He stood there groaning and then with an almighty roar he managed to pry apart the mechanism.
“Shit!” he yelled and stepped out of the trap.
Blood was pouring from his ankle.
Heather hadn’t stopped to look at him. She was crawling for the rifle.
“No, you don’t!” Matt said and lunged at her.
The bluffing and the pleading and the reasoning were over. The game was different now. Now it was the oldest game ever invented.
Kill or be killed.
She punched him in the kidneys. He winced and headbutted her in the nose and broke it. The headbutt was almost as painful as the .22 bullet.
Blood poured into her mouth.
Matt was on top of her. He put his big meaty paws around her throat and squeezed. He was squeezing from the wrists. That was good, she thought, her massage-therapist brain kicking in inappropriately; he could kill her without straining his back. The kids were moving in fearlessly. They were going to try to attack Matt with their bare hands. They were too far away to help. Run, just run! she wanted to say. But they weren’t runners anymore.
“Should have done this on day one,” Matt snarled as he choked her.
The world tunneled.
She couldn’t breathe.
Couldn’t think.
How could she have thought water was so important when the only thing important was air?
The last thing she would ever see was Matt’s furious red face.
Even that was fading.
Dissolving into whiteness.
Grayness.
Nothingness.
But there was one hope.
She had to remember that she was the messenger.
The messenger with the meteor iron.
Yes.
Yes…
Do you hear it, Matt?
The message cometh.
Matt screamed as Heather stabbed the penknife into his thigh.
She kicked him off and crawled to where the .22 rifle had come to rest.
It wasn’t there.
Where?
Where on…
Owen was pointing it at Matt’s head.
Matt was crawling toward her.
“That’s enough,” Owen said.
“You think you know how to use that thing?” Matt grunted.
“Heather showed us.”
“We know exactly what to do,” Olivia said, pointing the Lee-Enfield at him.
There was no way for Matt to know that the Enfield was empty and that Owen had probably not loaded another round in the .22.
Matt looked at the rifles and put his hands in the air. “Relax, kiddies. I’m not bloody going anywhere. How can I? She stabbed me, and look at me ankle,” he said.
“If he so much as farts in my direction, shoot him the way I showed you. I’m getting my damn penknife back.”
Heather pulled the knife out of the meaty part of Matt’s thigh and put it in her pocket. His ankle was a bloody mess and his thigh wound was surprisingly deep, but he would live.
She examined the wound in her shoulder. It hurt like hell but it was a small-caliber round and she wasn’t bleeding badly—she would live too.
“What are you going to do now, kill me?” Matt asked.
“Well, Matt,” Heather replied, “you’ve found our hiding place, so I guess the smart thing to do would be to kill you. But that would be murder. And that’s not our style. We’re going to get a vehicle and get off Dutch Island and then we’re going to call the cops.”
“And then we’re going to leave you a really horrible rating on Tripadvisor,” Owen said.
49
They tied his hands behind his back with his belt and shoved him in the cave mouth. They took his .22 rifle and made their way to the farm.
They crawled through the grass until they were five hundred yards out.
Olivia and Owen’s plan had been to do this at night. But they could do it during the day’s low tide too. It would just be more dangerous.
They would need a distraction.
The wind was blowing steadily from the west.
Heather pulled up ten little bundles of the kangaroo grass and spaced them each a yard apart. She took out Jacko’s lighter and set fire to every mound. The conditions were perfect. New growth after the rain; dry fuel; steady wind.
The fire caught fast and ran east the way it was supposed to do.
Fire wasn’t scary. If you stood on the windward side of the fire, you could watch it work.
For two thousand generations the Indigenous people had used fire as a tool for managing this terrain. Fire became an enemy only if you couldn’t move.
If, for example, you had to defend a house.
“Come on, kids,” Heather said and they cut south up a small hill.
It was only an hour past dawn and the sun was low in the sky but there was plenty of light for them to see the fire tear through the undergrowth toward the O’Neill farmstead.
Someone started yelling, and men and women and children began heading to the west of the compound. They must have had an emergency generator stored away somewhere because a firehose was produced and it started pumping water from the well.
She wasn’t too disappointed by that. It would give them something to do other than just abandon ship.
“Let’s move,” she said.
They kept low until they were a few hundred yards away and then they got on their bellies and crawled.
They had become good at this.
They crawled to within fifty feet of the farmyard.
Are you sure this is going to work, kids? Heather was tempted to ask but did not. What choice did they have?
They made it to the farmyard and hid behind the big barn. Everyone was out fighting the fire. And there were no dogs sounding the alarm.
“What do we do if it’s locked?” Owen asked.
Heather bit her lip. No other car would do. It had to be the hideous Porsche Cayenne with its big, ugly-beautiful snorkel.
She tried the handle.
The door opened. This particular vehicle had a key and a push-button start. It was a Wi-Fi proximity key. As long as the key was somewhere in the car, all you needed to do was put your foot on the brake and press the start button.
The kids climbed inside. She put her foot on the brake and pressed the start button.
Nothing happened. She pressed it again. Nothing. A third time—nothing. She searched the car but there was no sign of the key.
“The key must be inside the house. Wait here, stay low, keep the doors closed, I’ll be back in a second,” Heather said. She handed Olivia Matt’s .22 rifle. “I think there’s two rounds left in this thing. Stay in the car. If anyone tries to drag you out, shoot them.”
Olivia nodded. “I will,” she said.
Heather closed the driver’s-side door and took the empty Lee-Enfield rifle and ran to the house. Everyone was outside attending to the fire. Where would they keep a key? She looked for hooks on the wall or a little dish by the front door. Nothing like that. If she didn’t find that key, they were lost. You couldn’t hot-wire a modern car the way you could an older model. The proximity key needed to be in the goddamn car.
She remembered the stairs up to Ma’s room.
She took them three at a time.
At the top of the steps there was a very long hall with half a dozen doors.
“Shit.”
The first door she opened was a man’s bedroom with a pair of jeans lying on the floor.
The second room was a bathroom.
She was running out of time.
“What are you looking for?” a voice said.