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Intro
Teenaged friends Corrie and Ellie want to go on a five-day camping trip to “Hell”—the ultra-remote wilderness near their rural Australian town. After finally convincing their parents to let them go, they embark on the trip, along with their friends Homer, Lee, Kevin, Robyn, and Fiona. They will miss the Commemoration Day Show, an annual livestock festival in town, but none of them mind too much, since all Commemoration Day Shows are the same.
After a few days in Hell, strange things begin to happen. One night, Ellie wakes to several jets flying overhead, and the next morning, Robyn says that she saw hundreds of planes during the night. They begin to think that their secret camping spot isn’t so secret after all.
When the friends get back to Ellie’s house, they’re shocked to find that her dogs are dead outside, and her parents are nowhere to be found. The power is also out and the phone lines are down. The group quickly goes to Homer’s house and finds it in much the same condition: completely empty but completely untouched. It’s like everyone left to go to the Commemoration Day Show and never came back. Ellie suddenly remembers the planes they heard flying overhead in Hell—and the fact that the planes didn’t have lights, which means that they were intentionally flying into town under the cover of darkness. The friends decide that the only logical explanation is that their town has been invaded and war is afoot.
The friends check on each of their houses. At Corrie’s house, they find a fax sitting in the fax machine, which her dad must have sent before the power and phone lines went out. In the message, he explains that he doesn’t know what’s going on. Some people are saying that it’s all just “Army manoeuvers,” but he urges Corrie to hide out in the wilderness.
After checking on Robyn’s house on the edge of town, the friends decide to split up and set a time to meet back up later. Fiona and Homer will check on Fiona’s house, while Robyn and Lee will go to Lee’s parent’s place. Meanwhile, Ellie, Corrie, and Kevin go to the Showground—the only part of the town that’s not plunged in darkness—and quickly realize that all of the town’s residents are being held there.
When shots ring out, Ellie realizes that she, Corrie, and Kevin are the target. But as the friends run away—with soldiers in hot pursuit—Corrie trips over a lawnmower and injures herself. Thinking quickly, Ellie and Kevin light the lawnmower on fire; it blows up just as the soldiers are closing in on them. Ellie can’t believe that she has probably just killed three people, but Homer tells her she didn’t have a choice. This is war, he says, and “normal rules don’t apply.”
The group (minus Robyn and Lee) pause to rest at Corrie’s house. But when a helicopter circles the house, the friends hurry to a nearby shed, worried that they are being hunted by the invading army. Suddenly, a jet appears and fires two rockets at Corrie’s house. One is a direct hit, exploding the house on contact, and the other hits the steep hillside behind the shed where they are hiding—they don’t know if the second rocket was aimed at the shed or not. Homer suggests that he and Ellie go into to town at dark and look for Robyn and Lee, while the others prepare to evade the enemy army by escaping back into Hell.
After sunset, Ellie and Homer find Robyn hiding in her house with her dad’s rifle, and she tells them that Lee has been shot. He’s alive, but he’s at his parents’ place where patrol is heavy, and he can’t walk. After hatching a plan, they steal a bulldozer from the local garage and proceed to rescue Lee, who’s in rough shape. Along the way, Ellie runs over an enemy Jeep and knows that she’s just killed even more people. Homer’s friend Chris joins the group, and they head for Hell.
As the group camps out in the wilderness, they learn from a radio broadcast that the war is aimed at “reducing imbalances within the region.” Robyn explains that the war is about equality: many surrounding countries are poor, but Australia does nothing to help. She doesn’t agree with the war, but she can understand it. It is possible to be both right and wrong, Robyn says, but she thinks both sides are wrong in this case.
In the midst of all the chaos, Ellie grapples with her romantic feelings for both Lee and Homer. She likes Lee because he’s smart and intriguing, but Homer is handsome, and she loves his new take-charge attitude. Homer likes Fiona, though, which complicates things.
One day, Ellie stumbles upon a hut, which she realizes belonged to the Hermit—the notorious murderer who was rumored to have lived in Hell. She brings Lee back with her to investigate. They uncover a coroner’s report, which claims that the Hermit’s wife and infant son had been burned in a fire and shot in the head. The report says they were either burned in a fire first, and the Hermit shot them to spare their suffering in the absence of medical care, or, he shot them first and then tried to burn them to cover up the evidence. There is no definitive proof either way, but Lee also finds a letter from the Hermit’s mother-in-law, and it expresses her support of him. She says she is glad that the jury found him innocent, even if the judge didn’t. Later, Ellie thinks about Hell and the reasons that the Hermit felt he had to hide here. Hell isn’t a place, she decides, but is instead something people carry with them.
With each passing day, the group gathers more information about the invasion by spying on the enemy soldiers and the Showground. They learn that everyone in the town is being held at the Showground, and the soldiers are treating them humanely. The soldiers are looking to have a “clean invasion” so that they don’t draw the negative attention of the United Nations or the Red Cross. The friends know that they have three choices: they can hide out in Hell and see what happens, they can try to help their parents escape from the Showgrounds, or they can try to fight back against the enemy somehow. They all agree on the latter.
Resolved to fight back against the invaders, the friends decide to blow up a bridge, which is how enemy soldiers and vehicles access the area. Homer and Lee go down to the cattle farm near the bridge and start a stampede to create a diversion, while Ellie and Fiona drive a stolen gasoline tanker under the bridge and set the tanker on fire, dodging bullets all the while. The girls flee the scene, and it’s implied that the tanker explodes, destroying the bridge with it.
The girls meet up with Homer and Lee and head to Ellie’s house in town, where they are surprised to find the others standing over Corrie by the back shed. Corrie has been shot in the back, Kevin says, and they have to take her to the hospital, which is still functioning in town. Homer says they will have to drop Corrie at the hospital and run, but Kevin refuses—Corrie is his girlfriend, and he won’t abandon her. He loads her into the car and drives off, and the rest of the friends return to Hell. Their story isn’t over, Ellie writes, and they don’t know what will happen next. All she knows is that they must stick together so they don’t end up like the Hermit.
