She ejected the casing and loaded another .303 round.
All the house lights had come on now, and windows were opening.
She tried to get a bead on the third dog but the dust was rising in thick orange columns into the darkness, like a Hubble photograph of star-birth clouds.
A head appeared at a window on a lower floor. It looked like Ivan’s. He was yelling at someone in the farmyard.
His torso was an easier shot than the dogs—a big stationary target in a white T-shirt. But that wasn’t the plan and she let him be.
Growing consternation around the house now. Shouting, yells, even sporadic gunfire.
Someone began ringing a bell.
The rain started to pour down.
She looked back at the porch. The dust finally cleared and she aimed at the third dog. It was barking like crazy. She shot it in the chest, killing it instantly.
It had been a nasty business but a necessary one.
She ejected the round and loaded another. She slung the rifle over her shoulder and crawled twenty yards into the heath.
The rain was cold and heavy and good.
They might possibly have night-vision or thermal-imaging scopes, so this was not the time to stand and triumphantly survey what she had done. She prepared to move, but then Matt came out of the farmhouse with his dog, Blue. The dog began sniffing the air.
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.