Delilah said, “You realize you probably won’t even be able to move it, right? We should call 911 or whatever the number is here and wait for the cops.”
And get squashed like bugs, I didn’t say. I said, “Release the brake,” ran around to the back of the van, and pushed.
It wasn’t all that downhill. I put my legs into it, leaned forward, and shoved with all my might, my feet slipping in the muddy gravel.
Nothing. I let off for a moment, then tried again, harder this time, putting my legs and back into it.
The van moved. I said, “Yay,” to nobody but myself, and kept pushing. I was starting to sweat, or maybe that was the rain leaking through. Finally, the van started rolling a little faster. Yay again. I decided to stop listening for an engine behind me, because (A) I probably wouldn’t hear it over the rain and wind, and (B) what would I do if I did hear it? Note to self: next time, buy a yellow raincoat. Visibility. I forgot it and kept pushing.
We were on a curve again, hence the worry. This road went on forever, and nobody had bothered to pursue any fancy notions like “reasonable grade” or “gentle curves” when they’d built it. The Long and Winding Road. That was a Beatles song. Melancholy. I’d enjoyed being melancholy, back when I could afford it. Like I’d told Delilah, though, enjoying melancholy was for teenagers. She was steering into the turn. Good.
The downhill got steeper. I wasn’t pushing anymore. I was running. “Brake!” I shouted, even though I knew she couldn’t hear me. “Brake!”
I didn’t see the brake lights go on, because we had no brake lights, but the van slowed a little. We were around the curve now, and I ran harder to catch up. The rain was pounding over my hair, down my face. I had water in my eyes and water in my ears and water running into my mouth, and my feet were splashing through muddy puddles, soaking any part of my bare legs that the rain was missing. It wasn’t really cold, because it was summer, but it was wet.
You have dry clothes in the van. Catch up. Bound to be a driveway up here.
The downhill got steeper, and the van was picking up speed again. I saw a break in the trees ahead on the left. That had to be a turnoff. Almost there! Delilah just had to brake and then turn into it. She just had to …
She was braking. I could tell, because I was finally catching up. She wasn’t braking enough, though. Not nearly …
“Emergency brake!” I shouted with what was left of my breath. “Emergency brake!” I tried to run faster, to … what? Pound on the window and mime pulling the brake? It didn’t matter, because I couldn’t reach it.
I was thinking it, and then I tripped on something and was flying. No chance to catch myself.
That sickening, endless, hanging moment in the air, when you know you’re falling and can’t do anything about it, then I landed, palms and bare knees on the sharp gravel. The jolt went all the way through my body, followed by a shock of pain.
I was up again, running. No time for pain.
Delilah must be turning the wheel, because the van was veering toward the driveway, but she was going too fast. “Brake!” I shouted again from too far behind her. “Brake!”
The van skidded. Wobbled. Tipped, then smashed down onto its left side and slid onto the right side of the driveway with a screech of metal. It took out the mailbox with a crunchof splintering wood, but the post must have slowed it, because the back end swung around. The whole thing slid slowly, slowly, with another horrible screech, toward the drop-off from the side of the road into the trees.
It was going to stop. It was going to …
It didn’t stop. It reached the edge and teetered for a second. In that second, I was getting closer. Closer. All I had to do was wrench the door open and grab Delilah. If she had her seatbelt undone. If she …
It went over the edge. I couldn’t see. Too much rain, and too much vegetation. I could hear, though. The splintering of wood. The tinkle of broken glass. The crunch of metal. And, finally, an enormous thud that I could hear just fine despite the rain. Despite the wind.
I got to the edge. The van was on its back like an overturned bug, with the back wheels still spinning like they had someplace to go. But that was all that was moving.
Slipping down the hill in the mud, sliding on the slickness of wet ferns. My heart banging away so hard, it was taking my breath, my mind trying to skitter away, trying not to know this.
Delilah.
She’d be all right. She was wearing her seatbelt! Please, let her not have taken it off.
Please.