The server room in the old relay station was completely black. Not a single little light blinked. The air was very hot and hard to breathe. Above them, the scraping sound in the air vent got louder and louder. It sounded like a heavy piece of metal sliding on another piece of metal. Someone was crawling inside the pipes right above their heads.
“Stay quiet, mates,” Diane whispered. Her voice was very steady. She did not sound scared at all. She held her heavy iron wrench tight in her hand. “Whoever is up there wants us to panic. Do not give them what they want.”
Jax was breathing fast. “I do not like this at all, Diane,” he said softly. He was shaking. “We are programmers. We fix computers. We are not fighters.”
“Hush,” Diane told him. “Leo, grab the hard drive we found. Chloe, hold onto the back of my coat. We are leaving through the back door right now.”
They moved very slowly in the dark room. They could smell dry dust and the sharp smell of old electronics. Suddenly, the metal vent cover on the ceiling broke open. It fell to the hard floor with a very loud crash. A large, dark shape dropped from the hole in the ceiling.
Diane did not wait to see what it was. She swung her heavy wrench very hard in the dark. There was a loud grunt as the heavy metal hit something solid. The dark shape fell back onto the floor.
“Run!” Diane yelled loudly. “Run to the car!”
They ran out the back door and out into the hot night air. The moon was big and very bright. It lit up the red sand like a giant street lamp. They ran fast to the old Toyota Land Cruiser. Diane called the big car “The Tin Can”. They all jumped inside and slammed the heavy doors shut.
Diane put the key in the ignition. She started the engine. It roared loudly in the quiet night. She stepped hard on the gas pedal. The big car jumped forward. Red dust flew everywhere in the air behind them.
“Strewth!” Leo yelled from the back seat. “Who was that back there? Was it the killer?”
“I have no idea, mate,” Diane said. She drove very fast on the bumpy dirt road. “But they are playing for keeps. They really want to hurt us. We need to get far away from this town. We are going deep into the bush.”
They drove for a very long time in the dark. The sound of the ocean waves was gone. Now there was only flat red dirt and small, dry bushes as far as they could see. This was the real Australian Outback. It was huge and very empty. The stars in the dark sky were very bright. It looked like a million tiny lights shining down on them.
When the sun finally started to come up, the dark sky turned into beautiful colors of pink, orange, and yellow. It was a very pretty morning, but it felt very lonely. Diane finally stopped the car near some small, dry trees to hide from the road.
“Alright, time for a quick break,” Diane said. She looked very tired, but her eyes were still sharp. “Get out of the car and stretch your legs. I will make us some breakfast. You nerds need to eat good food to think clearly.”
Jax, Chloe, and Leo got out of the car. Their backs and legs hurt from the very bumpy ride. The morning air was already getting hot.
Diane took a heavy black iron pot from the back of the car. “We are having real bush food today,” she told them. “We will make some damper and cook up some snags.”
“What are snags?” Chloe asked. She looked confused.
“They are sausages, you galah,” Diane laughed at her. She built a small fire with dry wood she found on the ground. She put the big sausages in a flat pan. The meat sizzled loudly in the heat. The smell of the hot food made their mouths water. They were very hungry. Then Diane mixed simple white flour and water in a bowl to make a sticky dough. This simple bread is called damper. She cooked the bread right in the hot, gray ashes of the small fire.
When the food was finally ready, they ate very fast. The sausages were made of wild kangaroo meat. They were very tasty and had a strong, rich flavor. The damper bread was warm, soft inside, and hard outside. Diane gave them a small glass jar of Vegemite. It is a very dark, salty paste that Australians love. They put a little bit of Vegemite on the warm bread. It was very salty, but it tasted great with the hot, sweet black tea that Diane made in a tin pot.
“Remember my rule,” Diane said, smiling a little bit at her team. “The best travel guides are your tastebuds. Even when we are running for our lives, we must stop to eat good food.”
“This food is great, fair dinkum,” Leo said. His mouth was full of bread and meat. “But we need to look at Barnaby’s computer code again. We must find out why he died and who is chasing us.”
Leo opened his laptop computer. He sat on the red dirt. He opened the file they took from the dead man’s server room. The file was named ‘Error_404’.
“Look at this,” Leo pointed to his bright screen. “Barnaby made more strange errors on purpose. It was not just bad coding. It is a secret map for us to follow.”
Chloe looked closer at the screen. She used simple words to explain to the others. “Look at the rules for web design. The rules say you must ensure that interactive elements are easy to identify. But Barnaby did the exact opposite. He made all the links completely invisible. You cannot see them at all.”
“And look right here,” Jax said. He pointed to another line of code on the screen. “He broke another big rule. The web guide says you should provide clear and consistent navigation options. But he made the website menus go in circles. If you click and follow the broken links, they spell out a word.”
“What is the word?” Diane asked. She drank the last bit of her hot tea.
“Marbles,” Leo said. “The Devil’s Marbles. The local name is Karlu Karlu. It is a place with huge, round rocks sitting in the middle of the desert.”
“I know that place very well,” Diane said. “It is a very sacred place for the Aboriginal people. It is very old and very strange. Why would Barnaby point us there?”
“Maybe he hid something very important there,” Chloe guessed. “He also put a warning in the code. He used a form element on the page, but he hid the label. The good rules say you must ensure that form elements include clearly associated labels. But his hidden label does not describe the form at all. It just says: ‘Beware the dog’.”
“A dog?” Jax looked around the empty, hot desert. “Are there wild dogs out here?”
“There are dingoes,” Diane said. Her face became very serious. “But I do not think he meant a real animal. ‘The Dog’ might be a bad person. A killer who hunts people.”
“There is more,” Chloe added, typing on the keyboard. “Look at the pictures he coded. The rules clearly state you must include alternative text for images. The guide also says to ensure that alternative text for images is added to all informational and functional images. But Barnaby’s alternative text just says: ’18 degrees South, 134 degrees East’. Those are exact map numbers for the Marbles.”
Suddenly, they heard a strange noise. It was a low, angry growl coming from the dry bushes near the car.
Jax jumped up fast. “What was that sound?”
A large animal slowly walked out of the dry grass. It was a real dingo, a wild Australian dog. It had yellow fur and was very thin. It looked at them with cold, hungry eyes.
“Stay completely still,” Diane said softly. “Do not run away. If you run, it will chase you.”
The dingo showed its sharp white teeth. It was a very scary moment. But then, the wild dog turned its head fast. It heard a different sound. A very loud engine sound was coming from the dirt road far away. The dingo got scared and ran away fast into the deep desert.
A very large, black truck was driving very fast toward them. It left a huge cloud of red dust in the air behind it.
“Pack up your things!” Diane yelled loudly. “Quick! That is not a friendly visitor coming to say hello!”
They threw their bags and computers into the back of the Land Cruiser. The hot tea pot spilled on the red sand. The rest of the damper bread was left by the fire. They jumped into the car and slammed the heavy doors.
Diane drove the car fast over the rough, hard ground. The black truck was following them off the road. It was very big, very fast, and looked very mean.
“Who is in that truck?” Chloe cried out. She held onto her seat belt tight.
“I think it is the killer. I think it is ‘The Dog’,” Diane said. She drove very fast, dodging big rocks and deep holes in the dirt. The car bounced up and down very hard.
“He is getting much closer to us!” Leo yelled. He was looking out the back window of the car.
Diane pressed the gas pedal all the way down to the floor. “Hold on tight, mates! This is going to be a very bumpy ride. We are going completely off the map!”
She turned the steering wheel hard to the left. They drove right off the flat dirt track and into the deep, wild desert hills. The red dirt flew up all around them like thick smoke. The heat outside the car was very bad. There were no roads here at all, only wild, empty land.
“We need to lose him in the dry canyons,” Diane said. “If we do not lose him, we will end up dead just like Barnaby.”
They drove down into a dry riverbed. The walls of the river were very high and made of dark red stone. It was like a big rock maze. Diane drove very well. She knew how to drive in this hard, dangerous land.
“Are we going to die out here?” Jax asked. His face was very pale and scared.
“Not today, mate,” Diane said. She looked in the mirror with a cold smile. “Not before we find out what secrets are waiting for us at the Devil’s Marbles.”
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