Nowhere to Stop

“Mum didn’t say we were being chased. But the way she gripped the wheel, it felt like something was catching up anyway.”

We didn’t stop anywhere proper that night.

After the roadhouse, Mum drove like she was trying to outrun something that hadn’t quite caught up yet—something shapeless and pressing that lived just behind her eyes and whispered through the gaps in her silence. Her hands stayed welded to the steering wheel, knuckles taut and pale, the muscles in her forearms rigid with effort. Every few minutes, she’d glance into the rear-view mirror—not casually, but with deliberate tension, her eyes flicking back like she expected to catch a shadow in the act of forming. But there was never anything there. Just the low, endless smear of road behind us and the deepening sky that never quite committed to dusk.

We passed more roadkill than I’d seen in my life—kangaroos, mostly, but other creatures too, some unidentifiable, half-consumed by insects and time. Their bodies had taken on a swollen stillness, a grotesque silence. Each one came with its own cloud of flies that lifted lazily as we passed, then settled back down, as if even death out here obeyed some kind of routine.

Road signs appeared like ghosts—faded and riddled with holes, their numbers flickering briefly in the headlights before vanishing again into the blur. None of the names meant anything. Half of them sounded made-up, like the leftovers from stories too tired to be told anymore. I imagined the towns they pointed to—crumbling, half-abandoned, like the one we’d just left, or worse. Places where no one lived but the wind.

The car’s engine had started to whine—an eerie, high-pitched sound that rose and fell depending on our speed, like something in the machine was crying out, not in panic but in exhaustion. The rattle underneath had become part of the rhythm now, a percussion of wear and warning that Mum treated like background noise. But I could smell it. That sharp, metallic tang, like burnt copper and overworked effort. Every time we stopped, the scent crept in through the vents and clung to the back of my throat.

We passed signs of life—if you could call them that. A petrol pump with no roof, no walls, no sign of a person. Just metal and sky. A shack slouched under its own weight, corrugated iron peeling off like shed skin. Mack pointed out a boarded-up café that had once promised toasties and tea, the paint on its sign now just a faint suggestion of colour, like bruises fading beneath the skin.

“What about here?” he asked, more than once, his voice smaller each time. I could hear the hope in it—the wish for beds and blankets and something warm. But each suggestion was met with that same sharp shake of Mum’s head, the way her jaw tightened before she said, “Not here,” or worse, said nothing at all.

It wasn’t just that she was being stubborn. It was like she knew something we didn’t. Like she could read dangers hidden in the stillness, sense traps behind the emptiness. Her fear was no longer reactive—it had become proactive, anticipatory, like she was following a map none of us could see.

And so we kept driving. Into that limbo-light. Into that slow whine of failing machinery and half-seen warnings. Into a night that refused to fall, and a silence that kept growing teeth.

As the sky began to dim—a slow burn from the pale white of afternoon to soft orange, then deeper amber, and finally to the indigo that preceded true darkness—we started to see more stars than landmarks. It happened gradually, but there was no mistaking it: the horizon melted into silhouette, and the heavens opened like some vast, unknowable archive. Stars blinked into being, shy at first, then in clusters, bold and innumerable. The familiar dome of day peeled away, replaced by a vastness that felt less like sky and more like exposure. As if the world above had been turned inside out.

The air turned colder, sharper, taking on the chill edge of desert night. It slid under my jumper and pressed against my ribs, found its way into the fabric of my sleeves and settled there, quiet and biting. Our breath began to fog the inside of the windows—thin smudges of condensation that formed with each exhale and vanished as quickly, like thoughts half-spoken and immediately retracted.

Rose-coloured light clung to the dust behind us, turning it into smoke, or something like it—a burnished trail that might have been beautiful in another context. But there was something unnatural about it. Too neat, too artful, like a scene from one of the films we used to watch before everything changed. It reminded me of stories where people disappeared—not all at once, but gradually, their surroundings hollowing out until they were the only thing left, suspended in unreality.

Mack had stopped talking hours ago. His earlier efforts—checking the map, suggesting stops, offering calculations about fuel or distance—had given way to a silence that felt more like retreat than rest. He sat hunched with his arms folded, eyes on the window but not focused, his reflection hovering faintly in the glass. The fading light made him look pale, almost transparent, like a version of himself that existed slightly out of sync with the rest of us.

I curled tighter in the backseat, Ribbons cradled against my chest like a soft shield. My legs ached from being folded the same way too long, the muscles in my thighs prickling with pins and needles whenever I shifted. My eyelids kept sliding shut, pulled down by the weight of exhaustion, but every bump in the road snapped them open again, jolting me into half-awareness just long enough to feel more tired.

Then Mum pulled over.

Not in front of a roadhouse or under the yellow glow of any safety light. Just... stopped. A patch of gravel carved roughly out of the surrounding bush, flat and wide enough to be intentional, but only barely. There was a bin, tilted like it was trying to collapse into the scrub. A picnic table slumped nearby, one corner already given up to the earth. A rusted metal sign hung crooked on a leaning post, whatever message it once carried now reduced to a ghost of letters, like someone had tried to forget it on purpose.

The engine idled for a moment, ticking and pinging like a creature trying to cool itself after a long, hard run. The sound was oddly mournful, almost embarrassed, as though even the car knew this wasn’t a good place to stop. Then Mum turned the key and the silence fell—quick and deep, like a curtain coming down mid-scene.

“Here?” Mack asked. His voice cracked slightly at the edges, dust and dryness working their way into everything, even speech.

“We need to stop somewhere,” Mum said, her words tired. “This is fine.”

But the way she said fine—it bent under the weight of everything it was meant to carry. A word stretched thin enough to tear.

“No one’s here,” Mack pointed out. Not accusing, just... noting. Like someone taking an inventory of the facts.

“Exactly,” Mum said, quickly, like that settled the matter. Like emptiness could be counted as safety.

He didn’t respond. Just opened the door and stepped out, slamming it harder than he had to. The sound ricocheted off the low hills and disappeared into the scrub, followed by a soft rustle of disturbed dust curling at his feet.

I stayed where I was for a moment longer, the car suddenly colder without the engine’s faint heat. The dark was deepening fast now, the stars sharpening above us, pinpricks in an endless black cloth. I didn’t want to move. Didn’t want to step out into that quiet, into that loneliness that seemed to thrum just beyond the windows.

But I knew I would.

Eventually.

I climbed out slower, my legs protesting with every movement after hours of being folded into the car’s cramped backseat. My knees cracked faintly as I stood, and I winced, rubbing at them as though that might coax some warmth back into my joints. The air outside hit me like a slap—sharp and clean and utterly without mercy, slicing through my jumper and into the spaces between layers.

We ate what was left of lunch, if it could be called that. The last of the chips, now just limp fragments and salt at the bottom of the packet. A muesli bar Mack had in his bag, dry and dense, split cleanly down the middle. He offered me my half wordlessly, and I took it the same way, our fingers brushing for a second. The gesture was automatic, practical—but it held something else, too. Eating wasn’t about hunger anymore. It was about keeping our bodies going while our minds tried not to fall apart.

Mum didn’t eat. She hadn’t touched anything since the roadhouse. She stood on the driver’s side of the car with her arms crossed tightly across her chest, her shadow long and thin under the stars. Her posture looked casual at first glance—just a woman taking a break from driving—but her shoulders were too stiff, her head turning too quickly, too often, scanning the scrub as though it might reveal something. Her whole body was a warning system. Tense. Coiled.

“Should we call someone?” Mack asked after a while. His voice was quiet, as if he didn’t want to break the fragile stillness completely. “I know you said no signal, but... I dunno. It’s been days. They might be worried.”

“No signal,” Mum replied. She didn’t even glance at him. Didn’t reach for her phone. Just stood there, jaw tight, her eyes fixed on some horizon only she could see.

Down the gravel track, half-hidden behind a clump of mallee scrub, was a metal toilet block. Its shape was brutal and featureless, like a shipping container someone had drilled a door into. A flickering fluorescent tube buzzed over the entrance, casting stuttering light that moved more like a heartbeat than anything mechanical. It reminded me of the roadhouse—another place meant to serve people that now barely remembered how.

Mack said, “Come on. Might as well brush our teeth,” and I nodded because that was what you did—clung to rituals, no matter how hollow they felt.

Inside, the walls were lined with corrugated steel, and the floor was cracked concrete mottled with age and misuse. The air was thick with the ghost of bleach and something more organic. I tried not to breathe too deeply. The soap dispenser was shattered, rust streaking down like tear tracks beneath its empty mount. The tap sputtered when we pressed it, then released a steady stream of too-cold water that ran longer than it needed to, gurgling into the cracked sink as though unsure how to stop.

We didn’t talk. Just stood side by side, going through the motions like actors in a play with no audience.

Outside, the silence was absolute.

Not peaceful. Not restful. Just vast.

The kind of silence that pressed in on you, not with menace but with indifference. Like the land didn’t care if we were there or not. Like we were ghosts already.

When we returned to the car, Mum was already curled in the front seat, twisted awkwardly beneath her coat as if her body no longer knew how to arrange itself for comfort. One hand pressed against her temple, the other wrapped tightly around her middle like she was trying to hold herself in, as if something inside might spill out if she let go. Her eyes were shut, but the tension in her brow, the sharp line of her jaw, said she wasn’t truly resting.

“We’ll keep going first thing,” she murmured, barely audible. The words hovered in the cold air between us like breath that didn’t quite dissipate. “Just need to rest for a few hours.”

It didn’t sound like a plan. It sounded like a hope she no longer trusted.

Mack climbed into the back beside me, and the car gave a low groan as the suspension shifted under his weight. The vinyl was cold and stiff, crackling faintly with every movement. We didn’t speak. We didn’t adjust our positions. There was no point in trying to make it comfortable—we’d passed that threshold hours ago.

We just sat there, knees drawn up, shoulders hunched. Mack pulled his coat over both our laps, and I tucked mine around my arms, wrapping myself into as small a shape as possible. Ribbons sat between us like a guard, her faded fabric limp from age and use, but her stitched mouth still fixed in that stubborn little smile. Her eyes caught the starlight that spilled through the windows, glinting just enough to look alive. Almost.

The cold crept in slow and relentless, like it was trying to trick us into thinking we could resist it. It leaked through the seals in the door frames, radiated up from the floor, and wrapped itself around us in layers of discomfort. My teeth began to chatter in slow, irregular bursts, and I bit the inside of my cheek to stop the noise.

Outside, the road behind us had vanished into a kind of void—just gravel and darkness and nothing else. A few reflectors still caught the starlight now and then, small glints like breadcrumbs marking a trail back to nowhere. The stars themselves pressed down, heavy and disinterested, a million cold witnesses to our small, flickering presence.

I pressed my forehead against the window, its surface misted slightly from breath. The glass was cold and slick against my skin, grounding in a strange way. And for the first time since we’d left home—or what had once been home—I wondered what would happen if we simply didn’t find Brisbane at all.

If we kept driving. Past maps. Past names. Past reason.

What if all the roads Mum was chasing were just shapes she’d imagined, her mind drawing lines across the country that didn’t lead anywhere real? What if we were already off the edge, the bit of the map where the colours fade and the words stop, and the only things that remain are scrubland, ghosts, and the long low drone of engine noise echoing into forever?

I pictured us becoming one of those families—those families—the kind people whispered about, whose photos ended up in newspaper clippings, faces reduced to smudges under bold headlines, our story becoming a warning or a mystery depending on who was telling it. A curiosity pinned to a corkboard in another roadhouse, years from now, the paper gone soft at the edges and curling with age.

But strangely, the thought didn’t frighten me. Not the way it should have. It felt… still. Like drifting. Like the kind of disappearing that took time and gentleness and didn’t necessarily hurt. Just the world wearing you down until there was nothing left to fight with. Until you became part of the landscape. Quiet and unremarkable.

Mack shifted beside me. The car creaked again. And still, Mum said nothing.

The wind picked up then—only slightly, but enough to rock the car on its tyres with the slow rhythm of breath. It might have been soothing, somewhere else. In a driveway. Outside a motel with walls and a kettle and a heater that worked. But here, it only reminded me how thin the boundary was between us and the open dark. A sheet of metal, a pane of glass. That was all. That was it.

I pulled Ribbons close, tucked her under my chin like a promise, and closed my eyes—not because I thought I’d sleep, but because it was easier than looking at the sky. Easier than seeing how vast and indifferent the world had become. And in the darkness behind my lids, I let myself imagine Brisbane. Not as a place anymore, but as a feeling—warmth, familiarity, something final. Something safe.

Somewhere we might stop running.