This was as far as she could go.
Matt grinned.
The kids were trailing him. He pointed the rifle at them. “That’s far enough, you two!”
They looked terrified.
Heather managed to catch Olivia’s eye. It’s going to be OK. No. Really. I wouldn’t lie to you.
Heather crawled to her left.
Matt would want to make sure with his kill shot.
He would come close.
He would come direct.
The air this morning was thick, sweet, honeyed.
There were butterflies. An egret. An old crow.
Time had slowed.
She smiled at him.
“What are you grinning for?” he said and walked straight into the dingo trap.
He screamed and dropped his rifle as the jaws snapped shut on his ankle.
That would have been it for Matt but for the fact that the trap was very old and the spring rusted. It hadn’t broken his leg or severed an artery.
He stood there groaning and then with an almighty roar he managed to pry apart the mechanism.
“Shit!” he yelled and stepped out of the trap.
Blood was pouring from his ankle.
Heather hadn’t stopped to look at him. She was crawling for the rifle.
“No, you don’t!” Matt said and lunged at her.
The bluffing and the pleading and the reasoning were over. The game was different now. Now it was the oldest game ever invented.
Kill or be killed.
She punched him in the kidneys. He winced and headbutted her in the nose and broke it. The headbutt was almost as painful as the .22 bullet.
Blood poured into her mouth.
Matt was on top of her. He put his big meaty paws around her throat and squeezed. He was squeezing from the wrists. That was good, she thought, her massage-therapist brain kicking in inappropriately; he could kill her without straining his back. The kids were moving in fearlessly. They were going to try to attack Matt with their bare hands. They were too far away to help. Run, just run! she wanted to say. But they weren’t runners anymore.
“Should have done this on day one,” Matt snarled as he choked her.
The world tunneled.
She couldn’t breathe.
Couldn’t think.
How could she have thought water was so important when the only thing important was air?
The last thing she would ever see was Matt’s furious red face.
Even that was fading.
Dissolving into whiteness.
Grayness.
Nothingness.
But there was one hope.
She had to remember that she was the messenger.
The messenger with the meteor iron.
Yes.
Yes…
Do you hear it, Matt?
The message cometh.
Matt screamed as Heather stabbed the penknife into his thigh.
She kicked him off and crawled to where the .22 rifle had come to rest.
It wasn’t there.
Where?
Where on…
Owen was pointing it at Matt’s head.
Matt was crawling toward her.
“That’s enough,” Owen said.
“You think you know how to use that thing?” Matt grunted.
“Heather showed us.”
“We know exactly what to do,” Olivia said, pointing the Lee-Enfield at him.
There was no way for Matt to know that the Enfield was empty and that Owen had probably not loaded another round in the .22.
Matt looked at the rifles and put his hands in the air. “Relax, kiddies. I’m not bloody going anywhere. How can I? She stabbed me, and look at me ankle,” he said.
“If he so much as farts in my direction, shoot him the way I showed you. I’m getting my damn penknife back.”
Heather pulled the knife out of the meaty part of Matt’s thigh and put it in her pocket. His ankle was a bloody mess and his thigh wound was surprisingly deep, but he would live.
She examined the wound in her shoulder. It hurt like hell but it was a small-caliber round and she wasn’t bleeding badly—she would live too.
“What are you going to do now, kill me?” Matt asked.
“Well, Matt,” Heather replied, “you’ve found our hiding place, so I guess the smart thing to do would be to kill you. But that would be murder. And that’s not our style. We’re going to get a vehicle and get off Dutch Island and then we’re going to call the cops.”
“And then we’re going to leave you a really horrible rating on Tripadvisor,” Owen said.
49
They tied his hands behind his back with his belt and shoved him in the cave mouth. They took his .22 rifle and made their way to the farm.
They crawled through the grass until they were five hundred yards out.
Olivia and Owen’s plan had been to do this at night. But they could do it during the day’s low tide too. It would just be more dangerous.