The Island(58)

She followed its gaze and saw movement by the ferry terminal. She watched for a while and saw vehicles on the far shore.

She heard the sound of motorcycles and that distinctive Toyota Hilux engine.

She leaned against the tree and waited.

Eventually she heard the ferry’s big diesel engines kick in and she watched the vessel churn up a wake. There was a pickup truck on it and some kind of cage in the back of the pickup.

The dogs were coming.

She ran back to the beach. The kids were already awake. Petra was pointing at the water. “The ferry is coming back,” Petra said.

Heather nodded. “They are going to be hunting us with dogs today. We’ve got to move. We’ve got to keep one step ahead of them.”

“Where will we go?” Olivia asked.

“As far away from here as we can get. Our scent is all over this beach.”

They watched the ferry cross the water. They could hear a couple of the dogs barking excitedly. She was angry at herself. The trail from the prison would take them directly here. She should have thought of that last night, tried a diversion or a— “We should go,” Petra said.

And it was on. Olivia, Owen, and Petra got to their feet and brushed themselves off. Olivia knocked sand out of her sneakers. Owen tightened the belt on his shorts.

South was the ferry terminal, east was the heath, west was the water—their business now was north.

North along the beach.

Through the rock pools.

Through the mangrove bushes, mosquitoes, flies, land crabs. The kelp was stinking; the day was hot and it had only just begun.

The tide was out, exposing those friendly rocks from yesterday. They’d be seen easily if they tried that trick again. The rocks wouldn’t save them today.

Heather could hear another motorcycle and an ATV. At least two cars. A lot of people. Three or four dogs.

She didn’t know if they were doing that line thing again, but they weren’t fooling around today.

“What’s the water situation?” she asked Petra as they waded around a large clump of trees that was blocking the beach.

Petra looked in the bag. “One and a half bottles.”

“That’s it?”

“Yes.”

Heather nodded.

“We will save them for the children,” Petra said.

“Yes,” Heather agreed.

Up the beach.

Through the flies.

In the sun.

In the red Southern Hemisphere sun.

Sunburn on sunburn.

Up the beach.

Running.

Moving.

Wading.

Swimming.

Resting.

Moving again.

North along the curvy shore.

No geographer or Google Earther knew this bit of shore as well as them. The rocks, the little bushes, the tide pools, the dried-up river estuaries. The bays that curved in, the headlands that jutted out. The swamp, the drowned mangrove trees, each gully, each rock, each— “Look! Over there—what’s that in the sand?” Owen said.

“What do you see?” Heather asked.

“It’s something. What is that?” he said, running to a bit of the beach she couldn’t see. He picked up the object and showed it to her. “What do you think? This will come in handy, yeah?”

He gave it to her. It was a knife. A big knife. No—a machete, with a cracked wooden handle and a rusted blade about nine inches long.

“Yes, well done, Owen, this will help.”

She balanced it in her left hand and then her right. It was a rusty old thing that looked like it had been lying on the beach for a hundred years.

At least I’ll go down swinging, Heather thought. “Let’s take a water break,” she said. She handed their penultimate bottle to Owen and Olivia. “Ration it, just one sip each,” she said.

After that, she held it out to Petra, who shook her head.

The ferry had landed. They could hear the dogs and the motorcycles but it was hard to tell where exactly they were. Olivia climbed a tree to look.

“They have motorbikes and a horse and cars. It’s all of them. There are two groups. They seem to know that we were over there on the beach. They’re coming from there.” She pointed.

“The north?” Heather asked, alarmed.

“Yes. And up from the ferry dock.”

“From the south too?”

“If that’s the south, yes.”

“How far away are they?” Heather asked.

“I don’t know. Not far.”

The dogs must have tracked her scent from the prison. And that made sense because they had spent the night not too far from the dock or where they had picked up Hans. The O’Neills would figure out that, realistically, they couldn’t have traveled very far in the heat.

“They must have realized now that they just missed us yesterday,” Petra said.

“They’ll find us today. They’ll make sure. They’ll search this whole beach until they find us,” Heather said.

Petra shook her head and smiled. “Not necessarily,” she said.

“There are no rocks to hide behind today, and we can’t—”

“Do you see that gully ahead of us? It is a dried-up river. It must have dried up a long time ago.”

Heather looked where Petra was pointing. It was what on Goose Island they called a hollow way—a portion of land, an old pathway or a river, that was lower than the rest of the terrain. “What about it?”