by John Marsden
On the way out I noticed one interesting thing, although I didn’t realise what it meant until a bit later. Above each bed there were two brackets, about a metre apart. Or less than that, probably eighty or ninety centimetres. They were made of brass, and were screwed to the wall. They looked like they could support some weight.
I got to the door of the building, the door I’d come in by, and took a quick peep out. It looked clear, so I slipped through the little gap. Now I was in the open, on the outside of the barracks, a frighteningly exposed position again. I was a great target for anyone wanting to earn a medal. I looked to the right, I looked to the left, I looked to the right again. Then I stepped off the kerb.
And nearly got run over.
All that road safety training in primary school could have cost me my life. I’d become so used to looking to the right, which normally would be fine, but in this case wasn’t. The soldiers had hurried off to the left, and that’s the way I should have looked.
Fifty metres to the left two officers had appeared. You could tell they were officers. The morning sun glinted off their gold braid, but even without that you could tell. It was the way they walked, like they owned the place. They were completely at home. You knew no-one was going to yell at them for being late for sentry duty, or for having dirty boots.
They were strolling along the road having a good old chat. They didn’t have rifles, but although it was hard to tell from that distance, I thought they might have hand guns in holsters on their hips.
I stood there having a little tremble. They still hadn’t seen me. But even as I trembled I knew I had to do something. A voice of logic in my head was saying: ‘You have to be calm, think coolly. It’s your only hope.’ I knew from working with stock that the men hadn’t seen me because I was standing still. You can get away with a lot by not moving. It’s amazing what you can get away with. But although my stillness had saved me so far it wouldn’t save me as they got closer. A teenager standing in the doorway with a pile of food plundered from their fridge? Yeah, sure, they were going to walk right past and ignore me.
I started to ease back into the building. I’d closed the door behind me but the tongue hadn’t gone all the way into the catch, which was a bonus. So it opened quite smoothly and quietly. I was still in the shadows and now I slid a little further into them. They were only thirty, maybe thirty-five, metres away. A jet screamed overhead and although they didn’t look up I thought it might distract them slightly and give me the moment I needed. As the noise hit maximum decibels, and the jet crossed the roadway on its way to the landing strip, I did a quick fade into the dormitory, closing the door behind me.
There was no yell of alarm from outside. I ran to a window and peeped out. The two officers were still coming, totally absorbed in their conversation. That was fine, except that now I was in a building where I didn’t want to be, couldn’t afford to be. Not if I wanted to stay alive.
Which I did.
I ran to the back windows. There was nothing much there to look at: all open space, a huge expanse of airfield. The jet I’d just seen was now taxiing to a halt, smoke puffing from its wheels. Soon it would start swinging round to go meet the fuel truck.
I ran to the front again. I was feeling like a rat in a trap, and acting like one too. All this frantic running backwards and forwards, an animal in a cage, hoping against hope there’d be some little hole she hadn’t noticed before.
This time from the front window I saw an even more frightening sight. The officers were angling towards the barracks. They were on a course that would bring them through the door in seconds. I had another rush of panic: paralysing, frightening panic, and again I had to fight madly to keep it down, to suffocate it. They were only ten metres away.
I looked around wildly. The kitchenette was on my right but there wasn’t much cover in there. At the other end, on the left, was what had to be a bathroom, but I hadn’t bothered to check it out. I could fit into a locker, thanks to all the weight I’d lost in this war, but that was too much of a cage for my liking. Too claustrophobic. No hope if I was found in there. Looked like it had to be the bathroom. I ran towards it, on swift, silent feet, still clutching the food. I didn’t dare drop it now.
The bathroom had a swinging door, like in restaurant kitchens, and as I swung it open I heard the men open the barracks door, behind me. It was as close as that. A photo finish. Had I been snapped by their eyes? I had to know. I turned and grabbed the door to stop it swinging and put my eye to the crack.
I couldn’t see them, and for a moment my imagination went into a crazy and horrible fantasy where I pictured them creeping down the sides of the room until they were either side of me, ready to launch a big assault on the bathroom. Then one of them crossed my line of vision. He bent down and checked the corner of a bed, as if to see how neat it was. ‘Of course,’ I thought. ‘They’re inspecting the place. That’s why everything’s so immaculate.’ I remembered Mike, the big black-haired Maori or Samoan soldier who Fi liked so much, and how he’d said the best thing about coming on the mission was that you didn’t have to worry about inspections any more. Sounded like life at home with Mum sometimes.
I left the door and fled to the other end of the bathroom. There was another door here, another swinging door, and I pushed it open after only a quick peep. I had to hope no-one was in there.
I was in a room that was like an annexe to the main dormitory. But it was completely different. It had a lived-in feeling – that’s just a polite way of saying it was a mess. Beds unmade, clothes scattered everywhere, an open jar of peppermints on the floor, and at my feet three or four pages of a letter written on light blue aerogram paper.
None of that was important. Only one thing mattered. Above each bed, resting on the same kind of brackets I’d noticed in the other room, was a rifle. Dark, black, heavy things, so sinister. Magic wands of death. But they had magazines in them and I knew they could just be the only hope I had. I didn’t hesitate. I jumped onto the nearest bed, grabbed the rifle and lifted it down.
First things first: I checked the magazine.
It was loaded to the brim. It looked like as many as twenty rounds in there. For the first time that morning I felt some sort of satisfaction. If this was the day I had to die, then at least it wouldn’t be helplessly; I wouldn’t be gunned down with only my bare hands outstretched to fend off the bullets.
I took a peep through the bathroom door. No movement yet. I didn’t know which room I should hide in. Neither had an exit door, and the windows were too small and too high up. One thing for sure: there was nowhere to hide in here. Just four bare walls, eight beds and eight lockers. I couldn’t get under the beds, because they went right to the floor – they had drawers under them. And even if I changed my mind about hiding in a locker, I wouldn’t be able to fit the rifle in as well. But I didn’t want to change my mind about that.
What it came down to was a huge gamble. If the officers were doing an inspection they might not bother with this room. Obviously there was some reason it hadn’t been cleaned up: maybe the guys who slept here were away on a mission or something. And the officers would know that, wouldn’t they? So they could easily say to each other: ‘No point checking in there; they’ve gone to bomb New Zealand.’ If they did that and I stayed in this room then I was home free. On the other hand, if I stayed here and they came in, someone was going to die.
On the third hand, if I went in the bathroom and hid in a cubicle – the only place in the bathroom where I could hide – they might go right past and never know I was there. They might. All the cubicle doors were closed. I’d especially noticed that. I could get up on the dunny so my feet wouldn’t be seen under the door.
They might also open the cubicle door and find me crouched on the dunny, wide-eyed, like a kangaroo caught in a spotlight.
I didn’t have time to sit down on a bed with a piece of paper and make a list with two columns: ‘Points For’ and ‘Points Against’. I di
dn’t have time to make a careful, calculated assessment of the situation. I’d already taken a couple of minutes to get the rifle and check the magazine. I had to make a decision.
‘Ellie,’ I said to myself firmly, ‘whatever you decide, stick with it. No use worrying whether you’ve done the right thing.’
In other words, I had to live or die on the decision I was about to make.
I went to the end bed and threw the food on the floor between it and the window. Then I lay on the floor, the rifle beside me. My right hand gripped it. I’d already flicked the safety forward and made sure there was a bullet in the breech. If they found me I’d have to shoot my way out. There were no other options. There seemed to be so few people around that I might just get away with it. But what then? My head started to hurt, thinking of the complications. I shut my eyes hard for a moment to block out those thoughts. I couldn’t afford them. They were too distracting. I realised this was one of those times when I’d have to make things up as I went along; me, who always liked things to be organised, who wanted life to be planned, who’d been taught by my father that ‘time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted’.
Now there was no time for reconnaissance, no time to think of consequences, only a blind faith that if I got away with this action then maybe I could get away with the next, and the one after that, and the one after that, and so on. Of course something would go terribly wrong sooner or later. It would be like one of those cheap jumpers where you catch one thread on a nail and the whole sleeve suddenly unravels until you don’t have a jumper any more. I had to hope it would happen later rather than sooner, when maybe Homer or Lee would be around to help.
I suddenly held my breath, imagining I heard a voice. I realised, to my sick horror, that it wasn’t imagination. It had to be the officers and they had to be very close. Were they in the room or not? I couldn’t be quite sure. It was possible they had come in without my hearing the doors open. Just as I decided that no, they weren’t in this dormitory, they must be in the bathroom, I heard a voice very close. They were here all right, they were about two beds from where I was lying. I nearly lifted off the floor in fright. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d levitated way above the bed, where they could have a good view of me.
My grip tightened on the rifle. There had to be a shoot-out if they kept coming. I had the advantage of surprise. That would be worth a second. In that second I had to kill them both.
The same voice spoke again. He was still a couple of beds away. The other voice answered from way up the far end of the room. It wasn’t a huge room, but it made my chances infinitely slimmer if I had to jump up and try to find him before I could shoot him. But, if that’s what I had to do, then that’s what I’d have to do. I was so hyped up now that I thought I really could levitate: I pictured myself springing up like I was on a trampoline and shooting both guys before they’d even moved.
My skin was prickling: lemonade legs again. Lice. I remembered my grandmother saying she suffered from something called prickly heat. I always thought it was a funny, interesting expression, so it stuck in my mind. Now I had prickly heat like my whole skin was burning, hot pinpricks all over me. I was keyed up to screaming point.
Then it happened. I went into automatic and lost myself completely for a couple of seconds. I was a robot, a terminator. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced that before. There was a sudden shadow and all at once one of the officers was standing there. He was looking above my head at I don’t know what, a mark on the wall maybe. He hadn’t seen me. I swung the rifle up before he realised I was there. His mouth started to open with shock, but that was the only reaction he had time for. I couldn’t miss at point-blank range. It was over in a split second. All I had time to notice was the way his hair flew up when the bullet hit him: his eyes closed and his hair went up like a sudden violent wind had gone through it. The force of the bullet sent him flying backwards over a chair. No human could have hit him as hard as that bullet did. But I didn’t look any more. I didn’t want to see the awfulness of it, and besides, I had another problem.
I swung round to the left, lifting the rifle a little higher as I did so. The other officer was in two minds, running to the door and at the same time reaching for his handgun. It seemed to be caught in the holster: he was wrestling it with one hand as he reached for the door with the other. He got the gun free as he pushed the door open. He swung towards me as he entered the doorway. I think he was hoping to get off a shot as he fled into the bathroom. But he had no chance. I was never going to miss. I squeezed the trigger. He went crashing through the door, leaving a smear of blood on it. I heard his body hit the hard bathroom floor with a terrible crash. I think he would have broken a bone or two as he landed, but he wasn’t going to be worrying about that. It seems weird to think someone can break a bone after they’re dead. I suppose it happens though, and it may have happened to him.
I knew now that there was no going back. I had knocked down the first two pins and the rest would have to be knocked down, no matter what it cost. I didn’t know how I was going to break the news to the others that I’d signed their death warrants, but at least I’d do all I could to give us a fighting chance. The first thing I did was get four more rifles down from their racks.
I tried not to look at the bodies. I checked the one in the bathroom, briefly, to make sure he was dead. The bullet had caught him in the neck, so he was dead all right. I won’t describe what he looked like, but his body wasn’t in one piece any more. I’d shot the other one just below the chest, and he was dead too.
And just as I didn’t spend any time looking at the bodies, I didn’t spend any time thinking about what I’d done. I wasn’t a robot or a terminator any more, but I wasn’t back to normal either. I still wasn’t Ellie. I just got on with the job. I tried to be focused, to block out any ugly, frightening, nightmarish thoughts that would stop me doing my job effectively. I had to stay on automatic or I wouldn’t be able to do it at all.
I grabbed the ankles of the man who was lying on the dormitory floor and dragged him in between two beds, where I chucked a blanket over him. I chucked some more blankets over the blood on the floor. It was all in the vague hope that people mightn’t find the bodies for an extra half hour or so, because that could be absolutely critical for us. The dormitory was such a mess that maybe no-one would notice the blankets scattered around.
Next stop was the bathroom. I ran towards the door. And it was at that moment, when I was just two metres away, that it flew back on its hinges. I hadn’t expected that. I hadn’t heard anyone coming. I didn’t have any of the guns with me. They were all on the bed. I had two instant thoughts and I don’t know which came first. Maybe neither of them did. Maybe they were simultaneous. One thought was that the enemy soldiers were back, returning to their barracks, and they were going to kill me. Tear me to pieces, at a guess. The other thought was that the soldier in the bathroom hadn’t died after all: he had come back to life and was going to kill me. What’s that movie where you think the guy’s dead and suddenly he rears back up at the goodie and everyone in the theatre screams? I can’t remember. Maybe it was The Terminator.
My face went into a huge spasm and my left arm lifted up completely out of my control. It was weird. I could feel it happening but there was nothing I could do to stop it. I started to bend at the middle too, as if I expected a bullet to hit me there. That’s how sure I was that my luck had finally run out for good.
Chapter Seven
It was Homer.
Oh Homer, there have been times in my life when I’ve been glad to see you and times when I haven’t, but this time, yes, I was glad to see you.
Back in New Zealand there’d been a move to give us a medal or something. It seems like that kind of stuff takes about fifty years to organise though, and about sixteen committees have to consider it and you have to have heaps of independent witnesses. So we didn’t think about it, although I’d like to have seen Robyn get one, a big one. But H
omer that morning, he should have got one. He was truly brave.
Fi had seen the officers go into the barracks. Kevin and Homer were the only ones in the hangar. She ran and got Homer, who was on the toilet at the time. From inside the hangar, as he ran towards the little door, still pulling up his daks, Homer heard the shots. He knew they’d come from the barracks, and he knew they meant I was in desperate trouble. He didn’t hesitate. With no weapons he crossed the road and stormed into the dormitory. When he found nothing there or in the kitchenette he went on through the bathroom, over the dead body, and into the annexe. That was a brave thing to do.
He didn’t tell me that at the time of course. Every second was precious. We couldn’t stand around having conversations. All he said was: ‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but let’s get the other one in here.’
That was the first he knew that I’d killed two of them. But he didn’t ask questions, just helped me wrap the two parts of the man in a bedspread and drag him out to where I’d put his mate. As we did it I grunted: ‘They ambushed me.’ Homer just nodded. He was probably feeling like chucking up, which was the way I was feeling.
I used towels to wipe up the blood. It was a revolting job because he’d bled an awful lot, unlike the other man, who hadn’t bled much at all. But I thought it was worth doing. It took five minutes, and if it bought us six minutes it was worthwhile.
‘Do you think anyone else heard?’ I asked Homer.
He shook his head.
‘There was a jet went over just as you fired. Even Fi didn’t hear.’
That was good news, wonderful news, although I was amazed I hadn’t heard the jet. Shows what concentration can do for you. Now that Homer mentioned it though, I realised that a number of jets were landing. There was one every thirty seconds. For all I knew it could have been going on for ages. I wouldn’t have noticed.