The Island(78)

The wind had changed. She was between the bay and the farm, and her scent would be carried on the freshening breeze.

Blue started barking.

Matt let the dog off the leash and screamed at everyone to shut up.

Blue was coming straight for her.

He was a clever dog.

She liked that.

She wondered how many bullets she had left. She should have checked. A soldier always knows, her dad would have said.

She sighted the dog along the length of his body and put her finger on the trigger.

The dog was limping toward her as fast as he could.

“Go on, Blue!” someone yelled.

“Go on, boy, find the bitch!” Ivan yelled.

This was a much smaller target, a slobbering profile trying to sprint through the dust.

Every second the distance between them shortened, making the shot easier but also giving them a bead on her.

She pulled the trigger and missed.

The dog bore down.

She pulled back the bolt, reloaded, aimed, fired, and Blue’s head exploded. He ran on for half a second before tumbling over in a heap of arterial blood and dust.

She heard screaming back at the compound: “She shot Blue! The bitch shot Blue! Get her!”

“Where is she?”

“She’s over there beyond the tire!”

“Over where?”

“You mob of bloody morons, just shoot everywhere!”

The entire compound was galvanized. Gunfire erupted from half a dozen shotguns.

Heather was already moving. Rifle over back, facedown in the dirt. Crawling over the cracked red soil and the sharp stones and the seashells that the glaciers had torn from the mountains and released here on Dutch Island in a great melting, millennia ago. She crawled with her body barely touching the ground to throw up no dust trails and leave no red djinn in the air.

They weren’t giving up.

It was night, and the barbarians were coming.

The only question was whether the barbarians were them or her.

She crawled until she was fifty yards from where she had fired her last shot.

Half a dozen men were in the yard screaming bloody murder. Three more were shooting into the bush roughly in the direction of where she had just been.

Two of them were presenting stationary targets as they stood stupidly together.

Heather laid the rifle gently in the dirt and flipped the bolt back, and the empty brass cartridge sailed across the ground without catching the starlight and giving away her position. She pushed the bolt forward again and placed one of her precious final rounds in the chamber.

She heard a woman screaming in the farmyard. She looked through the binoculars and saw that the screamer was Ma; she was standing behind the screen door, half in and half out of the farmhouse. Heather cradled the rifle and looked at Ma through the iron sight. Half in darkness, half in light, but perhaps she was worth a try? Cut the head off the snake…except this wasn’t a snake, this was a hydra. Ma opened the screen door and came out onto the porch. “Ma! Get inside! I’m taking the Hilux!” Matt yelled.

“Don’t you bloody tell me what to do!”

“Oi, Matt, I think I see her! Over there!”

A bullet pinged off a rock three yards to Heather’s right.

“Shit!” She’d been spotted.

Heather crawled for her life now, south, away from the compound, away, away, away.

She didn’t try to avoid the little thornbushes or the jagged rocks. She crawled on her hands, elbows, knees, feet as fast as she could. Sand, rock, stone, red dirt, thorns…gunfire near her. Sporadic at first but then more concentrated. A dozen or more men and women shooting into the bush to the south of the house. Shotguns and rifles and then, cutting through the other sounds, the disheartening, terrifying chug-chug-chug of an AK-47.

She flattened her body in the dirt.

The AK tore up the field twenty-five feet to her left, the shells hammering into an old cast-iron water tank, ricocheting off in all directions. A ricochet could kill her just as easily as a straight shot.

“Do it, Ma!” someone yelled behind her.

“Get going!” Ma said.

Going where?

A shotgun blast screamed through the air.

Heather stole a look behind her. She could see Ma in the cab of the Toyota Hilux, which was driving in roughly her direction. She was leaning out the window with a weapon. Ma erupted in light as she fired a shotgun.

Heather flattened herself as the white-hot buckshot scraped the air above her head.

I thought that old bitch couldn’t walk!

Heather had no choice now. She got up and ran toward the darkness of the mesa. The Toyota’s headlights found her. Ma reloaded the shotgun. Heather hit the deck as Ma fired. The shotgun pellets were so close this time, she could hear them whinnnn above her.

She got up on one knee and aimed the Lee-Enfield at the Hilux driver. Matt. He saw her aim at him. He desperately turned the wheel. She squeezed the trigger and nothing happened. She ejected the spent cartridge. She rummaged in the bag, found a .303 round, loaded it, aimed, pulled the trigger.

A bullet punched through the windshield. She heard a screech of brakes, and this time the Toyota did not follow.

Either she’d killed Matt or he’d thought better about pursuit.

She ran and ran and ran.

Motorcycles came out looking for her, one going south, another east. The ATV came out and even the drone.