by TJ Park
“He wants to go!” Warlock blurted. “Let him go!”
Scott stood alongside his father. He was keen. “I’ll come with you, dad.”
“No.” Rob’s soft objection cut off Janet’s louder one. He had been prepared for such an offer. “You’re staying here to hold the fort.”
Scott was about to argue, but Rob pulled him in closer and began whispering in his ear. The boy had his back to Doug and did not see Doug approach so he could listen in. Rob was aware of Doug’s eavesdropping, but made no attempt to hide what he was saying to his son. He was using the old angle of Scott staying behind to protect his mother and sister, but he knew it wasn’t enough to hold the boy. He spiced it with a secret plan he had to capture the crims. And he needed Scott to stay inside the house and be ready for when he sprang it. Of course, with Doug listening in he never intended any such thing. He just wanted his son to stay put.
“Can I depend on you?” he finished.
Scott nodded in earnest.
“Good man,” Rob said, squeezing his shoulder.
Doug stepped back before Scott could turn and discover him close by. The poor kid had no idea the big secret he was keeping was writ large on his eleven-year-old face.
A torch was balanced precariously on the edge of the mantel, shifted by the regular thuds. Rob removed it and turned for the door. Doug moved out of his way without comment. Warlock watched the grazier in near-superstitious awe. Even Mick spared him a respectful glance while shaking his head.
Janet bleakly followed her husband. She wanted to speak to him, but was unable to express intimate and untried words in front of the others. She also knew how Rob wanted to play it: no crying, no fuss. Protracted goodbyes would only distress everyone more, especially the kids.
Rob hefted both rifle and torch in a firmer grip, readying himself.
“Maybe you should leave those here,” Mick said. “We might need them.”
In other words, don’t let them go to waste.
Astonishingly, Rob appeared to think about it.
Janet turned Rob to her and pressed her hands over his on the rifle and torch. Her grip tightened momentarily, almost vehemently. They were awkward in front of the others. No kisses, but their eyes locked together for as long as the brief goodbye allowed. Rob broke it first, ducking past his wife to give Lauren a peck on the forehead. The girl was left blinking as her father strode to the barricaded front door. The barricade was such a ludicrous set-up, in retrospect, with the cool air wafting through the broken windows on either side.
Rob paused there, looking toward Doug.
“I won’t help you do this,” Doug said.
Rob began to jostle with the barricade on his own. Scott rushed over to help. Rob’s shout of “No!” stopped him in his tracks.
“I need you to hang onto that gun at all times.”
He passed his son a conspiratorial wink that was tragic in its transparency. Doug guessed the other man’s reasoning. Rob did not want his son to remember assisting his father’s death.
Warlock leapt forward. “I’ll give you a hand, mate.” He started pulling on one end of the hallstand, but Rob said, “Wait.” The grazier cocked his head, alert for some signal. “When I tell you.”
Boom! The house shook again. The roof wailed.
“Now!”
Together they shouldered the hallstand aside, the noise they made concealed inside the impact out back.
The open doorway gaped like a wound. It made everyone feel exposed and vulnerable, though most of the house, thanks to busted-out windows, was just as open. Rob set a foot at the threshold, making it his starting line. Doug tensed along with him, watching the heel of Rob’s hind foot rock up and down, ready to launch him away.
Rob waited several beats longer than seemed right and Doug wondered if the grazier was losing his nerve. He wouldn’t fault him for it. Then the house shook again and Rob was off and running before the reverberations could finish winding their way through the timbers.
Warlock tried to push the barricade back into place, his feet sliding over the floor more than the hallstand. Scott didn’t offer any assistance this time. Doug helped him shove it back, clapping it flat against the doorframe.
“No,” Janet said, “you have to leave it open for when Rob gets back.”
A look passed between Doug and Warlock. It was one prospect that seemed very unlikely. Regardless, Doug pulled back one corner of the hallstand, leaving enough of a gap for Rob to slip through.
He joined Scott at the closest window. Mother and daughter were more sensible, staying away from the front, not wanting to bear witness to their loved one’s slaughter.
The grazier was fast. Doug only caught a vague notion of Rob stealing into the black interior of the machinery shed.
“He made it!” Warlock whispered hotly.
“Halfway there,” Doug amended. He waited for any sign or hint of Rob being brought down. He was that certain it would happen.
Then the usual relentless boom rattled out back and the noise snapped Doug out of his fatalism. He wanted them ready for a quick evacuation if by any chance Rob did succeed.
He got Warlock to help him lug the crate into position near the door. It had been brought in the day before at the behest of Mick, who’d been unable to bear the thought of it sitting out in the broken-down jeep any longer. At the sight of it, Mick sat upright with barely a wince. Forget the water of Lourdes; the contents of that crate was the only panacea he needed. He pushed himself out of his chair and hobbled over toward it.
“All of this … over that,” Janet murmured in sickened disbelief.
But you could see a reluctant hope rising in the Clarkson faces. Perhaps Rob’s hope would come to pass – the intruders gone and the nightmare with them.
That hope was short-lived. Mick slowed as he approached the crate at the door. He was coming to recognise, as did everyone else, either directly or intuitively, that the interval of quiet since the last impact was too long.
The silence kept lengthening with no further intervention.
Warlock glanced toward the rear of the house. “Oh … oh, shit.”
Lauren’s low, almost inaudible wail touched icy fingers up Doug’s spine.
Everyone waited. They were not really waiting to hear from Rob any more, or from the familiar. They were bracing themselves for confirmation that the two had met.
Mick joined Warlock and Doug at the open door, not willing to call the whole thing off just yet. “Rob monkeyed the engine on me. It’ll take him time to undo it,” he said.
“Any suggestions on what we do if Rob doesn’t …” Doug didn’t finish.
Scott threw himself away from them and found another window from which to watch out for his dad.
The silence spun out. It became excruciating.
Janet broke it, though she did it so quietly it hardly made a difference.
“You gutless cowards. Rob is worth more than the three of you put together.”
Mick started. Doug coloured. Warlock just accepted it as fact. He dared the gap in the doorway, squinting as if he was looking out at the sun instead of the dark.
“Hey, something’s happening out there.”
A portion of shadow extended from the machinery shed, then hived into the nuggetty shape of the ute. It approached the house at a slow pace, as if trying to mask the gritting of stones under its tyres.
Doug shouldered Warlock aside. “You did it, Rob,” he muttered.
The ute came on. Doug tried to seek out Rob’s shape within it, but the lights weren’t on and the windows were unintelligible black sockets.
The ute turned about and came to rest alongside the front stair of the veranda, its motion spent.
Doug was certain this would be the moment when the monster would arrive from nowhere, flipping the ute over with a nudge of its head, or leaping onto the tray with forepaws braced on the roof like a conquering king mounting his throne.
Boom …
The floor be
neath them jittered. Warlock uttered a small shriek.
“Shut up,” Doug muttered, as Warlock opened his mouth to speak. Doug held up his hand, kept it there.
They waited to see if the latest blow to the house would be only a one-off or a resumption of the former pounding. They waited with hearts in mouths.
Boom! With the second impact, Doug and Warlock attacked the barricade, dragging the hallstand back to admit passage of the crate. With Warlock taking up the rear, Doug began hauling the other end out the door. And there he halted, Warlock thumping his half of the crate into the back of his legs.
“Doug?”
“A torch,” he whispered harshly. “Get me a torch.”
Warlock’s end of the crate dropped with a bang, but the noise only irritated Doug momentarily. The back of the house crashed straight after, covering it up.
Doug asked himself if there had been an infinitesimally lengthier pause than normal between the two crashes out back. The situation out front was just too inviting. He could summon the crackle of stones under the ute’s tyres, but he couldn’t do the same for the low thrum of the engine that should have been accompanying it.
And where was Rob? Waiting in the ute with an offer to drive them?
A torch nudged Doug’s arm, and he realised that while he waited for it he had remained inert, holding up his end of the crate. He placed it down gently, very gently, and took up the torch greased with Warlock’s nervous sweat.
Perhaps Rob had managed the unlikely feat of pushing the ute up to the house, doing it to remain quiet, steering it with a hand stuck inside the driver’s window, letting it go at the last, so it could drift perfectly into place.
Yeah, right.
Doug shone the torch outside. He roamed the beam through the ute’s windows, over the rest of the vehicle, around it. Nothing out of order he could see. And not one grazier to speak of.
Doug snapped off the torch. He had listened carefully this time and the interim between crashes out back had built up just a little too long while the ute was lit up like an apparition.
Doug scrambled over the crate in his rush to re-enter the house, before dragging it in behind him. He didn’t care about how much noise he made now. He kept tripping over Warlock, who wouldn’t get out of his way fast enough.
“What is it? What’s happening?”
“It’s a trap.”
Warlock took a quick peek outside the door, simultaneously pulling his head in like a turtle in the same movement. He looked at Doug with wide, heedless eyes. “Hey, Doug. Hey. We shoot off a few rounds … threaten his kid … he’ll come out of hiding.”
“It’s not Rob that’s waiting for us, Wally.”
Warlock’s newfound zeal was pulled up short. He looked askance in the direction of the unhurried pounding out back, then out the front door again. He passed a shaky hand over his mouth.
A quick, warm body tried to slip past Doug. “Dad? Where are you?”
Scott almost made it out the door when Doug snapped a hand over his arm and swung him back inside, snatching the boy’s rifle away in the same motion.
Scott hit the floor, skidded along it. He stared up at Doug in mute shock before springing up with a child’s preternatural agility, rushing him.
“Give that back, you piker! That’s mine!”
Doug raised the rifle out of reach, planted a flat hand on the boy’s chest and shoved him back into the room before any of his wild, feckless swings could make more than glancing contact. A transplanted kitchen chair went over with him.
Lauren cried out. Though Doug was braced for further admonitions, Janet spoke not a word. Her growing dread for her husband was too large for other concerns, even her son. She went to the boy absently, but he would have none of it. He eluded her embrace and retreated to a far corner, weeping in shame.
Warlock was having another gander out the door, terror and yearning warring in his face. “Jesus Christ, Doug! It’s so close!”
Doug tried Mick. “What do you reckon?”
“I reckon a hassle-free getaway at this stage is too good to be true.”
“It’s a couple of steps away,” Warlock whined. “I could piss that far.”
“It’s trying to sucker us again,” Mick said. “The same way it used me to get you out of the house. It’s just got better bait this time, hasn’t it, Wally?”
He turned a baleful eye on Warlock.
Doug didn’t mull it over for long. “I think you’re right. In fact, I know you are, but we’re going anyway. You up for it, Mick?”
Mick sighed heavily. “You know it.”
Doug turned to look at Janet. “You and your kids are coming with us.”
Janet looked surprised, then angry. “No! We’re waiting for Rob.”
“I’m not arguing with you. You’re going. Get yourselves ready.”
Mick pressed Doug’s elbow. “Do we really want to load ourselves down?”
“Maybe we do,” Warlock said softly. His eyes wouldn’t stay steady. He didn’t look anywhere near the Clarksons. “You know … they mightn’t only be in our way.”
Mick, about to produce an insult, nodded consideringly instead.
Doug was about to argue against such an idea when a huge, rending crash cut him off. The three of them fell into crouches instinctively. Billows of dust surged through the kitchen entrance.
It was the commencement of the house coming down.
They stayed a few moments in their stooped positions, not moving, waiting to see if their section of the house would remain standing or be the next in line in a swift chain reaction.
It held. For the time being.
“Scott? Scott!” Janet looked at Lauren accusingly. “Where’s your brother?”
Lauren had her hands placed over her head. She used them to gesture uselessly. “I don’t … I d– don’t –”
“Scott!” Janet ran about the living room. Doug found her antics distracting. The boy could still be there, amongst them, hiding. The room was hazy with unfurling dust.
“Scott!” Janet confronted the entrance to the kitchen. It was closed up, blocked by a leaning wall that used to be part of the kitchen ceiling.
She shook her head firmly. The resolve in her was clear. He was not under there. He could not possibly be. Her conviction impelled her to search the rest of the house still standing. She went down the hall, to Scott’s room first, arriving just in time to see his hands unlatch from the windowsill and vanish from sight.
She ran to the window, but the dark outside erased any sign of him. Screaming his name, she began to clamber out the window.
A hand closed over her trailing ankle before she could swing it the rest of the way outside. She lashed out with a kick and sunk a good shot into Doug’s ribs. He crumpled to the floor, expelling air, but didn’t let go. He climbed up her leg, hooked the belt at her waist, and hauled her back in, giving her head a good rap on the window casing as he flung her away into the room. He tried to shut the window – never mind the glass was missing – but it wouldn’t give, seized into place by the twisted frame.
From the corner of his eye he saw Janet launching herself at him and he thrust his elbow back. It connected high and well. He turned around expecting it to be Janet’s turn on the floor, but found her still standing, if hunched over, gripping her shoulder. When she saw him looking she lunged for him again. He grabbed her wrists to stop her from clawing his eyes; his hip was thrust forward to keep his crotch from being kneed.
She was in a frenzied state. She would have corkscrewed right out of his grasp no matter the injuries obtained if he let her keep struggling.
“Let go of me! Let go of me, you shit!”
Doug said, “I’ll get him.”
They were not words picked out of the air to soothe a hysterical woman. But she hadn’t heard. She folded her legs up to try and make him let go. He gave her a brisk, head-snapping shake. “Listen to me! I said I’ll go get him.”
She went absolutely still, with stunned
eyes and unfastened mouth.
“I’ll do it,” Doug repeated. “I’ll go and get your son.”
***
Casting about for what he would need outside, Doug strode past Mick and Warlock in the living room, not looking at them.
“We on, Doug?” Warlock asked.
Doug hastened in his hunting around.
“We on, Doug?” Warlock asked again.
Doug found he could speak if he didn’t stop moving.
“The kid went looking for his old man. Someone’s got to go get him … make sure they don’t get together and think they can get the drop on us.”
He could barely glance at Warlock, embarrassed by his flimsy excuse. He couldn’t face Mick at all. Why wasn’t Janet screaming at him to hurry up? A craven part of him wanted her to demand it so he could refuse and escape with the others.
Boom …
The familiar was not pursuing the Clarkson boy just yet. They experienced another stump keeling over, another part of the house coming down with a grinding crash. The laundry room maybe?
He found what he was searching for: extra ammunition for the rifle. It was in a box on a side table his eyes had raked twice already. He stuffed his pockets with bullets.
Emboldened by the house’s latest collapse, Warlock scuttled over. “Forget the kid, Doug. The ute’s right there. We’re never going to get a better chance!”
“No, we probably won’t,” Doug agreed as he went for the door.
Warlock lunged into his way. “He’ll be okay, Doug. He’s a tough little bastard.” Warlock laughed crazily. “Fuck! Why are you doing this? He hates your guts! He’d shoot you as soon as look at you!”
Warlock turned to Mick for support, but the old man wouldn’t intervene. Doug almost wished he would. But Warlock didn’t mind begging.
“C’mon, Doug. We need you. You’ve got a responsibility to us, Doug. Us.”
Doug almost wavered. Janet came forward and put out her hand.
“Give me the gun. I’ll go.”
Doug jerked the rifle away. “No.”
“Oh, fucking no,” Warlock cried out, covering his face with his hands.
Mick did not have to physically move into Doug’s path to halt him in his tracks. He did it with a look. “You have to do this, don’t you, son? You’ve got no choice in it.”