The kids wait, impatiently, for it to get dark and then they head to Kevin’s house, which is much the same as the first two, except one pet dog had food within reach and is in (mostly) good condition.

Guys, don’t tell me this dog dies, too. Even if it does, don’t tell me. It’s a corgi. DON’T TELL ME!

Corrie’s house is next, also empty, but Ellie notices something on their…fax machine? Which is just…out in the hallway? I’ll admit, I don’t remember 1993 all that well, were home fax machines more common? Anyway, the fax is from her dad, sent from the county fair’s admin office, and it tells her to “go bush.” Which…doesn’t change any of their plans at all, because they’re still headed further into town to Robyn’s house, and it doesn’t give them any more information than what they’ve already worked out. …thanks, Dad?

Robyn’s house is at the outskirts of town, so after that they go to a spot where they can overlook everything. The town is dark, but the floodlights are on at the showgrounds. By unspoken agreement, they decide to continue on to Fi and Lee’s houses because damnit it’s just not fair that the other kids got to have some visual definitive answers but deny these two.

Homer, the surprise logical one of the group (unless you’re an Animorphs fan and then it’s just “oh look, it’s Marco”)(those books are contemporary, was ‘class clown that gets super rational in a crisis’ like, a character trope then? I’m having trouble with recent examples…) Anyway, Homer points out that it’s best for them to split up because small groups can sneak better and also two or three of them getting captured is better than all of them getting captured. It’s uncomfortable math, but it’s still true.

Ellie, Kevin, and Corrie are left out of the house visits, so they head off to check out the show grounds, and they have to walk all across town to get there. It’s…uh…uneventful? There’s no description of the place other than Ellie reminiscing about good times at a neighbor’s house. She even thinks about how some of her neighbors are really stubborn and wouldn’t go down without a fight, and she hopes there wasn’t violence, but she can’t…look around and figure it out? Report back to us a little bit, maybe? Even to confirm clean streets, which I would probably just complain about anyway?

And why is it so quiet, anyway? Where’s ye old invading army at?

The lack of description continues as they sneak up to the show grounds…just…okay, and now you know as much as I do. I mean, I’ve been to a small town county fairground before, I can picture that if I have to (and I do, in the absence of anything else) but it’s still quite a fail. How close are the nearest houses? How big is the fairground? What’s it sound like? There have to be sounds. Smells? There’s three guards walking a perimeter check after they show up, but…seriously, no other movement?

There’s a god damned army and an entire town’s worth of prisoners here, and you have nothing to report to us?

I feel like the book wanted some big reveal here, and thus kept things ‘normal’ until proof-positive of army presence, but…come on, we all already know. Even if you didn’t know what the book was about, this is exactly what the kids had figured out already, so it’s not a surprise, so set a better scene.

They finally get a good view of the fairgrounds, and everything’s still all set up for the show, carnival rides included. There’s just a few tents on the racetrack, too, and later they see someone they know coming out of a tent and heading to the porta-johns, so presumably that’s where the townspeople are being held.

I have so…so many questions.

1) Why is everyone still here? From all accounts, Wirrawee is a tiny podunk farming/ranching community with a tiny population. There’s no reason to keep these prisoners here instead of moving them to a larger town. It’s a waste of manpower. Unless this is some centralized prisoner gathering place for several other small towns all rolled into one, just…go. You don’t need this tiny town, Bad Army. At least I don’t think. Why would Wirrawee be strategic as a podunk tiny town?

2) Why leave all that carnival stuff up? I feel like, if for some reason Wirrawee is worthy of continued presence, they should at least be in the process of tearing down. Fair carnivals are a freaking maze, and that’s a lot of hiding places for miscreant prisoners, or even just to confuse the Bad Army guys and slow down operations. At least move the food carts out of the way.

3) Where are the animals? Fairs are traditionally for showing off agricultural animals, and Ellie mentions her family taking sheep every year. Is Bad Army taking care of them? Did they all get slaughtered in the barns? Shouldn’t that stink enough for Ellie to have smelled it even from outside the fence?

4) No, really, why Wirrawee? They’ve got, what, a couple thousand people, maybe? (Judging from the fact that Ellie + friends plan to walk all the way across it and back in less than 90 minutes.) What kind of army has enough manpower that they’re able to send in forced to take over + establish prisons + maintain prisons in every tiny town? That’s not an army, that’s a literal whole country pulling up stakes and heading to Australia.

5) I mean, I’m sure if Wirrawee was militarily special then Ellie wouldn’t have told us, because she’s a teen and doesn’t care/notice, so I’m open to being proven wrong later, but there is no reason for anyone to invade this place. I mean, you take the biggest population centers, the government seat, key military locations…and what’s Wirrawee going to do about it? Threaten to bite your kneecaps? There is no reason given so far for Wirrawee to warrant a spot on the Bad Army Invasion Checklist.

6) Since we have to deal with the fact that Bad Army has decided to take over Wirrawee for reasons yet unknown, where are they? Even assuming this is some small contingent only there to guard people who couldn’t do anything about the invasion anyway (“I’ll bit your kneecaps!”), that’s still manpower that needs…you know, administration, barracks, logistical support. I’d expect to see them in town, but town’s had power cut off for some unfathomable reason. Are all the off-duty guards just twiddling their thumbs on the ferris wheel?

7) Also, they’ve had to fee an entire town’s worth of people for a little less than a week now, and they aren’t looting the houses??????? All that food, spoiling in refrigerators with no power, gathering dust in pantries, probably rotting in grocery stores and gardens too. Why aren’t there teams of people going through houses getting supplies? An army travels on its stomach, and Bad Army must have come in light to be so fast so they aren’t bringing their food supplies with them.

8) Frankly, once we start talking supplies, keeping them on the fairgrounds makes no sense. Let them go home and make them feed themselves! Yeah, it’s harder to keep people from slipping out into the bush, but…so? What are those people going to do, bite your kneecaps? (Yeah, I know, I can’t let go of that line, but COME ON, WHAT ARE THEY GOING TO DO?) (I mean, it’s fiction, so they’re going to save the day, but in real life? Nope.) You cut communications and patrol the roads, and most of the population will stay put because they’re scared and that’s where the food is.

Okay, that’s all for now, but I suspect I’ll be asking “why Wirrawee?????” a lot. Also, people who write armies, seriously don’t forget about your food. Whole battles and wars have literally been lost on the basis of supplies.

The kids get spotted and shot at, so they run off and accidentally get stuck in someone’s backyard without a rear gate to exit through. They decide to McGyver up a boobie trap with a riding lawnmower.

“We need to make sure they’re all together.”

I nodded. I’d just realized the same problem. I could see two dark figures but I assumed we were being hunted down by the three patroling sentries we’d seen before.

Ellie can assume that, but the real problem is she’s right. Bad Army guys should have sent two after the kids and one to get backup/keep patrolling. (Well, really, there should have been four on patrol. Two to check things out and two to stay back.) (Okay, to be really technical, they shouldn’t have followed an unknown number of targets into a dark house in the first place, get a QRF team out there. But hey, maybe they don’t have a QRF team because all their manpower is tied up in rounding up the citizens of every podunk ranching town.)

They ‘lay a trail’ of gas from their hiding place to the gas tank, which can’t work because how would you bridge the gap between the ground and the bottom of the mower? And also I’m pretty sure you couldn’t get a reliably steady trail just by dribbling it on the ground anyway. But you can see where this is going. Ellie lights the trail of gas, and it runs back to the mower and explodes. Except, even if you could get a trail, the gas tank has an opening. The lid is off. You throw a match in there, and it’s just going to burn. Explosions need pressure, and there is none with the lid off. Flames might shoot out the tank, IDK my experience here is pretty limited, but I do know it wouldn’t explode. (“What experience do you have in lighting gas tanks on fire?” you say. Well. Nothing, but there was one interesting experience with lighter fluid… Also, like, the masses of people who have debunked this online.)

Honestly, though, it didn’t have to be an explosion to work. They only needed a distraction. They could have put some kind of wick (Kevin’s shirt?) in the tank and lit one end and ran like hell and had a little moltov cocktail situation. It would have flared up and made a lot of smoke, which would have gotten the attention of the guards and maybe even caused a bit of panic, because no one likes being close to gasoline on fire even if it doesn’t explode. (Or, forget the mower at all, just spread gas around and light a big fire.)

But, it’s fiction, so the mower explodes and the soldiers get injured and the kids get away. They meet up with Fi and Homer, but Lee and Robyn aren’t back by the appointed time so they have to leave them behind. Dun dun dun. (The plan before they split was to come back the next night and hope whoever went missing could lay low until then. We’ll have to wait to next time to see if that works.)