The night was warm. The sea breeze had decided not to come.
Little animals were scuffling about in the undergrowth. She fantasized about catching one and sticking her knife into its belly and drinking its blood.
What she wouldn’t give for a glass of water. Didn’t have to be cold water. Muddy ditchwater would do. Anything. She looked at the sky. Was there any chance of a rain cloud?
No. She could see in every direction all the way into space. There was nothing between her and the vacuum.
She marched on.
On.
She was so light now, she could feel the stars tugging her. The other worlds. The other civilizations.
How easy it was to drift upward.
You just let yourself go.
Go.
Up, up she went on a thermal until she could see all of the island. All of the bay. All of the state of Victoria. The rest of the great sleeping continent.
Higher. Deeper.
Now she could see all of Australia and New Zealand.
That looming presence in the south was Antarctica. So close to all that frozen water.
Farther up she went until she could see all of the Earth spinning on its axis through the darkness. Goose Island had its share of crackpots. She knew at least two people who were flat-earthers. If she ever came back, she would tell them that they were mistaken. She had seen the round Earth rotating herself.
If she ever came back.
So lonely out here.
Lights coming toward her.
The space station?
A UFO.
No. Shit. A car.
Back to Earth like an incoming V-2. She dived off the road and flattened herself in the grass.
A Land Rover speeding along. Music blaring from the vehicle. Music Dopplering in her eardrums.
All we are saying is…
All we are saying…
All…
She buried her face in the grass as the headlights swept across the blackness.
She sat up and watched the taillights barrel down the road.
It was going to the farm but she didn’t care where it was going or what it was doing.
It was gone.
It had fallen into the past with yesterday and Tom and George Washington and Jesus and the painters of Lascaux and the dinosaurs and the dead stars that made the iron and nickel at the center of the Earth.
All gone.
She got to her feet and continued down the road.
In fifteen minutes, the old prison loomed out of the night. She slowed her pace and grew cautious but there was no real reason for caution.
All was dead here.
Rectangular pitch-black buildings. Silhouettes of abandoned farm machinery. She explored the equipment for a few minutes but there was nothing she could break off and use as a weapon.
She got down into a crouch and approached the nearest of the structures.
Most of the prison had been demolished, but a cellblock had been left standing: a long concrete-and-iron-bar building exposed to the elements. That little house on the rise must be the old guardhouse.
There were no lights on anywhere. She walked into the courtyard between the prison and the house and listened.
Nothing. In the far distance, she could hear surf breaking on the shore of the island.
The house was a two-story job with a balcony on the upper floor that went all the way around. She walked to the front door and examined it. A heavy wooden door with a keyhole. She tried the handle and then put her shoulder against it and shoved, but it didn’t move.
Heather took a few steps back and examined the building with a more clinical eye. She shook her head to try to get her brain working better.
Two floors. Brick construction. Corrugated-iron roof. There were large windows on the ground floor with bars over them. She did a circuit of the structure looking for any points of entry but couldn’t see any obvious ones.
Heather tugged at the metal bars covering the windows. Although they appeared rusty and very old, none of them seemed loose. She tried every metal bar on every window on the ground floor and then shoved her shoulder against the door again.
Sighing, she tried to figure out what to do.
There was no guarantee that the house would have water. Maybe this whole thing was a fool’s errand.
She walked back to the old cellblock and looked inside the individual cells. Cobwebs hung from all the doorways and the building stank of urine. Watching out for venomous spiders, she examined each cell for anything she could possibly use.
There was a lot of garbage on the floor but the paper waste was mildewed and fit for nothing. There were a few crushed beer cans with liquid inside. She was so desperate she was tempted to pour the contents into her mouth. She decided that if she couldn’t get into the house, she’d risk being poisoned and do just that so she could have at least some liquid in her system for the journey to the beach.
Back into the courtyard.
The waning sickle moon slipped out from behind a solitary cloud and for a moment she got a really good view of the old guardhouse. There were no bars on the floors of the upper windows. If she could find a way up there to that second floor…
She wondered what time it was. How long she had been away? One hour? Two?
On the north side of the guardhouse there was a narrow veranda with a rocking chair and a wicker chair. The rocking chair was useless, but perhaps she could stand on the wicker chair and climb up one of the columns to the second-floor balcony. From there it would be comparatively easy to get to one of the windows, break it, open it, and enter the guardhouse.
Heather picked up the wicker chair. It was not as light as she’d been expecting and she had some trouble carrying it around to the side of the veranda. She pushed it down hard into the sandy soil and leaned it against the wooden pillar holding up the balcony.
She estimated the distance from the top of the seat to the iron railing on the second floor balcony as about six feet. If she stretched her arms and didn’t fall off the chair and was strong enough, she could pull herself up.
Standing on the seat, she tentatively put one foot on one armrest and then the other foot on the other, and when she was certain that the chair was not going to slip from underneath her, she placed one foot on the back of the— The chair slipped and she tumbled backward into the sand with a mild whump. “Ow,” she said and put her hand over her mouth.
It wasn’t as bad as falling off the tree into the red dirt.