by Mark Smith
The next day we strip out the house. Everything that’s valuable—the bedding and mattresses, the kitchen stuff, the three best chairs, the cushions off the couch—it all goes into the garage with the food stores. Then we arrange everything else to look like the house has been trashed, the kitchen table turned over, drawers pulled out, cupboards opened, the couch lying on its back. Kas even brings in shovel-loads of dirt and leaves from the garden and spreads them around the floor. By the time we’re finished it looks nothing like our home, which is exactly the effect we were aiming for. Finally, we stand out in the yard and look at our handiwork. Rowdy is confused. He doesn’t understand why we upset his bed in the corner and threw his smelly old blanket over the upturned table.
‘There’s something wrong,’ Kas says.
‘What?’
‘Sorry, Finn, but we’re going to have to smash some windows. It’s too’—she searches for the word—‘intact.’
So we choose a window each and gather up rocks to throw. Willow is excited. She’s never done anything like this before.
‘Let’s think about which ones to break,’ I say. ‘We’re not going to be able to replace them when we get back.’
I choose a window out the front, Kas takes one on the side and Willow picks a lower one in the lounge room. We throw our rocks and the sound of smashing glass fills the air. Rowdy barks, more confused than ever.
When we finish we reward ourselves with a swim, heading to the beach about an hour before sunset, while there’s still some warmth in the air. The swell has dropped back and it’s easy for me to stroke out beyond the bar. Kas and Willow stay in waist-deep water, diving under the small waves and popping up to look out towards me. Eventually I catch a wave back to them, grabbing Kas’s leg under the water. When I surface she slaps my hand away but when I turn my back she jumps on me and pulls me under. I can’t remember ever feeling like this before, this thrill of being close to someone.
It’s almost dark by the time we trudge back up the dunes. At the top, we look back at the river mouth one last time. What we see when we turn towards home takes our breath away. The sky above the ridge that rims the town is lit by four fires, maybe a half a kilometre apart. Four beacons. Four warnings.
We’re no longer alone.
We drop to the ground, unsure of whether we’ve been seen. Kas sticks her head above the tussock grass and looks again.
‘Shit!’ she says.
Keeping low, we make our way down the track towards the beach road, cross it quickly and reach the trail through to Parker Street. There’s something uncomfortably familiar about the feeling of adrenaline pumping through my body. It’s not something I’ve missed these past few months.
We take cover behind the shed. I hold Rowdy by the collar and check that everything’s okay before running across the yard to the safety of the house. We lock ourselves in and close every curtain. It’s dark inside but our eyes slowly adjust until we can make each other out.
‘Well, that changes things,’ Kas says, one hand raking through her hair.
Something doesn’t make sense to me. ‘It’s weird,’ I say. ‘If it’s Wilders, why wouldn’t they come quietly and catch us off guard?’
‘Maybe they’re trying to flush us out,’ Kas says.
‘Are we still going to the valley?’ Willow asks. Kas and I exchange glances. I’m pretty sure we’re both thinking the same thing—we have to leave. And soon.
‘We’re packed already. We could go tonight,’ Kas says.
But she hasn’t been out in the bush like Willow and I have—she hasn’t seen the storm damage. It’d be impossible to find our way in the dark.
‘Too hard,’ I say. ‘I reckon we hold off till first light.’
‘They could be waiting for us up there. Any number of them,’ Kas says. ‘I knew we should have left earlier. You stalled us too long. Now look what’s happened.’
There’s a tense silence. Maybe she’s right. Maybe this is my fault.
Willow is looking from one of us to the other. ‘No use arguing about it,’ she says, sounding just like Stella. ‘How do we get out of here without being caught?’
‘I know the tracks better than anybody,’ I say, happy to move on from laying blame.
Kas seems to have moved on too. ‘Where do you reckon the fires were exactly?’ she asks.
‘I’m not sure but we’ve got traps set up on the fence and we need some meat for the journey. We’ll go there first.’
Kas is shaking her head. ‘You’re kidding?’ she says. ‘We might as well give ourselves up.’
‘Come on, Kas. They’re trying to spook us into running, showing ourselves. We could circle further west before we climb up to the ridge, get around behind them.’
She thinks for a while. ‘It’s a risk we don’t have to take.’
‘It’s not only the rabbits. We need the traps. We can’t afford to lose them.’
I get the feeling she can see I’m right. Besides, I’m the only one who can navigate; Willow’s never been the way we’ll have to travel now.
‘First light, then,’ Kas says. ‘Now, we need to sleep.’
‘We should have someone keeping watch, I say. ‘I’ll go first.’ I don’t tell them I’m so wired I couldn’t sleep anyway.
We open some beans and eat enough to keep the hunger pangs at bay through the night.
After Willow and Kas have bedded down on the floor, I slip out the back with Rowdy and retrace our steps to the platform. The fires are still burning. They look bigger and brighter, but I figure that’s because it’s darker now. I stand up on the railing to get a better view and, taking my bearings from the river, note each one’s location. And something strikes me as strange—they’re different sizes. The further west, the smaller the fire. I think I know why.
There is one problem, though—I’m pretty sure one of them is close to the hayshed.
It’s barely light when we walk out past the grove of sheoaks to Parker Street. We need to head around the western edge of the golf course, swinging as wide as we can through the scrub before we climb towards the ridge. The tracks out here are more like riverbeds—we have to pick our way along them. Kas and I walk all the more carefully with the bags. Willow has the bow over her shoulder and the arrows in a stopped piece of plastic pipe looped through her belt. Every ten metres or so there is debris blocking our way. The bush is eerily quiet—the wind hardly stirs the leaves, as though everything is finding its breath again after the storms. It takes us a couple of hours to get up to the ridge, and another hour to make our way in a wide arc to the hayshed. By the time we reach the paddocks the sun is fully up.
I was right—over in the furthest corner of the paddock, not far from the gate where I knocked Ramage off his bike, smoke rises from the remains of a fire.
‘I don’t like it,’ Kas says. ‘We should go straight to Ray’s.’
But I’m not giving up my traps that easily. ‘Unless we want to run across the open paddock, we’ve gotta stick close to the fence anyway. We can pick up the traps as we go.’
‘Shit, you’re stubborn!’ she says.
‘I wouldn’t be alive if I wasn’t.’
We move back into the bush and, staying low, head south towards the fence. The first trap is empty but it hasn’t been sprung. While Kas keeps guard and Willow holds an arrow tight in her bow, I crawl out of the bush, spring the trap with a stick and pull it out of the ground. It all happens in a matter of seconds and I’m back in the cover of the trees. The next two traps are also empty, but in the last one, closest to the gate—and the smouldering fire—is a rabbit, its back leg caught in the metal jaws, its eyes blinking.
Willow signals to me to take the bow. Kas shakes her head, but I know Willow can do this. She darts out, frees the rabbit and quickly stretches its neck, before pulling up the trap and scuttling back to Kas and me.
She pulls a piece of twine from her pocket and binds its feet. ‘You two have got the bags,’ she says. ‘I’ll carry this.’
‘Where did you learn that?’ Kas asks, shaking her head.
‘Finn,’ Willow says.
I hide the traps in the hollow log I’ve used before. Then we stop and take stock.
‘There’s no one here,’ Kas says. ‘That fire hasn’t been tended for hours.’
‘That makes sense,’ I say. I tell them about my walk up to the platform last night. ‘One thing got me thinking—why four fires? Why not just one?’
‘And?’
‘If it’s Wilders, they want us to think there are more of them than there really are. The fires were all different sizes.’
‘So?’
‘They were all lit by the same person and it took them a while to move from one spot to the next.’
Willow’s onto it, now. ‘So by the time they got to the last one, the first one was burning down.’
‘Okay, but there must still be someone up here, somewhere,’ Kas says. ‘We need to get out to Ray’s as quick as we can.’
We pick our way back down the ridge to the road that heads east towards Ray’s, feeling the weight of our loads, but saying nothing.
We stop to rest once we get to the road junction leading up to Pinchgut. We have to be super careful down here. It’s tough going though. When we swing east along the coast road we see the roof of a shed that’s been ripped off and blown halfway across a paddock.
But there are signs of new life, too. The bush is alive with wildflowers, pinks and purples and bright yellows and the last of the wattle blossoms.
I notice Kas is dropping back, choosing to walk on her own while Willow and I keep up a steady pace, Rowdy at our heels. Her head is down and there’s no purpose in her step. I touch Willow on the shoulder and we stop to wait for Kas.
‘What’s up?’ I ask.
She turns away. ‘Rose,’ she says quietly.
Shit, of course. I’ve been so caught up in getting ready to leave, planning the trip and making sure everything is locked up and safe, I’ve forgotten we haven’t been out to Ray’s since Rose died. I take Kas’s hand and gently pull her forward.
‘It’s hard,’ I say, ‘but we’ve gotta do it sometime. It might as well be now.’
The sun drops early, with spring not quite holding its own yet. It’s taken most of the day to get to the top of Ray’s valley. We’ve walked through the bush parallel to the road, climbing over and through debris. It’s exhausting. The light is falling away as we finally wind down the rough track to Ray’s top paddock. There’s not much wind but I pick up a faint smell of smoke. As we get closer, I realise the smell is much stronger than a fire burning in a stove.
We stumble out of the bush and stop.
Across the paddock is the glow of a large fire that looks like it’s been burning for a while. My heart stops. The slope of the land means we can’t quite see where it’s coming from, but I know its Ray’s house. I move to jump the fence. Kas grabs me by the arm.
‘Wait,’ she says, panic in her voice.
She pulls us into the bush and we use the trees as cover, making our way to the corner of the paddock. Here we drop down with the lie of the land until we’re level with the house. Or where the house used to be. There’s nothing left but a crumple of roofing iron and charred timbers. In the middle, the coals glow orange.
There’s no sign of Ray. Kas has her hands to her mouth and Willow stands beside her, staring through the wire.
As the sun drops behind the trees, the coals glow brighter. The shed in the home paddock is close enough to the tree line to get to without being spotted. We follow the fence downhill until we are about twenty metres from the shed.
‘I’ll go first and give you a signal if it’s all clear,’ I say. Kas and Willow nod, their eyes fixed on the remains of the house.
Leaving my sack with them, I slide through the fence wires and run as quickly as I can to the side of the shed. There is another smell here, something different from the smell of the fire, but I can’t quite figure it out. I should have brought the torch with me so I could check inside the shed, but it’s quiet so I whistle to Kas and Willow. Kas comes first, holding Rowdy by the collar to stop him bolting. Willow is behind them.
Just as they get to me a deep voice makes me jump.
‘Well, well,’ the voice says. ‘What’ve we got here?’
Two dark shapes appear out of the shed.
Wilders.
The man on my right strikes a match and lights a kero lamp. He lifts it above his head and pushes it towards us.
‘Well, I’ll be fucked,’ the other one says. ‘If it isn’t the ugly sister. I remember you.’
He sticks out his big paw and grabs Kas, pulling her towards him. She tries to shake him off, but he’s twice her size.
He holds her at arm’s length and says, ‘Feisty like your sister, too.’
The one holding the lantern brings it to my face, close enough I can feel its heat. His hair is long and straggly and it’s hard to tell where the hair ends and his beard starts. He smells like shit.
‘And this is the little prick we been chasin’ since last summer, isn’t it, Gauge?’
He leans in even closer, smiles and says, ‘You’re well and truly stuffed, boy. You nearly killed Ramage with that wire across the gate. You got a price on your head and me and Gauge, we’re gonna collect.’
Willow has been hiding behind Kas but the one with the lantern has spotted her. ‘And another girlie here, too,’ he says laughing. ‘Well, haven’t we hit the jackpot. We’re gonna be rich, Gauge.’
‘I knew it, Birch. I knew the fires would spook ’em. Couldn’t help ’emselves, I reckon, worryin’ about the old man, thinkin’ about the dead girl,’ Gauge says.
He’s holding Kas by the hair now, with his other arm around her neck. She’s trying to brace herself to push away from him but it’s having no affect.
‘Where’s Ray?’ It hardly sounds like me talking, my voice shakes so much.
Birch barks like a dog, then starts to laugh, pointing at the remains of the house. ‘A bit slow, the old fella. Then again, when you’re tied to a chair it’s hard to move real quick.’
I swing a punch with everything I’ve got and connect below his ribs but it bounces off him. In an instant he lifts me by my jumper and pushes me against the wall of the shed.
‘You’ll have to hit harder than that, son,’ he says. He slams a fist into my stomach and knocks the wind out of me. I crumple to the ground gasping for breath. Willow throws herself on top of me.
Birch reaches down and hauls her up by the arm.
‘You’ll bring a good price back in Longley too, girlie.’
Birch picks me up and pushes Willow and me into Kas. I feel rope being tied around my wrists behind my back. Birch starts to tie Kas, but Gauge stops him.
‘Not yet, Birchy.’ He licks his lips and smiles through rotted teeth. ‘Haven’t seen a girl in months,’ he says.
Birch laughs.
‘You look after these two,’ Gauge says, dragging Kas into the shed by her hair.
‘Wanna bag ta put over her head?’ Birch shouts after him.
Willow is cowering against me, pushing her head into my chest. We’ve been shoved onto the ground. Birch has seen Rowdy and he starts making clicking noises with his tongue, trying to win him over. Rowdy growls and backs away.
Everything is quiet. The lamp casts a huge shadow of Birch against the shed wall. I can’t hear Kas at all—no screams, no noise of a struggle—and the silence makes me sick.
Frantic now, I work at the rope around my wrists, twisting and pulling. I can feel blood trickling into my hands. Finally, I slip free. I’m watching Birch kneeling on the ground, all his attention focused on Rowdy, when a figure rises behind him. It’s Kas. She lifts a piece of wood the size of a baseball bat and brings it crashing down on Birch’s head. There’s the sound of bone cracking and the kero lamp hissing where it falls into the damp grass. Birch is thrown forward by the blow, his neck snapping back as he hits the ground. Kas lift
s the wood again and brings it down on the back of his head. Then again and again. I cover Willow’s face, but she knows what’s happening.
Kas is yelling with every blow, a wild howl, filled with tears and hate.
‘Ugly bitch. Ugly bitch,’ she says over and over.
I get to my feet. ‘Kas’, I say. ‘Enough. It’s enough, now.’
When I grab her arm and take the piece of wood, she slumps to her knees and pounds the dirt with her fist. Her body heaves and shakes. When I reach out and touch her shoulder she brings her hand up to hold mine. It’s sticky with blood.
‘What happened?’ I whisper, trying to see back into the shed.
She shakes her head and looks away. The moonlight reflects off the blade of a knife on the ground. It’s one of the kitchen knives I packed before we left and it’s covered in blood right up to the handle. I squat down and put my arms around her, holding her until her body is still.
After a minute or so, she shrugs me off and stands up. She takes a deep breath and looks at us. Her chin is up and I hardly recognise her voice.
‘No one hurts me,’ she says. ‘No one.’
She wipes her hands on the grass before picking up the knife, cleaning it in the same way and sliding it into her belt.
I lift the lantern that Birch has dropped. His body is a formless lump in the dark. There’s blood on the handle of the lantern but the wick has somehow stayed alight. Holding it up I see Willow cowering against the wall of the shed. Kas has walked off a few metres and is bent over, vomiting.
I go to Willow. ‘Wils, it’s over now. It’s all over,’ I say.
‘Is Kas all right?’ Her voice quivers.
‘She’ll be okay,’ I say, hoping I’m right.
‘Did he hurt her?’
‘I don’t know. But he can’t hurt us anymore.’
