He supposed that if it did bite Olivia, that would be his fault too.
Owen went back behind his wall and built it a little higher.
39
If there’s one thing the Dutch know about, it’s water.
Hans had understood that the O’Neill farm was built over a sandstone aquifer. There were no rivers or lakes on Dutch Island, nowhere for rainwater to go but back into the ocean or down into those layers between the rocks. The O’Neills had been drawing water from the aquifer for decades, and the well had had to be drilled deeper, as the original water was not replenished. The actual wellhead itself was no longer necessary, as the water was pumped to a cistern, but they’d kept it.
Hans had seen all of this and knew it was a mistake.
Heather checked that the coast was clear. As the ants continued to bite, she pulled Hans by his feet to the well thirty feet away at the north of the compound. She dragged him slowly and carefully for fear of the dogs hearing or taking an interest. A few curious barks were all she heard. The dogs perhaps knew something was up but they weren’t overly concerned about it yet.
The well was covered with an iron grating to keep out birds and possums. She set down Hans and lifted the grating. It wasn’t heavy and she laid it carefully in the dirt. She felt another big raindrop on her neck.
There was a rope and a bucket hanging above the wellhead for anyone who wanted to drink water the old-fashioned way.
The knot was a double granny—nothing shipshape or finessed—and she had it untied in a minute. Her dad had taught her half a dozen knots he’d learned in the military. A bowline would do the job here. It was an easy one to do in the dark. You make a six, the rabbit comes out of the hole, runs behind the tree, and goes back down into the hole.
She looped the rope around Hans’s feet and hoisted him up onto the edge of the well. Using the side of the well as a partial lever, she lowered him down. Her shoulders were straining and she was sweating, but this improvised pulley was dividing the weight in half by mechanics, which, she thought, was a branch of physics. Take that, Owen.
She lowered and lowered until the pressure began to ease and she knew he was floating in the well water. She let go of the rope and dropped it down into the well after him. Hans had wounds all over his body, and the longer his body floated in the well, the better chance it had to contaminate the O’Neills’ water supply.
Another thought occurred to her.
The farm’s generator was also upwind of the dogs.
Hmmm.
She crawled to the generator on the edge of the compound. It was a big beast, more than enough for the farm and the outlying houses. An 800 kW Caterpillar diesel. The fuel supply would be nearby.
Yup. The diesel was stored in two big plastic drums. They were far too heavy to tip over, and the plastic covering was weathered but thick and designed to resist the attentions of vermin. A determined woman with a knife might take all night to make a dent.
She walked around the drums looking for a safety-release valve or anything like that, and sure enough, someone had connected a faucet to one of the drums for filling up portable diesel cans. She gave the tap two hard turns, and the diesel began to pour out onto the dirt. The night was still warm and some of the diesel began to evaporate. It was hard to ignite diesel in its liquid form, but diesel vapor was very flammable. She should have brought the cigarette lighter with her. Would a bullet do the trick? She would have to see. The gasoline was stored next to the diesel in a similar drum. She turned the valve and let the gasoline pour out too.
No diesel to make electricity meant no way to recharge the drone.
No gasoline meant no ATV or motorcycle or pickups when their tanks ran dry.
She knew that so far, she had been very lucky. This was not the place to push that luck.
She disappeared back into the grass and worked her way around to the north of the compound.
It began to rain in big, slow drops.
The dogs were chained just under the front porch veranda. Three of them. Not bloodhounds exactly, but there was definitely hound in them. They were exhausted, lying there under the porch light, looking up occasionally as mozzies flew into the bug zapper, whining as the rain got heavier and colder. They were good dogs. They’d had an enjoyable final day on planet Earth.
She lay down in the dirt and got comfortable.
She took the rifle off her back.
Her father had grown up hunting possums and squirrels in the red maple and dogwoods of McCreary County, Kentucky, right on the Tennessee line. Heather was her dad’s only child, so he had wanted to show her the gun lore that his dad had shown him. Although she had never really been that interested, she couldn’t help but absorb a lot of it. And of course, now it came back. It had been coming back for days.
Always upwind. Always low. Always quiet.
Once inducted into the brotherhood of the gun, you could not forget. She made a little mound of dirt under the barrel just the way her dad had taught her to do it. She firmed the mound and made sure the barrel was horizontal.
It was.
She got comfortable and analyzed her target.
A west-to-east breeze, but not enough to make a difference over this distance, which was about one hundred yards. Maybe a little more; maybe four hundred feet. She looked through the binoculars and figured out where each of the dogs was lying. She flipped up the Lee-Enfield’s iron sight and flipped it back down again. A long-range sight was not necessary.
There was something glinting in her sight line five yards ahead to her left. She tried to ignore it but couldn’t. She laid down the rifle and crawled to the glinting object with the intention of covering it with dirt, but when she reached the spot, she found that it was a half-buried, ancient, unopened can of peaches. She put it in her bag and went back to her position.
She picked up the rifle and waited until she was still and the sight was motionless.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered and took aim at the dog with the white patch on its brown face. The obvious alpha. She aimed at its heavy flank. It was sleeping. She squeezed the trigger and the rifle cracked and kicked, and the dog rolled over in the dust. So much dust. The second dog stood up and began to bark. She pulled back the bolt, and the brass cartridge exited with a chiiing. She loaded the next .303 round and aimed through the dust at the second dog, which had a pleasing dingo quality to its face. She shot it dead through the neck.
She ejected the casing and loaded another .303 round.
All the house lights had come on now, and windows were opening.
She tried to get a bead on the third dog but the dust was rising in thick orange columns into the darkness, like a Hubble photograph of star-birth clouds.
A head appeared at a window on a lower floor. It looked like Ivan’s. He was yelling at someone in the farmyard.