The Island(2)
To her left the last hint of early-morning mist was evaporating in the sunlight. The air was expectant with the coming heat. It was going to be a scorcher. Easily over one hundred and ten degrees.
It was, she remembered, February 14. Funny how the seasons were reversed like that. Back home it would be in the forties or even colder.
Valentine’s Day.
Exactly twelve months ago Tom had come in for his first massage-therapy appointment in the clinic in West Seattle. It had been snowing. When he’d lain down on the table, he still had snowflakes in his hair.
What a difference a year made.
She’d been childless then, on the verge of unemployment, living in that damp apartment near Alki Beach. Now she was married and responsible for two children and about to kill a man she barely knew on a different beach on the far side of the world.
She took three more careful steps and raised the machete.
1
The sign said ALICE SPRINGS 25, TENNANT CREEK 531, DARWIN 1,517.
She took that in for a second or two.
If they somehow missed Alice they would have to go another five hundred kilometers (over three hundred miles) before they could get food, water, or gas. She looked through the windows on either side of the empty highway and saw exactly nothing. The radio had been drifting in and out for the past twenty minutes but the signal, perhaps, was getting a little stronger. She could make out John Lennon singing about “old flat-top” who was “groovin’ up slowly.”
She could identify pretty much every Beatles song from just one or two bars or a snatch of lyrics. Her parents and almost everyone else on Goose Island had worshipped John Lennon, and with only intermittent TV and internet reception, music had been even more important. The song ended and a DJ began his patter. “That was ‘Come Together,’ the opening track of Abbey Road. And before that we had ‘Hey Jude.’ Can anyone tell me what album ‘Hey Jude’ was on?”
The DJ paused for his listeners to reply.
“It wasn’t on any album, it was a seven-inch single,” Heather whispered.
“Nah, don’t call in. This isn’t a competition. It’s a trick question. ‘Hey Jude’ never got released on any of the original Beatles albums, just the compilations. Well, mates, I hope you enjoyed the balmy weather at midnight where we just hit the low temperature for the day—thirty-six degrees centigrade, which for you oldsters is ninety-six point eight degrees Fahrenheit.”
Tom groaned in his sleep and she lowered the volume. He had a busy morning ahead, and every second of sleep he could get now would help him. She turned to look at the kids. They too were asleep. Although Owen had been on his phone until about a half an hour ago, hoping against hope that a Wi-Fi signal would materialize out of the desert. Olivia had conked out long before that. Heather checked that both their seat belts were still securely fastened and turned her attention back to the empty road.
She drove on.
Rattling transmission. Moths in the headlights. The drumming of the Toyota’s wheels on the blacktop.
She reflected that the Mad Max movies had been skillfully edited to erase the actual tedium of driving through outback Australia. The landscape from Uluru had all been like this. It made one long for the comparative excitement of the morning traffic jam on the West Seattle Bridge. No other vehicles at all here; just the noise of the Toyota and the radio drifting in and out. There were no people around, but at a roadwork sign she could see big khaki machines covered in dust resting by the cutoff like slumbering mastodons.
She drove on and began to worry that she had taken a wrong turn. There was no sign of a city or an airport. The GPS hadn’t updated in a long time and according to it, she was lost in a vast blank nothingness somewhere in the Northern Territory.
Her uneasiness increased as the road surface got worse. She looked for signs of life ahead or out the side windows.
Nothing.
Damn it, back at the construction site she must have taken the wrong—
A big gray kangaroo suddenly appeared in the headlights.
“Shit!”
She slammed on the brakes, and the Toyota shuddered to a stop with an alarming amount of deceleration. Tom and the kids were flung forward, then pulled back again by their seat belts.
Tom groaned. Olivia whimpered. Owen grunted. But none of them woke.
“Wow,” she said and stared at the kangaroo. It was still standing there, five feet in front of the car. Another second and they would have had a serious accident. Her hands were shaking. It was hard to breathe. She needed some air. She put the Toyota in park and, leaving the lights on, turned off the engine. She opened the door and got out. The night was warm.
“Scoot,” she said to the big kangaroo. “I can’t go on if you’re in the middle of the road.”
It didn’t move. “Scoot!” she said and clapped her hands.
It was still staring at the car. How could it not understand the universal language of scoot?
“The headlights might have blinded it. Turn ’em off,” a voice said from the darkness to her right.
Heather jumped and turned to see a man standing a few yards away from her in the desert. On learning that she was going to Australia, Carolyn had warned her about the “world’s deadliest snakes and spiders,” and when that hadn’t worked she sent her a list of movies about hitchhikers murdered in the bush by maniacs. “It’s an entire genre, Heather! It must be based on reality,” Carolyn said.