“Jesus! What do you think you’re bloody doing!” a voice said.
Heather turned. It was Ma with a little blond-haired boy she was leaning on for support.
“It’s time for us to go,” Heather said.
“I don’t give you permission to go,” Ma said.
“You’re not in a position to give permission,” Heather said.
“It’s my island!”
“It’s not your island and it never was. Where’s the key to the Porsche?” Heather asked, pointing the rifle at Ma’s head.
“You won’t shoot.”
“Ask Jacko if I won’t shoot. I’ll shoot you and your grandson.”
“You’re an animal!”
“Where’s the key!” Heather screamed, pointing the empty rifle at the little boy’s head.
“Nightstand. Right next to the bed,” Ma said.
Heather saw the key in a little dish beside the bed on top of all their phones. She shoved the key and the phones in her pockets.
“What’s all that yelling, Ma?” a dazed-looking Danny asked, wandering in from the hall. Heather pointed the empty Lee-Enfield at him.
“Hands behind head, kneel on the ground! Now!”
Danny got down on his knees and put his hands behind his neck. “This isn’t fair,” he wailed.
Heather walked behind him. “I’m sorry about Ellen. I really am,” she said and hit him in the back of the head with the heavy rifle stock. Danny fell face-first onto the ancient floorboards.
“As soon as they see you coming, they’ll back the ferry offshore. You’re screwed,” Ma said with a cackle.
“We would be screwed if this was an island,” Heather replied.
A cold lick of hatred in Ma’s eyes. She fortune-told. She could see what this young woman would do to all she had built here if she was allowed to live.
It was also a look of recognition. A mirror. She’d come here as a young woman and mixed things up and married in and destroyed things and built things all those years ago.
Ma lashed weakly at her with her cane. “I’ll have you, you bitch!” she said furiously.
“Well, you’d better move fast.”
Heather ran down the hall. She waved goodbye to little Niamh and bolted down the stairs. She darted across the farmyard to the Porsche.
“It’s me,” she said as she opened the driver’s-side door. Olivia, in the front passenger seat, grinned and relaxed her grip on the rifle. Heather placed her foot on the brake and pushed the start button, and the Porsche roared into life.
She drove around the farmhouse, checked where the sun was, and headed east.
In the rearview mirror, she saw Matt on horseback galloping into the farmyard.
“Matt!” Olivia said.
“On a horse!” Owen added.
“I see him! Damn it. Keep an eye out behind us, Owen, they’ll be after us soon,” Heather said after a minute.
“I think they already are!”
“No way!”
She looked in the mirror.
A bunch of them had piled into the Toyota Hilux and were getting it going.
She looked ahead.
Red sun.
Lens flare.
In her head, music from the Pixies, “Gouge Away”—a little on the nose, but so be it.
She drove over the boggy heath, the Porsche bumping over the land. Not their land. Never was.
She hoped the kids were right. She hoped the pamphlet from the prison was correct. Two days a month, on the low tide with the full moon and the low tide with the new moon, Dutch Island became a peninsula.
“Look out!” Owen said and she swerved around the wreck of a VW Beetle, beautiful in its red rust, sitting in the grass like an ankylosaurus.
If they crash, they get another car. If we crash, we’re dead, Heather thought.
A bullet smashed into the rear window.
Olivia screamed.
“Everyone OK?” Heather asked.
“I’m OK,” Owen said.
“Should I fire back?” Olivia asked, holding Matt’s rifle.
“Just keep your head down, honey! Both of you!”
She drove around a tree stump and went straight toward a channel that might have been an old drainage canal or a river made wider by the rains.
The hood of the car dived nose-first into the canal and three things happened at once: something heavy ground against the axle, the car veered sideways, and a sheet of mud and brown water sloshed onto the windshield.
“Incoming!” Owen yelled as they slewed toward the wall of the far bank of the channel. They hit it sideways; the car stalled and then stopped.