‘Stay calm.’
‘Oh, Christ, Louis is in there!’
‘Yeah, and my brother’s in there,’ I said. ‘We stay calm. We think this through.’
‘Someone has to stay with the cars.’ Fry put a hand on Lee’s shoulder and pushed her gently. ‘For when Kalowski and Knowlesy get here. Go, Sandy.’
‘Butyoucan’t go in as well!’ Lee begged. ‘That’s not in the training. First rule of rescue: don’t create more casualties. Remember?’
‘Fuck the rules,’ I said. ‘Fry, let’s move.’
RUSSELL
The lights stayed on this time: white, humming, blinding. I squinted carefully around, trying to be as still as I could. I knew I was casting shadows. That my breathing wasn’t as quiet as I’d have liked. The forest around me was cut through with beaten dirt paths. Stacks of cyclone fencing. A pile of rotting wood. An ancient, rusted tractor. There were wires running from tree to tree, thick and bundled together with cable ties. I saw some huge floodlights that were not lit like the ones in the near distance. I braved a look back the way I’d come, couldn’t hear anything above my own heartbeat. Possums in the canopy above me, disturbed by the lights, leapt from one branch to another, shimmying along the wires, trying to get somewhere dark.
I spotted him at the same time as he spotted me. He was dressed neck to knee in camouflage fatigues, gloved up, the chest of the shirt bulging with kevlar. Stephen Branch’s face was blacked out with dark green cammo paint, so that when he turned his big eyes on me, and spread his smile wide, his face contorted into a hellish, grinning mask. I was so stunned by what I was seeing, I didn’t even think to raise my gun. Branch reached for something beside him, a switch, I guessed, hidden from my view by the trunk of a tree. With his other hand he raised the rifle, prepared to catch its stock and fire at me.
The lights went out. I ran again, hearing the shot smash into a tree to my left, feeling the splinters and smelling the burnt wood.Dothe unexpected.The world was twisted, my mind was frantic, but the slant of the land under my boots told me which way was downhill, towards the front of the property, where the rest of the police team was. Where my brother was. I didn’t head that way. Instead, I turned left, heading uphill, knocking trees with my hands and shoulders as I blundered my way through the blackness.
I felt the earth beneath me give as I stepped on a trap, the hole yawning open to take me beneath a weave of what felt like palm fronds and leaves and sticks. I staggered, almost went down, pushed myself up and carried on. I found something with my hands. Rust, raw metal edges: an old trailer or the hull of a boat left ditched in the dirt. I slid in behind it, waited, minutes passing, grateful for each second that I had Stephen Branch’s focus and wanting more time to pass while I kept him away from Dodge and Evan and the others. The snap of a twig behind me somewhere made me turn. I lifted my gun and aimed that way and waited.
A movement in the darkness. I fired twice, heard a cry that was sickeningly familiar. I was so horrified that I stood at full height.
‘Evan?’
Lights like another hard blow straight to the eyeballs. Branch was there, behind me, fifteen feet away. I turned to see the rifle pointed directly at my chest. He raised it to fire and a shot came flying past my arm, catching Branch in the hip, below the Kevlar vest, spinning him into the undergrowth. I bolted out of the firing line of the two shooters, seeing Branch lunge for the light switch out of the corner of my eye. Darkness swallowed us all. He was still mobile. I could hear him scrabbling through the bush. I needed to draw him away from Evan. I crashed loudly through the bush, one hand out and one on my pistol, pushing through another thicket of thorny vines, hitting the edge of something hard and horizontal. A verandah. I followed the verandah until it became the familiar slatted side of a weatherboard house.
‘Hey!’ the girl’s voice called. Branch, mimicking a terrified teen girl again. He was somewhere behind me, what sounded like fifty metres, in the bush and coming fast, making no attempt to hide the sound of his footsteps. ‘I’m here! I’m here! Please help me!’
‘Fuck you!’ I shouted back. Because I couldn’t help it. Because I was angry, and afraid for Dodge and my brother, and terrified for myself. More gunshots out there in the dark. Pistols popping and the rifle cracking in response.Do the unexpected.I started up the stairs, then changed my mind, came down and turned towards the back of the house. I crept along the side of the dwelling with no plan, and no knowledge of what lay inside waiting for me.
Arriving at the back corner of the house, I heard a rifle shot. A window blew out at the front of the house, where I’d just been. The sound of glass spraying on floorboards. That was weird. Why had his aim been so far off? At the back of the building, a soft gold light was spilling from a window. I used the glow to avoid a bear trap lying open and gaping at the foot of a set of wooden stairs, teeth pointed upwards. I dropped and slithered under the house instead of going up the stairs. I lay taking long, shaking, quiet breaths to try to calm my heartbeat.
Silence. Stillness.
Minutes ticked by.
I expected Branch to come around the side of the house. To pursue me the way I had gone. But as I listened, I heard a floorboard creak above me, ten feet or more to my left. I replayed the past minute or so in my mind and realised with shocking clarity that Branch must have been exchanging fire with whoever else was out there in the dark at the same time as I was reaching the house, and he had missed seeing me going back down the steps and around the side of the house. Relief and exhilaration plucked at my insides. That’s why he’d fired at the house. Why he’d taken out one of the front windows. He thought I was inside.
I rolled onto my back and listened, blood or sweat trickling down my temples, running in rivulets into my hair and down the back of my neck. In the distance, I could hear sirens, shouting. I closed my eyes, tried to separate the layers of sound. The night, and its creeping, crawling, chittering creatures. The distant growing police presence. And above me, getting closer now, the pad of a boot on floorboards. I knew then, by the sound of that soft footfall, that the person in the house wasn’t Evan. Or one of the other cops.One step after another, Stephen Branch was hunting me inside the house.
An idea formed slowly in my mind. I raised one leg and pushed on the floorboards above me. They gave a satisfying creak. I waited, hearing nothing but silence, then pushed gently again. The sound of Branch’s footfall was almost indiscernible. He was probably sticking to the edges of the room, there the boards would be more stable, less prone to creaking. A light came on, glowing dimly through the cracks in the floorboards, not strong enough to be in the room I was directly below, but perhaps a hallway outside that room. I looked around, examined the shape of the joists in the floor, found that the room above me was showing cracks of light in all but one large rectangular space. A cupboard? A wardrobe? I rolled over twice, as silently as I could, pressed my foot against the bottom of that darkened space and eased the pressure on. The floorboard creaked. I heard Branch enter the room, the barest creaking of boards just above where I’d been. I pressed the boards above me a final time.
Rifle shots into the cupboard above me. I bit my lip, raised my weapon and fired at where I guessed Branch must be standing. Five fast, desperate shots, spraying myself with woodchips and dust and cones of golden light.
There was a groan, long and loud and full of pain, let out in Stephen Branch’s own voice. Then there came a heavy thud on the floor above me. The sounds told me that I’d hit my mark.
EVAN
‘Rus? Rus?’
I went up the verandah steps and stopped outside the front door of the ragged little house in the bush, put my shoulder to the wall. Fry leapt the steps in one bound and arrived beside me. There was shouting in the distance, but beyond the verandah rail all I could see was blackness. I’d heard seven gunshots inside the house, rifle and pistol. Now there was a silence so thick it made my ears ring.
‘Russell!’
‘Yeah,’ my brother said from somewhere at the back of the house. Fry let out a short but heavy sigh of relief. ‘He’s down. I’m coming in through the back door.’
‘We’re at the front,’ I said. I kept an eye through a glass panel in the front door on what looked to be a kitchen. Garbage bags, plastic tubs filled with items, a dead brown plant sagging over the edges of a pot, dry leaves curled around the rim like witchy fingers. Russell appeared in the doorway, paused, looking through it into another room. He was covered in blood from head to foot, a bright red mask of it, forearms running long streams that dripped off his fingers. The nice white business shirt was filthy with sweat and blood and dirt. I was fairly bloody myself from pushing through the blackberry, but nothing like this. He looked like a horror-movie extra, turning his fierce, adrenaline-pumped eyes on me as he opened the unlocked front door and I came into the house.
