Roo Hell

Roo Hell- Click for a closer look

Roo Hell occurred on the Barrier Highway, somewhere North of nowhere and south of where we had come from. There were four of us in the car - myself, a fellow named Boscence, Luke (aka Skeleton Friend) and a Brazilian of some kind (not pictured). We had come back from a monumental drinkathon and decided we were going to cross the country in a few days, taking it relatively easy.

Things did not go as planned.

From the start, it was ugly. After almost getting cleaned up by an idiot overtaking around a blind corner at high speed, the temperature in the car started to rise. Luke's brittle corpse couldn't sustain him after a week of drinking and he passed out. He would awake later, terrified that we'd sold him into slavery at a second hand store somewhere in the middle of Hell, Northern New South Wales.

Things only got worse from here on in. The car was an old Astra, a rickety tin can with no room to move and it was full of terribly smelly men on a damn hot day. We stopped at Tamworth and got a bite to eat. The country music festival was coming, but we weren't in the mood to hang around for a few days waiting for it. The road was only getting hotter and uglier. We decided not to stay the night in the town, and moved on.

This decision would take us to Roo Hell.

Without getting too far into particulars, I was told that I was the only person sane enough to do any driving once we had gotten past midnight, and I was offered the choice - we all sleep in the car in the desert on this stretch of highway, or we keep moving. Having tried to sleep in a full car a few times, and having elected to sleep in the gutter outside the car instead, I understood that this was an ultimatum - drive, fucker. So I drove.

This was a stretch of road in the middle of some kind of blasted wasteland, in the middle of a pretty severe drought. Previous years had been kind to the kangaroos - they had bred to ridiculous numbers, but this year there was not enough food or water to sustain them. They were on the move, and being nocturnal buggers they all came out at night. I was dimly cognisant of this fact, but hadn't seen any of the little bastards. In fact, I was taking it decidedly easy and keeping a weather eye open while yelling at Boscence about the presence of huge numbers of road-trains all over the road, when one of the afore-mentioned trucks overtook me and switched its high beams on.

The result was an explosion of gore. Dozens of kangaroos, frozen by the light, exploded as the truck bore down on them. They were flung under the tyres and pummelled into the road in great numbers. And they kept coming. As the truck pulled ahead it left a swathe of half-dead, completely dead and exploded kangaroos behind it. Most of them had been rendered into unidentifiable sacks of meat, but still large enough to damage the car if we hit them. I swerved wildly to avoid a particularly large one, and in doing so clipped something on the right hand side of the car. There was a loud bang as the suspension flattened as it bounced over whatever we'd hit. Fortunately it was just a small carcass and no damage was done. Meanwhile, roos who hadn't quite made it in front of the truck did their best to get out in front of us, and live ones were still hopping into the road. For the fist hundred kilometres or so, Boscence and I carried out a terse conversation while Luke lay horrified in the back, doing his best not to think about what was going on. The Brazilian was huddled over in terror, praying to his heathen gods. He would never speak to any of us again after this.

Somehow, everyone fell asleep and I carried on alone, more or less on autopilot. There must have been several hundred kilometres of splattered roos on the road, but it got peaceful as the sun started coming up and I pulled into a truck stop. I jumped out of the car, riding the wave of feck into the clean air outside. The others slept like the dead and would not be awoken. I went and got myself a ginger beer, relaxed for an hour then kept on driving.

The road ahead was covered in dead roos, their corpses already being picked clean by birds of prey. Not a live one was to be seen. They were almost certainly lying low, building up their energy for another attempt on our lives the next night. We resolved ourselves to being home that day, and stopping only to let the Brazilian wander around Broken Hill, we pulled into Adelaide that same evening.

I believe we didn't talk for a week, and the Brazilian disappeared, never to be seen again.