Tajik thumps a fist against the dashboard. ‘Bloody hell.’
Nathan shakes his head. ‘Contact! That’s not what he . . . they . . .’
Revulsion sweeps me at how badly I’ve underestimated Jack and how complete my failure has been. I thought I needed to save my little corner of the world. But by not killing him I’ve allowed him to reach weaponry that gives him the Griffin’s fierce power over heaven and earth. He’ll be able to rain death from above wherever he wants.
‘Before we get ahead of ourselves,’ Damon is saying, ‘we’ve got problems closer to home. This way, please.’
Our car rolls along Bull Ridge Road as the Minion leads Tregan and Gary to a Humvee parked outside the hangar’s open doors.
‘Sorry about this,’ he says. ‘But you both—and everyone out there who can see what you can see—need to know what’s going on.’
Damon lifts the back hatch. Tregan and Gary recoil and we gasp with them.
Oscar and Alex are pale, dirty, bloodied with star-shaped bullet holes between their eyes. Wrists bound with wire in front of them.
‘We think these two wanted out,’ Damon says. ‘They were executed.’
Nathan slams his fist into the dashboard. ‘Liar!’
What’s worse is how the lie unleashes a new wave of revulsion from the Revivees directed at us.
Tajik shakes his head as he steers us around a rolled VW.
Nathan looks back at me. ‘Do you think Alex told them anything?’
When I try to answer all that comes from me is a groan because at the air base, just beyond the Humvee, in the darkness of the runway tarmac, Jack has emerged from a white cloud of cigarette smoke.
‘Hi guys,’ he says. I know his grin is directed at me through Tregan and Gary.
They steady each other—Oh-my-God-but-we-saw-him-dead—and their awe and terror and jubilation echoes through the Revivees.
Jack closes the Humvee hatch. Up close his remaining eye glitters gold. His dead eye is behind a patch and his cheek and neck are stitched.
Tregan and Gary tremble.
‘Do not be afraid,’ Jack says with a slight slur. He adds a sly smile. ‘Rumours of my death have been, well, you know, somewhat exaggerated.’
‘But we saw you dead,’ Gary says for everyone. ‘We saw you dead.’
Damon hangs his head. Jack drops a hand on his shoulder. ‘You’ve made your apologies,’ he says to his right-hand Minion,
‘and it wasn’t your fault. The girl who pronounced me dead said she was a doctor. She couldn’t hear my heartbeat.’
Jack winks with his good eye.
‘Turns out she’s a homeopath,’ he says with a mocking laugh. ‘Wow, you should’ve seen the faces of the guys about to bury me when I sat up.’
Gary and Tregan manage smiles. I-mean-it’s-feasible-isn’t-it?-It-happens-all-the-time-in-fully-equipped-hospitals-and . . .
Revivee minds look to less scientific reasons. Jack-he’s-being-modest-Sent-by-God-Must-be-like-Jesus-To-save-us-He-was-dead-Came-back-Praise-him-The-new-Resurrection . . .
Anne’s shouting at them in a drunken rage: Idiots-listen-Listen!-It’s-in-the-Bible-Antichrist-dies-from-a-head-injury-Mocks-mocks-you-hear-me-mocks-Jesus-by-raising-himself-so-everyone-worships-He’s-he’s . . .
Jack laughs raspily, waves his hand in the air like it’s lassoing all the Revivee thoughts. ‘I’m flattered by all of that. But it was luck—bad and then good—that saved me. Not divine or demonic intervention.’
‘You can hear us?’ Tregan asks.
Jack nods.
Terror and relief ripple through the Revivees.
No-point-resisting-He-can-track-us-anywhere-We’ll-be-fine-He-knows-we’re-on-his-side-Jack-my-mind-for-you-As-soon-as-I-see-something-you’ll-know-Whatever-we-can-do-Can-we-come-in-Please-want-to-be-there-with . . .
‘Why can’t they see that he’s full of shit? That he’s evil; that—’ I say.
Nathan shakes his head. ‘They haven’t seen what we’ve seen.’
The irony kills me: if the Revivees could share our thoughts then they’d know the truth.
We skid to a stop, are thrown into darkness as Tajik kills the parking lights.
‘What?’ Nathan says.
By the dim glow of the instrument panel Tajik points to the horizon. ‘Out there.’
The chopper’s back, its search beam stabbing into a distant treeline, rear red light like poison glistening on a stinger.
Tajik reaches for the keys.
‘No,’ Nathan says. ‘Don’t stop the engine. The battery hasn’t had time to charge.’
‘Can we keep going?’ I ask.
‘Not in the dark,’ Tajik whispers. ‘I can’t see a thing.’
‘Do you think they saw us?’
As if to answer my question, the bright white diamond dazzles our way as the helicopter banks and heads across the fields toward us.
‘Out,’ Nathan yells. ‘Driver’s side!’
I ease open my door and curse as the interior light comes on for a second before Nathan switches it off. We all tumble onto the road in the vehicle’s shadow and I pull Evan down. The paddock a few feet away offers no cover at all. Just cows caught chewing cud in the chopper’s approaching glare.
‘Under,’ I hiss. ‘Hide.’
I shove my little brother under the chassis, flatten myself against the bitumen and squirm in behind him. Nathan and Tajik squeeze after me, curl under the axles in the shadow of the chunky tyres.
I huddle tighter to Evan.
We’re swept by the roar of the blades and hit by the downdraft cyclone. Brilliant light spills across the vehicle and road and paddocks and shadows shift as the chopper prowls above and around the car.
My face is hot. The exhaust pipe or whatever it is an inch from my cheek is radiating heat. Tajik didn’t turn off the engine. The tailpipe must be spewing fumes. If they see them we’re dead meat. Same goes for any light from the instrument panel. I hope the exhaust smoke is blown away by the blades, that the glow of the controls is bleached by the spotlight.
The searchlight burns brighter on the road behind the car. Dirt and twigs and pebbles spray my face. The rotor blades blast louder and the bitumen vibrates beneath me.
The chopper is not flying away.
It’s coming in to land behind the vehicle.
They’ve found us.
He’s found me.
TWENTY-EIGHT
I have to do something. Get out from under the car. Fire on the bastards. Kill them before they get boots on the ground. My brain’s commands haven’t reached my limbs when there’s an explosive volley and the furious shriek of wounded machinery.
I twist right. Nathan’s gone. I see flashes of brass out by his boots on the road. I roll out from under the car as the chopper tilts away crazily, searchlight pointed into the clouds, cabin coming apart as it slams backwards into the earth, blades slicing through scattering cows and shredding into shrapnel that spews into the sky.
Whumpf!
The shockwave ripples the ground as the fireball flash scorches the air. Orange and red flames blow out and then suck into a mushroom cloud as burning flesh and metal rain down on the bitumen.
A smoking hoof lands by my face. I roll away from it. Pull Evan out from under the car. He’s okay. Has been shielded from the blast. So has Tajik, who crawls out, breathless and blinking.
On the side of the road, a toppled telegraph pole and a tangle of powerlines point to where the black helicopter’s skeleton burns. Nathan stalks around the front of our vehicle, smoke curling from the rifle he still aims at the wreck. ‘Are you okay?’ he shouts. ‘Danby? Tajik?’
I nod. Stand up, Evan in my arms.
Tajik gets to his feet next to me. ‘What happened?’
We both look from the field, where no survivors stir, to Nathan, who lowers his gun and stares at us.
‘This time,’ he says, handsome in the firelight, ‘I got the safety off.’
‘Are you all right?’
I ask, terrified of the answer.
Nathan shoulders his rifle, runs his hands across his torso, nods and then opens his arm to me. Still holding Evan, I step into his hug—and Tajik piles in, too. Together we shudder, laugh, cry.
I could dissolve forever into the warmth of this moment. But now Jack knows where we are. There’ll be more choppers. And God knows what else.
‘We have to go,’ I say. ‘Now.’
We break our huddle, dive into the car.
‘Go! Go! Go!’ yells Nathan.
Tajik floors the accelerator, and our ride smashes aside bits of wreckage to scream along the road in the blaze of its high beams.
No more night-creeping. Now we have to get lost.
Jack will pour himself and all of his resources north. Maybe even get ahead of us. Close the net. We’ll be behind enemy lines as surely as if we’d parachuted into Nazi Germany.
I use multiple seatbelts to strap Evan horizontally across the back seat.
‘Up ahead,’ Nathan shouts. ‘Intersection. Which way?’
We’ve reached West Portland Road.
‘Left!’ I yell and Tajik skids around the corner.
West Portland Road. I visualise the map. We were close to getting outside the radius. But Jack coming after us is going to reset it to zero. There’s not going to be any escape.
Tajik slows to dodge in and out of vehicles, bumps over bodies.
‘Sorry,’ he keeps saying and I’m not sure if he’s talking to us or them. ‘Sorry.’
I climb over the back seat into the cargo area. Grab a tyre iron.
‘I’m smashing the back window,’ I yell.
Nathan looks at Tajik and gives me the thumbs-up.
I jab the iron bar into the window again and again until it cracks into a spongy lattice of safety glass. I kick it free. Night air swirls in and I aim my rifle into the rectangle of darkness behind us.
The two remaining black choppers sit on the tarmac at the air base. Tregan and Gary have just watched them fly in from the east and west. Heavily armed Minions are on board and ground crews are fuelling the birds from a truck. Farther down the runway, the Chinook is loading up with soldiers and motorbikes.
‘It just keeps getting better and better,’ Nathan says, seeing what I’m seeing.
The car hugs the road through thick bush before we have to slow through hairpin curves that spit us out on a riverside straight that’s lined with holiday houses. We weave between cars and trucks and pass a sunny sign for Paradise Gardens Waterskiing Park, our headlights shining on cars and caravans and kayaks on racks and speedboats on trailers. I glimpse bodies dressed for summer fun lying sprawled on grass and gravel. The stench of decay rushes in through the back window as we chase the next rise and leave the holiday death camp behind in darkness.
Tajik slows to take a bend.
‘Faster,’ Nathan urges.
‘Too dangerous,’ Tajik protests.
Without speed, we’re dead. With it, we’re still dead.
Picturing the map, it’s mile after mile of roads twisting through hills and valleys. No matter how fast we go, the choppers will outrun us, open up with their guns, blow us off the road. That is if we haven’t already lost control and smashed, crashed and burned. That’s it. We belong dead.
‘Stop!’ I bark. ‘Stop.’
‘What?’ Nathan calls back.
‘Just stop!’ I yell.
Tajik slows. ‘What?’
‘Just stop!’
He brakes.
‘We can’t get away,’ I say. ‘Not like this. Not on the road.’
They stare back at me, mouths agape, angry and afraid.
‘What are you talking about?’ Nathan says.
‘If we want to live,’ I reply, ‘we need to die.’
My eyes, nose and mouth sting from the petrol I’ve siphoned from the fuel tank with a length of garden hose cut from the lawn of a holiday house. I’m glad for the fumes because they mask the stench of the four corpses Tajik and Nathan have dragged from the entrance to a holiday resort. Finding the right sexes and sizes for body doubles was depressingly easy from the dozens of dead people. But riding back up the hill with them stacked in the back like firewood felt beyond wrong. What I’m about to do beggars belief, but it’s our best chance.
Now the men are in the front and a woman and a little boy are in the back. Everyone in their seatbelts.
Nathan splashes petrol from a plastic tub over them and closes all but the driver’s side door. Tajik twists a T-shirt into the fuel tank and gives a nod. Nathan releases the handbrake and slams the door. I flick a cigarette lighter to ignite the cloth fuse. We give the four-wheel drive a push. Stand together as it rolls away, slowly at first, then picking up speed on the long downward slope. The car starts to drift. Misses a toppled motorbike. Glances off a hatchback. Smashes into a tree trunk with a loud crunch as the headlights go out. We’re too far away to make out what’s happening. I can’t see any smoke. I wonder if the burning rag fell out. We might’ve just trashed our ride for no good—
Rackoompff.
The car expands with a roar as the petrol tank explodes and the interior becomes a storm of flame. Oily black smoke pours up through the trees.
We look at each other, relieved and horrified.
Nathan and Tajik help me get Evan onto my back and we head along a track that leads down to the river flats. Below us the holiday houses glow faintly in the silver light coming from the eastern sky.
Much of the countryside we’ve covered since Richmond was pretty empty of people. But this waterskiing resort was fully booked on Christmas morning. Bodies in bikinis and board shorts are all over the place.
We zero in on an aluminium boat still sitting on its trailer behind a family sedan. Erebus is painted in fiery letters on the bow of the little vessel. A dad’s on the front seat of the car. A little girl’s dead by their caravan. Mum and any brothers might be anywhere. Festering in the frangipani garden. Floating in the fenced pool. Burning in the car. I can’t let it matter now. What matters is that we get Erebus into the river.
The sky brightens with every heartbeat, spilling its chrome light across the air base. Tregan and Gary watch the refuelling truck back away. The black helicopters are good to go. I don’t know how fast they can fly. But I’m betting they’ll be at the chopper crash site in minutes. From there they’ll probably spot the smoke from the burning car.
Nathan and I ease Evan into the boat. Tajik uncouples the trailer from the car’s bumper and we heave it along the gravel roads to the concrete slip sloping into the river’s brown water.
A billboard on the grassy bank has a cartoon map of this territory, sponsored by Jolly Lager Beer, that’s complete with happy waterskiers, a smiling sun and oversized pelicans and fish. The river snakes north through bush valleys to slide past ferry crossings and holiday resorts. Then it coils around the town of Wisemans Ferry and from there it flexes and twists east until it finally empties into the blue Pacific Ocean.
‘To the coast?’ Nathan says.
‘If we can,’ I say.
With all the river’s tight turns, we’ll have to travel two kilometres just to cover one as the crow flies. It would take a miracle but we might make it.
The three off us push the Erebus into the shallows and haul ourselves on board. Nathan looks at the outboard motor.
‘You know how to work this?’
I shake my head.
‘Move out of the way,’ Tajik says, crouching by the engine. ‘Neither of you have ever worked a lawnmower?’
We shake our heads and he grins as he turns a switch and pumps a rubber button with his thumb. ‘It is basically the same thing.’
A boat with a lawnmower engine doesn’t fill me with any sort of hope.
Tajik yanks the cord and the outboard roars to life. He adjusts the angle and turns the throttle and the boat lifts and like that we’re carving across the river.
Paradise Gardens recedes behind us. The river spreads out ahea
d. But we’re not the only ones on the move.
Jack has an assault rifle over his shoulder as he follows Nick to the remaining chopper, its engine whining and blades blurring. The first bird’s already airborne, red tail-lights blinking inside its shadow against the silver sky.
‘Wait,’ Tregan calls after Jack.
He turns.
‘You don’t have to go, do you?’ she asks.
We’re-safer-with-him-here, Tregan thinks—and Gary can’t help but bristle that I-can-look-after-you-babe-I’m—
‘We’ve spotted them,’ Jack says. ‘They’ve killed more of our people.’
Jack takes a step closer to Tregan.
‘I need to finish this,’ he says. ‘Then we can get on with things.’
I think Jack’s talking to me, promising some awful future for us, but Tregan’s flushed by his attention. This-guy-he’s-there’s-something-I . . .
She feels Gary, intimidated, jealous, afraid—even as she can’t help wondering what it’d be like if Jack—
‘My main man, Damon here, will look after you,’ Jack says as his Minion appears at Tregan’s shoulder with a nod and a smile. ‘Anything you need, he’ll do it for you, okay?’
With that he and Nick march across the tarmac and board the chopper.
Don’t-go-please, Tregan thinks as the chopper swirls off and arrows away through the sky.
We watch as Tregan and Gary watch the black choppers dwindle and disappear. Next time we see them it’s going to be with our own eyes as they swoop on us from the south.
‘C’mon!’ Tajik yells, turning the throttle, trying to get more from the Erebus’s outboard. ‘Bloody hell, come on!’
But I’m still back at the air base.
Can’t-believe-you-after-all—
‘Wait!’ Tregan calls as Gary stalks away from her towards the hangar. It’s-not-like-that—‘I didn’t really think—’
But we all know she did.
Damon steps into her field of vision, blocking her view of her furious fiancé. ‘Not your fault,’ he says, hand on her arm reassuringly, his touch making her tingle ever so slightly. ‘You shouldn’t have to apologise for what you think about anything or anyone.’
You’re-right-He’s-right-Gary-no-reflection-on-you-I-just—
The Last Shot Page 28
