Page 102 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

And just too late she remembered she wasn’t, and then, almost instantaneously why it would have been a good idea.

He yelped, but more in surprise than pain, and instead it was she who gasped at the impact and the crunching jolt travelling up her own leg as she broke toes instead of dislodging his patella.

He stared at her, and now the smile was gone and a different kind of wetness was pouring from his mouth. Dark, red-black wetness.

“You thtupid bit—” he began, and then dropped the hatchet as he felt for his mouth to see why his voice sounded so wrong, or perhaps why his tongue has throbbing with so much sudden pain. He gagged as he found the damage, the gouts of blood pulsing from the wound made by his own teeth catching the tongue as she had smacked his jaw shut, half severing it. It was the moment of horror that bought her the time that saved her as she corkscrewed and slipped her head out of the towel and followed Plan A.

Better to run than fight.

Always.

She sprinted for the fields, for the wide space where she would be able to hide in the falling darkness, or at least see him coming, running for the folds and humps of the distant machair that she was sure she knew better than him. By the time she’d had her second thought and wondered if she should have tried to barricade herself in the house it was too late. The adrenaline had only masked the pain of her broken toes for the first couple of hundred yards and now it made her wince and gasp with every other step.

She heard the dispiriting kick of the starter-motor on the quad bike behind the house and then the sound of it bumping and clanking into the chase behind her.

The pain in her foot was serious now, making her limp and slowing her and she hadn’t even reached the gate at the mouth of the Road to Nowhere. But she still careered onwards, unbalanced and squint as she was, throwing everything into a furious lurching sprint, because she was running with a plan now. If she could get to the fenced fields she could jump the first wire and run diagonally, while he would have to take the quad the long way round to get to the open gate at the other end, by which time she should be able to get over the next fence, which would mean he had to double round and travel twice as far to make the next again open gate into the second field. And by that time, in her hastily concocted plan, she would have reached the relative safety of the machair humps and the back of the dune system where her knowledge of the terrain would help her hide. There was even a weapon of sorts out there, if she could get to the old shovel.

It was a good plan.

The falling darkness that she had hoped would cloak her was cut by the bouncing headlight of the bike cutting a swathe through the thickening murk as he rounded the corner of the house, the trailer it pulled clattering and complaining and making its motions swervy and jumpy as it clanked and roared across the uneven ground towards her, eating up the precious distance she’d gained with absurd speed. She felt herself pinned by it like a searchlight as it cast her long jolting shadow across the grassy lane stretching ahead of her. She gritted her teeth and told herself she just had to make it over that first fence.

She hoped she might just make it there before he caught up. The quad was slowed and made ungainly on this rougher ground by the laden trailer whipsawing behind it.

It was still a fine plan.

Would have been a better one if she hadn’t put her good foot in a rabbit hole and gone down hard enough to jolt tears from her eyes and punch all the wind and hope out of her at the same time. She tried to breathe in but it just wouldn’t come. Still, she tried to haul herself up and start running, but the ankle treacherously gave way like it wasn’t there at all, and she toppled again, and then she got another jolt that let her get a breath in, but it was too late.

She heard the man shout something loud enough to be heard over the growl of the quad, which obscured the words but let the unmistakably exultant note through, and then the engine noise snarled louder as he revved the bike between the open gateposts at the head of the Road to Nowhere, headlights bucking and jolting as the machine flew across the uneven ground as he drove with one hand and held the axe aloft shouting as he came for her.

All she could do was roll sideways out of the path of the main beam, but she came to a halt trapped against the rusting rabbit-wire at the bottom of the side fence and the beam swung as he steered for her as the motor pitch shifted from a snarl into a high whine as he gunned it right at her.

And the only thing she could do was futilely hold her hand up defensively, palm out, shielding her eyes from the high-beams as if the gesture itself could somehow prevent the inevitable impact.

Magical thinking.

And. Yet. But.

At the moment her outstretched hand reached the limit of her arm’s reach—

—the impossible happened.

The quad bounced into the air and lost direction, and as the lights twisted out of her eyes she saw the man fly off the seat and then in the following red glow of the tail-lights she saw he lost his grip on the axe and it went spinning away into the darkness behind him as he remained in place, hung in mid-air, swinging and jerking between sky and earth, as if held there by the force coming from her outstretched palm.

She didn’t really register the quad hurtling past her, grazing her shoulder with the clanking trailer as it slowed and quietened and then undramatically rolled to a halt in the middle of the track and just sat there, idling as if nothing remarkable had just happened. She stared at the man still stuck impossibly in mid-air as he twitched and spasmed and then finally quietened in the fainter glow of the tail-lights now twenty metres behind her.

She watched him for a long time, not daring to take her hand down in case the magic failed, and then as the arm got tired enough that the lactic acid burn in the muscles somehow pulled her back into herself, she worked out what had happened. The quad had bounced up on the uneven ground and he’d been too focused on running her down to notice the length of wire bracing the two gateposts, the wire she normally hung her towel on. If she’d done that today she’d be dead or injured, because he’d have seen it. As it was, he had not registered the taut metal stay until it – like her earlier blow – caught him under the chin. But in this case the power of the accelerating quad clotheslined him, the taut wire cutting straight through his neck and severing his spine, killing him instantly, and leaving him hanging in the ruddy glow of the tail-lights. It wasn’t magic that killed him.

It was just horsepower and basic physics.

Then gravity joined the show as the flap of skin and tendon still holding his head on to the rest of the body slipped, and his head hinged back like a Pez dispenser she’d had as a child, and he came free and dropped to the ground beneath with a solid slump and thump. The sudden movement after the stillness of his airborne suspension shocked her and just for a moment she thought he was coming for her like some kind of zombie in a horror film, but he just lay there and didn’t move, more like a bundle of clothes than a person now.

She still watched him for a long while, trying not to think of Pez dispensers. And then she pulled herself to her feet and used the fence wire as a handrail as she hobbled back to the quad and turned the key decisively, silencing the chuntering engine and killing the lights.

If he had friends there was no point signalling where he was. Where she was. And lights on a dark and deserted island were going to be visible from a very long way off.

She didn’t want to look at his body yet, so she leaned against the trailer and let her eyes adjust to a night that had suddenly turned darker than any of the ones that had preceded it.

She had to put her credulous, magical thinking brain away. She was now back to being her practical self. No time for wonky thoughts. She’d allow herself to have the shock later, she decided, when she had space for it. For now?