The Island(60)

That will do the trick, poor dead Hans said in her head.

“I think it will,” she replied.

She could hear the dogs. Four of them. Four dog voices. Twenty human voices. Kids with them. What kind of sick people were they to bring their children with them?

She ran on as the gully got narrower and narrower.

Surprisingly, she found that she wasn’t so much scared as sad.

What a waste. All the things she knew. All the stuff about humans and their mores. All her travels. All her languages. She had English, French, Dutch, and German.

All the experiences. Working in the university. That year in Mali. That terrible year where she’d studied the effects of tragedy on nurses in the children’s cancer ward in Amsterdam. Those were the real heroes, the nurses who worked there. She’d written a book about it. It had been translated into German and Danish.

The dogs.

Coming up fast.

Faster than her.

She wasn’t that old. Hans wasn’t that old either.

They’d almost never argued. Not even about having kids. We’ll buy a house and ride our bikes and we’ll travel, Hans said. We’ll see the world. We don’t need kids dragging us down. Too many kids on the planet anyway.

The gully was at an end now. She’d thought it might come to an end in a little spring or a pool of water she could drink from, but there was nothing.

She stopped and looked behind her. Dogs and men coming her way.

Good.

She picked up a flat rock and climbed out of the ditch.

“There they are!” someone yelled.

Here I am. Watch what a retired Dutch woman in her sixties can do.

She ran east. She didn’t look back. She kept running. She was surprised that one of the motorcycles didn’t draw level with her but all the fissures in the ground might be impeding their progress.

It was no problem for her. She jumped the little trenches and ditches and ran up the gentle slopes.

They had let the dogs off the leashes.

She didn’t look back.

The dogs weren’t barking. This was all business now. The motorcycles had ceased their whining.

She was too fast for the flies.

All she could hear was the pounding of her own feet.

The pounding of sixteen doggy legs behind her.

They were getting closer.

Closer.

Paws on dirt.

Big breaths.

Snarling.

One of the dogs leaped at her and bit into her left leg. She fell and tumbled down hard and got up and clubbed the dog in the face with the rock. It collapsed onto its belly. She hit it again in the eye. She hit it a third time, killing it. The other dogs had reached her now. They were bloodhound crosses, simple-looking things. She went for them with the rock and they backed away. They sniffed around their fallen comrade and then looked at her, aghast. This wasn’t part of the game, was it?

She got back on her feet and ran on.

The dogs did not pursue her now.

She began to think of the slim possibility of escape.

And then the world detonated between her shoulders and there was the cracking sound of a single rifle shot.





28



Heather, Olivia, and Owen went along the beach until they were sure the dogs were heading east.

Then, tentatively, they got up onto the heath and ran easier and faster parallel to the shore. They kept close to the sea. They kept low.

They heard a rifle shot and Heather shuddered and they kept going.

They made good progress until they reached a graveyard for rusted old cars and vans. Heather and the children had sprinted into the middle of it before they saw a hand-painted sign that said DANGER: LIVE AND UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE. AND OTHER SCARY SHIT. DO NOT ENTER.

“Stop!” Heather said.

“What does ordnance mean?” Owen asked.

Heather looked around them. She saw now that the cars were riddled with bullet holes and between them there were craters where explosives had been set off. The O’Neills must have used this as a target range. Some of the craters were enormous and some of the cars had been blown apart. There could be unexploded grenades or homemade booby traps or anything.

They were more than halfway through the range; was it better to keep going or retrace their steps?

“Kids, I want you to get behind me and follow in my footsteps. But far back. We’ve walked into some kind of weapons-testing range. Don’t touch anything or pick anything up. Do you understand?”

She turned to look at Olivia. “Get Owen behind you, and you stay far behind me. If I step on something or something happens to me, you know what to do.”

“What?”

“Keep going and look after your brother.”

“What if you’re hurt?”

“Leave me. Look after Owen, OK?”

Olivia nodded.

“Don’t move until I say so.”

Heather walked slowly between the wrecked cars, placing one foot carefully in front of the other. In the dirt she saw shell casings and fragments of Molotov cocktails and what looked like the ring off an M67 grenade.

When she had gone twenty feet, she turned to Olivia and nodded. Olivia began walking in her footsteps and Owen followed his sister.

Paper targets riddled with buckshot lay on the ground. Broken glass was everywhere.

Their progress was slow.

Dogs in the distance.