“The one with the sore leg.” Courtney whispered. “I could take him out, get his gun.”
Cynthia sighed and stretched her shoulder that was still bleeding. “They plan on closing around us like a net. Courtney’s right, we need to improve our chances.”
Kara nodded as she tugged the last part of the knot undone.
Courtney pulled her hands free of the loops of rope and rubbed at her wrists.
“Don’t go too far, this is a desert afteral, you could end up lost.” Cynthia warned. Courtney stood and took the rope from her neck and stretched.
“I’ll stay close.” She smiled as her appearance shimmered out of focus. Where the ordinary brown haired girl had stood a sexy femme fetale stood in a khaki singlet and military camouflage pants.
Cynthia and Kara watched her disappear down the twisted path and into the scrub, towards her wounded target.
“So, we have to take care of Ace and the remaining man?” Kara removed the loop of rope from her neck.
“Well, I’d be happy just to keep ahead of them to be honest.” Cynthia half smiled, as she watched Kara free her wrists. Courtney had loosened it.
“We need to move.” Cynthia said standing.
Kara stood and looked at Cynthia’s bound hands covered by the plastic bag. “Your hands?”
“When we get some distance between them and us.” Cynthia took the lead again and the two women jogged quietly along the path.
Chapter 33
They couldn’t avoid making noise as they ran across all the twigs and dry leaves. Matt and Ryan were cutting it too fine to worry about the element of surprise. At this rate they will be lucky if they find the two women alive at all.
They pushed through the denser bushes and leapt over the broken branches. This desert may be an ocean of bushes and stunted trees, but it is just as dangerous as any other in the world, if you get lost. It was hot and dry and there are no obvious sources of water and the animals that live in this place are excellent at surviving without it for long periods of time. There may be the occasional kangaroo or troupe of emus, but the most abundant of the desert’s inhabitants are reptiles. Blue tongue lizards, dragon lizards and shingle backs, but the most notorious reptile of all are snakes.
Matt narrowly misses a small brown snake with his foot as he pushes through a bush. In the fading evening light all he saw is the dark whip-like tail as it disappeared into the grass to his right.
A close call.
“Watch your feet, Ryan.” Matt warned as he picks up his pace again.
“Snakes?” Ryan nodded. “I think I saw one just back there a bit.”
Matt gritted his teeth. “It’s the wrong time of the day to be careless. They spend the late afternoon getting warm and then start hunting just on dusk.”
There will be more.
Silently he hoped Tony Carlyle stands on a big one and gets a nasty bite.
The sky was turning apricot and the shadows grew darker and longer. The trail was also became harder to see.
The two men had to stop several times and lower their heads to find the impressions in the sand between the grass and leaves. After doing this two or three times Matt pulled his torch from his jacket and used it when the trail grew cold.
The trail was gone.
“Nothing.” Matt said shaking his head.
Ryan scanned the sea of scrubby bushes and the patches of gum trees.
No movement.
No sound.
Except the breeze rattling the dry twiggy bushes and the squeak somewhere of two eucalypt branches rubbing together.
Matt looked back the way they had come and noticed that there was no evidence of their progress either.
“Shit, I’ve never been out here this late. I can’t see the truck.” He said shaking his head.
Ryan took out his mobile phone. “No bars.”
Matt ran his hand through his hair and then rubbed at his, now stubbly, chin.
“We know they are here, Mr Claire. We just…”
Bang!
Both men stopped dead still, then Matt knelt down.
“Was that at us?” Ryan looked nervous.
Matt shook his head and shrugged. “Dunno, but it has to be them.”
Ryan set off in the direction of the gunshot, determined to save his sister.
Matt was hot on his heels, his gun still in hand.
They both panted and wheezed as they crashed through the dry bushes that tried to slow them down.
It was easy to follow the direction of the gunfire in this place Matt noticed. The sound didn’t bounce off of any hills or gullies. There was no echo, the sound just rang out and faded away.
Bang! Bang!
Two more gun shots.
Matt and Ryan only hesitated slightly in their advance. They were definitely not the targets, which filled them with dread.
We can’t be too late…
They were three hundred metres away, maybe less. Matt couldn’t gauge distance very well out here.
And as the sun was setting and the ground grew darker he didn’t gauge his footing either.
Bang! Bang!
Two more shots fired.
Matt’s foot got caught under a stick that was concealed by grass and he fell forward, face first, into the sand.
He yelped in pain as his head hit the ground and his ankle stung.
“Aaah, shit. Shit, shit, shit.” He moaned.
“Mr Claire!” Ryan ducked down and scrambled through the scrub to Matt’s side. “Are you hit?”
Matt rolled onto his back and stared up at Ryan’s concerned face.
“Mr Claire?” Ryan put his hand under Matt’s head and lifted it enough that Matt could see his sore foot and the stupid stick tangled around his legs.
“I’m fine, mate.”
“The shots…” Ryan began.
“I tripped when I heard them.” He rubbed the sand off his face and spat some grains out of his mouth. “That’s five, Ryan. Maybe our girls are giving them a reason to shoot.”
Ryan and pulled Matt to his feet. “Or maybe that is how many bullets it took to take the fight out of them.”
Nodding, Matt began pushing through the scrub again. His ankle was twisted and hurt like hell, but he couldn’t afford to slow down.
As they grew closer it became more obvious that they were in the right place. The first thing they noticed was the big eucalypt trees. These were bigger than all the other trees they had passed along the way.
Matt couldn’t believe that they hadn’t seen these from further away.
“Look!” Ryan pointed to something hanging in the tree.
Rope.
As they looked around under the tree they realized that this was to be the site of some kind of brutal slaughter. If Matt didn’t know better he would have assumed that someone had set this area up to clean and dress a pig or a sheep.
The rope was set up with a pulley and at the end there was a kind of rack with two butcher’s hooks.
They go through the ankles, so the animal can be lifted upside down and hung.
He got a shiver when he imagined that Tony might have used this before, with a Post-Human.
On the ground there were three black hiking packs. One looked to still be full while one that was under the butcher’s hooks was carefully unpacked. The items were tidy and organized.
A boning knife.
Scalpels.
A wire tourniquet.
Cryovac bags.
And a collapsible bucket to collect the blood.
These were Tony’s tools for killing, and they were clean.
Ryan followed Matt’s gaze and he looked relieved. Matt knew better. They had heard five gunshots, so someone could be injured or dead.
Matt limped and Ryan walked in circles around the trees scanning the ground for any kind of evidence that would tell them where they might be.
Ryan stood gazing at an area that looked denser than the scrub around the trees. There was a patch of sand that l
ooked a little trampled close to that side.
“If I were planning on running from Tony or his men I would use cover as quickly as I could find it.” Ryan wandered over to the impressions in the sand. “Foot prints, Mr Claire. Bare feet.”
Matt staggered over from where he was looking closer to the tree. “Good spotting. That’s them for sure.”
The evening was creeping in fast now; the sun was disappearing beneath the horizon. Twilight was settling like a veil over the desert.
Matt knelt down as best he could next to the tracks and examined them with his torch. Amongst the sand and dead leaves were traces of blood, only a small amount, but it was still upsetting.
He shook his head.
“Are they hurt?” Ryan observed the dark specks.
“Yes, and no. It’s their feet. They were walked out here with bare feet.”
“What about here?” Ryan pointed to a more substantial amount of blood, very close by. It was definitely from some kind of injury. It was drizzled between some leaves and over twigs.
Matt shook his head. He couldn’t tell if it was the girl’s or their captor’s.
“Either way,” Matt said standing, “They must have used those trees as cover. Our light’s running out. Let’s go.”
The men marched into the stand of saplings and dead bushes.
As they pushed through and ducked under leafy branches they found that it was hard to be quiet. Their shoes crunched on the debris that littered the ground.
The further they went the more evidence they saw from the shots that were fired. The occasional splintered branches or clipped leaves that lay on the ground.
Then, blood.
Matt and Ryan assumed that one of the girls must at least be wounded; there was no body, which was a relief.
Amongst the trees it was getting too dark. The shadows were growing longer and joining with other shadows. The sparse scrub was turning into a dark forest. Matt had to give Ryan the torch so they could see their path. Matt held the pistol with one hand and used the other to steady himself against anything that could to relieve the weight on his ankle.
Finally the terrain changed a little. The scrub around them opened into a dark green wall. Matt recognized the plant from previous trips to the Little Desert with Cynthia. She had commented on it once before. It was a thick and green with pathways between each plant.
A green labyrinth.
In the torchlight, the bushy trees looked about ten feet high and they were at least a metre or two wide. Too wide to see around, or through, or over; Cynthia would have gone this way to lose their captors.
“This way.” Matt gestured to the closest path. There were traces of blood that he could see, glittering in the torchlight on the sand and streaking some of the leaves.
They followed path after path, but they didn’t dare call out in case the pursuers were close by.
Matt limped along at a brisk pace following the white torchlight that bathed the closest trees.
“Mr Claire!” Ryan ran ahead and shone the torch on a long object that lay on the ground. It was a rifle. Clean and shiny, just laying there, in the sand.
Matt hobbled over. “Pick it up for me.”
Ryan picked up the rifle and handed it to Matt. He sniffed the barrel and checked the chamber.
“Still loaded, but it’s been fired.” Matt handed the rifle back.
“Could this be the only rifle they had?” Ryan asked, half to himself.
Matt rubbed at his nose. “We’d never know. It’s a single shot, so they reload after each round is fired.”
Ryan understood, but he looked hopeful.
They moved on along the path and Ryan kept the rifle in hand just in case.
By now the desert was cloaked in darkness. The bushes and trees formed an ocean of shadows. The paths between the thick bushes trees were especially dark and Matt and Ryan relied on the little torch to find their way.
They hadn’t gone too far from where they found the rifle when they saw some blue nylon rope cord laying on the path.
They followed it to its source.
A few steps further, there was a eucalypt tree with a skinny trunk growing in a clearing. The rope was wound around the skinny trunk and hung limp at the other end.
Ryan squinted in the torchlight as the got closer. He could see something else behind the trunk of the tree.
A figure.
Ryan rushed ahead.
When he got to the limp figure Matt could see in the torchlight that it was the body of a man. The blue cord was wrapped twice around his nick. His eyes were bulging and lifeless.
“This has to be a good sign, yes?” Ryan said as he scanned the ground with the torch.
“I hope so…” Matt was stopped mid sentence by a sound not far away.
Sobbing.
“Did you hear that?” Matt asked Ryan, who shook his head. “Sounded like a woman crying.”
Ryan’s eyes were wide as he strained his ears.
There it was again.
Ryan rushed forward, gesturing for Matt to hurry. Matt did his best, but the pain in his ankle was building after the extra use.
“Through here…” Ryan called back as he knocked branches aside. “It’s Kara, I know it!”
The further they went, the thinner the foliage became.
Ryan found himself standing in a clearing devoid of any bushes.
“Kara!” Ryan stood with wide eyes, as he beheld the scene before him. Matt pushed through the branches and into Ryan’s back.
The two men stood staring at a grizzly scene. On the ground was a mess of blood, it was everywhere, splashed and smeared. In the centre knelt Kara, her clothes and face were stained all over with fresh blood. In front of her was Cynthia, laying still as the dead, also a bloody mess.
Not far from the two women lay Tony, his face a waxy bluish mask.
He was certainly dead.
Chapter 34
It was like a scene from a horror film, the kind where the victims run around in the dark from some killer that would pounce when you least expect it.
As they marched along the trail, Kara untied Cynthia’s hands. The knot was tight and there was some wire too. It took some work to get it undone.
“There,” Kara said as she unraveled the last of the wire. Finally she slid the plastic bag off Cynthia’s bare hands. “They really wanted you to keep your hands covered didn’t they?”
Cynthia breathed a sigh of relief. “It’s almost as if they didn’t trust me.” She smiled.
The trails between the bushy trees were narrow and the two women couldn’t see around the corners in front of them.
They were trying to run along the track, Kara’s hands out in front to swat aside any branches.
It was dark already, in this little patch of forest. The shadows had grown long until the paths grew inky, now everything was night. The gunshots had ceased, but they knew their captors were not going to give up and they could be far behind.
There was a large opening between the bushes; the track was wider and dotted with wild grasses.
The armed man stepped out from one track, in time to run into Kara and they both fell to the ground in a heap.
The man struggled to take control. “What the…”
Both Kara and the man were unprepared for the encounter when it happened and Kara’s head hit the ground with a thump.
She reached up to throw the man off, but he was heavy. His eyes were wide, but when he realized what had happened, his mouth became a toothy grin.
Cynthia lunged forward to take the man’s weapon, but the man was too fast. The man flicked the butt of the rifle into Cynthia’s jaw, before returning his attention back to Kara, who struggled to shove him off.
Cynthia stood dazed for a second. She knew what her next move should be, but her body didn’t respond.
She was stunned from the blow.
“Stay there, bitch.” The man managed to mumble.
She dropped in a heap on the ground
and her vision swam.
Kara and the man exchanged blows. He would hit her in the face and then try to bring the rifle to bear, but she would knock it aside. Finally the rifle was knocked clear from his hand, giving her some advantage.
He leaned back to try and snatch it up off the sand.
Cynthia’s vision had cleared enough to see the man’s fingers scrabbling in the sand for his gun, while Kara pummeled him with blow after blow.
Crawling forward on her backside, she kicked the rifle further out of his reach. It landed with a thump, somewhere in the dark.
As the rifle disappeared the man pulled free of Kara so he could retrieve it.
That was what Kara needed.
She snatched up the blue cord that had been around their necks. She had been carrying it with her since she had untied them both. It was lying on the path where it had fallen from her hand.
Cynthia was still dizzy, from the blow that had knocked her down, but she had to stop the man from getting the rifle.
“Where is it,” he searched the grass.
This was all the time Kara had needed. She had made a loop with the rope and tossed it over the man’s head. It settled around his neck and she wrenched back on it.
The man’s face was an expression of shock, as he was pulled backward to the ground as Kara pulled. Cynthia joined her and they both hauled on the rope until the man was dragged to the base of the tree. They pulled tight and wound the rope round and round the trunk. After a moment the struggling stopped. The man slumped over and they tossed the rope on the ground. The whites of his eyes bulged in the dark. He was strangled.
Kara stood panting. Her face was marked with a few dark, bloody smears, but she gave Cynthia a half smile. “Was not ready for that.” She wiped her nose.
“We need to move, now.” Cynthia whispered. “That was too loud. He’s still out here somewhere.”
Kara agreed.
They both began too stumble along the darkened track, with as much speed as they could, but they had not gone far when they heard someone crashing through the trees not far behind.
It had to be him.
They both glanced at each other. They couldn’t make out the expressions in the dark, but they were surely the same. Desperation. They needed to move.
Deadfall: A Post-Humans Story Page 19
