The Island(74)

“I’ll look for something else. Keep the mouth of the cave covered.”

“What if you don’t come back?” Owen asked.

“I’ll come back.”

“But if you don’t?”

“You and your sister hide until the police get here. The police will come. I promise you.”

Owen left it there. If the police didn’t come, they were dead. If they surrendered to the O’Neills, they were dead.

Heather ruffled his dirty hair and hugged Olivia. “Look after your little brother, OK?”

“OK.”

The charcoal of the eucalypt skewers had coated the palms of her hands. She raised them to her face and ran a line of charcoal down her left cheek.

“Why are you doing that?” Owen asked.

“So I’ll be harder to see,” she said. She walked to the cave mouth. “Don’t worry. I’ll be back soon,” she said.

She stepped outside.

The first priority was to kill the dogs.

Then she’d see what she could do to make the O’Neills hurt. Maybe if she could make them hurt enough, they’d give her the ferry.

That seemed unlikely.

Regardless, it was time to take the fight to the enemy.





36



She was composed. Calm. As calm as the sea, the grass, these old trees. She floated in the nowness of everything.

She scanned the hill and the heathland with Jacko’s binoculars.

It was dark. Almost nothing stirred. Not a rabbit, not a wombat, not a sleepy koala. Just the shape of the yellow-white spinifex grass swaying in the breeze. She looked toward the mainland and the outskirts of the city. The sun had set long ago. The lights no longer held much interest for her. She watched dispassionately as a large passenger jet took a big turn over Mornington Peninsula and vectored north toward the airport.

There were other starlit vapor trails above heading away from Melbourne to Sydney or Perth.

That was another universe, that world of airplanes and cars and malls and police officers.

Thunder rumbled from the west.

Heather fixed the rifle on her back and the full canteen and machete at her belt.

She strode across the wasteland.

Under the Milky Way. Under the Southern Cross.

She had food and water in her belly.

A storm was coming.

She was the storm.

The O’Neills lived in a land without a Dreaming.

They didn’t even know their own island.

Yes, Tom had killed that poor woman.

Yes, she had lied and tried to cover it up.

But that was only trespass upon trespass.

The original trespass was against the people who had lived here for a thousand generations.

She walked.

And as she walked, she played music in her head. All her mom’s old albums: the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, the Kinks.

The wind picked up.

The temperature fell.

She was close now.

The farm was lit up by spotlights and house lights. She heard music. Were they celebrating? They were certainly winning the war of attrition. Did they know about Jacko yet?

She lay down in the grass and took out the binoculars. She scanned the farm for the dogs and found them chained near the porch. Three of them together, gnawing at their dinner.

She put down the binocs and checked the wind.

The wind was blowing from the west, from the sea.

Good.

She headed east around the farm, giving the dogs a wide berth. They wouldn’t smell her but they were smart and they might hear her. Not many other big mammals out here on Dutch Island tonight.

Heather approached the old steamroller, took the rifle off her shoulder, and waited in the long grass. With the binoculars, she carefully scanned the roof. No one up there this windy night. She scanned the farmyard and that was empty too. She turned on the walkie-talkie and listened. Nothing on any channel. The lights were on at the main farmhouse but there wasn’t much activity anywhere else.

She remembered what Rory had said about the anthills behind the steamroller. About what they were going to do with Hans.

Maybe she should…

Yes, she should.

She crawled toward the anthill.

A few pathfinder ants began biting her ankles. She tucked the bottoms of her jeans into her socks.

She had to know.

Creeping forward, she soon found both of them.

They were both dead.

Petra had been shot in the back and dumped naked on top of the ant mound. She was a moving sea of red bodies. Hans was just beyond her on a smaller mound.

A steady breeze was blowing from the southwest and it was rocking the arc light hanging on a wire in the middle of the farmyard. Hans’s and Petra’s bodies were swinging in and out of chiaroscuro like some insane video-art installation.

The ants had eaten Petra’s face and were pouring into her bony white eye sockets to consume her brain.

The perfect horror of it made her catch her breath.

She began to cry. She sobbed and hugged herself and sobbed some more.

She wiped her cheeks.

“I got the kids to a cave! I found a cave,” she told Petra. “It was worth it, what you did. It worked. Thank you.”

Ants began biting at her elbows.

She slid backward from the anthill and rubbed at her arms.

She was about to slip back into the darkness when something horrifying happened.