Oscar checks Tajik’s phone. We crowd around.
Our green dot is far from any roads or houses. We’re right in the middle of the first rectangle of bush. There are several more before we hit the fields and farms near Richmond. The top of the screen says it’s 9.12 p.m.
‘Five kilometres,’ Oscar says. ‘Nine hours or so until dawn. We can do this.’
Alex chortles unpleasantly where he sits on a mossy log.‘Maybe you can. I’m exhausted, my feet hurt. I don’t think I can—’
My anger flares and without thinking, I raise my rifle to aim its red light at his face. ‘You want to stay here? Is that it?’
‘No!’ Alex cowers, shielding his face behind his fingers. ‘Please don’t!’
At the edge of my vision Nathan’s eyes are wide and he has his hands up. I realise how this looks. My friend thinks I’m going to blow Alex’s head off.
‘Danby,’ he says. ‘Don’t.’
I shake my head. ‘I’m just lighting him up.’
‘No,’ Alex cries. ‘Please.’
Oscar steps close to me. ‘“Lightin’ him up”—do you know what that means?’ He turns to Alex. ‘No more negative bullshit from you. Or we will leave you for the rats. Last chance.’
Alex nods furiously.
Little confrontations—sharp words, teachers’ rebukes, showdowns with Stephanie—used to leave me trembling inside. Now I’ve got an assault rifle aimed at someone who’s supposed to be an ally and I’m as steady as . . .
Nathan touches my shoulder. ‘Put it down.’
I lower my weapon. Marv and Tajik let out loud breaths.
‘Safety,’ Oscar says.
I follow his gaze to my rifle. It’s set to ‘Fire’. I don’t remember doing that. No wonder Alex is shitting himself. I return it to ‘Safe’.
Oscar permits himself a tight smile inside that beard of his. I can’t tell whether he’s wary of me—or weirdly impressed.
I sling my gun over my shoulder and crouch by Evan. Rest my hand on his forehead. As if his innocence can flow into me.
Tajik hands Alex a bottle of water. ‘We can make it.’
‘That’s right,’ Marv says to Alex and all of us. ‘We get through this night. Then we work out what we’re doing and who goes where, okay?’
Oscar squats beside me. ‘Evan okay?’
‘Think so.’
He circles a finger in the dirt. ‘What Louis did back at the house wasn’t right,’ he says in a low voice just for me. ‘We can’t kill in cold blood. Not unless we want to be like them.’
I shake my head. ‘I wasn’t going to shoot him.’
Oscar glances at me. ‘You didn’t know what you were going to do.’
He might be right.
‘It’s okay,’ he says gently. ‘You just need to channel that anger at the right targets. Do you wanna take point?’
I blink at Oscar. ‘Point?’ I’ve heard it in the movies but I can’t remember what it means.
‘It means you go at the front, make sure we’re not in danger.’
Put myself in danger—that’s what Oscar’s asking me to do. I wonder if it’s because he trusts me. Or because he doesn’t want me standing behind anyone with a loaded gun. I don’t mind either way: I want to face whatever’s out there. Maybe that’s how Louis felt when he ran back to meet his fate head on. Another of Mum’s journal pages flashes into mind: ‘Hardcore—or not at all.’ She’d illustrated that one with a picture of a punk standing on top of a tank.
‘Sure,’ I say. ‘What do I do?’
‘Stay a few metres ahead,’ Oscar says softly. ‘Move slowly. Be alert to any sight, sound, movement, smell. If something’s not right, turn your light to the ground and put a hand in the air. That’ll tell us to go dark and get down. When it’s all clear, give us the K flashes.’
I nod. ‘And if Jack’s guys are out there?’
Oscar grins. ‘If you haven’t got any other choice, then, Danby, you light them up. What that means is—’
‘I get it.’ I smile. Lighting someone up must be army speak for shooting them. Alex is a gamer. He would’ve known that. With me saying that—and taking off my safety—it’s no wonder he thought I was going to kill him.
‘Were you a soldier?’
Oscar chuckles. ‘I rode with a crew full of ex-army tough guys. They were always talking about “back in the day”. I s’pose some of it sank in.’
He shows me Tajik’s screen. Runs a finger along at a thin blue line in the wilderness ahead of us.
‘This creek, near the road,’ he says, handing me the phone, ‘we’ll rest there. Reassess. We good?’
I’m not sure how I’m supposed to respond. Sir, yes, sir? Hoo-ra?
‘Okay,’ I say.
Oscar looks down at Evan.
‘I’ll carry him for a while,’ he says. ‘Give Marv a rest. If that’s cool with you?’
We stand and Oscar hefts my little brother onto his back. While he confers with Marv and they swap assault rifle for .38, Nathan zips bottles into my backpack.
‘Are you okay?’ he whispers in my ear.
I turn around. Rifle flashlights pointed at the dirt, it’s like we’re standing in crimson mist. But I can make out Nathan’s frown.
‘I’m fine.’
‘You sure?’
I nod. ‘You’ve got my back, right?’
Nathan smiles tightly. ‘Right behind you.’
Going ahead on the path, there are fewer bodies. Grasshoppers spring off the trail between ghost gums that look blood washed in my red light. I keep the phone to my chest, glance at it every so often to make sure our green circle’s moving in the right direction. Whenever there’s noise, I do what Oscar said, and I hear them stop as they turn flashlights off behind me. I crouch, listen, cautiously shine my torch ahead and around, aware I’m making myself a target. I wonder whether I’ll even see the flash and hear the blast of the bullet that kills me. It’s freaky to think about that. I quietly hope it’s a quick death—and can’t believe I’ve been reduced to having something so awful as a wish. But all I ever see are possum eyes shining from branches in the second before they crash away to safety. When silence returns, I stand and walk on, the others rustling behind me, their glow at my heels.
Then, just like that, the trees cease. Ahead is cleared land under low clouds. I hunker inside the line of bush and flash my signal back at the others.
As they come to me, we click off our torches.
‘What’s up?’ Oscar says in the darkness, setting Evan down against a tree.
‘Just out there,’ I say, crouching by my little brother. ‘A big empty patch of land where there should be bush.’
I hand Oscar the phone so he can see the map’s wrong.
‘What do we do?’ Nathan asks, scrambling back from the edge of the bush. ‘It’s fully exposed out there.’
‘There,’ says Tajik, pointing through the brush. ‘Lights.’
Four then five then six bright circles twinkle across the horizon. Evenly spaced. Appearing. Disappearing. Reappearing. The rumble reaches us. Motorbikes. Yellow headlights shuffling along a tree-lined road and shifting to red tail-lights as they head north.
‘Shit,’ says Alex. ‘We should turn back.’
‘Quiet,’ Oscar says. ‘Let me think a sec.’
We peer at the screen as he zooms in and out on our position.
‘The bikes were there,’ he says, pointing at a main road on the map. ‘About three kilometres away from where we are.’
He scrolls along the route they’re taking. It leads to our destination: Richmond.
‘Bloody hell,’ says Alex. ‘They must’ve caught him, Louis, he must’ve blabbed. Oh, man—’
‘Shut up!’ I snap. ‘Just shut up, all right?’
Alex’s face recedes from the phone’s halo of light. But not before I see the fear in his eyes and realise that I’m part of what scares him. Old Danby would feel a surge of shame at being so rude and angry and mean. But old Danby’s big
gest worries were matching wits with her stepmother and whether some boy liked her.
‘Everyone keep calm,’ Oscar says. ‘Them out there means they’re looking. That’s all it means. And if they’re looking, they don’t know where we are, right?’
Tajik nods. Marv crosses himself.
Oscar looks at Nathan and then out at the empty field. ‘Any way around you could see?’
Nathan shakes his head. ‘Best I can tell it’s cleared for a few hundred metres before the bush starts again.’
‘The road’s pretty far away,’ I say. ‘Keep the torches low, they won’t see us, and we’ll hear a chopper coming.’
‘But if one comes we won’t be able to outrun it,’ Nathan says. ‘And there’ll be nowhere to hide.’
‘I don’t think there is much choice,’ Tajik says.
Our eyes meet. Nods all around.
All except Alex.
‘Alex?’ Oscar hisses, spinning around. ‘Alex?’
No answer. He’s not standing apart from us. He’s not behind a tree taking a piss. While we’ve been whispering intently in the phone light, he has slipped away into the darkness.
‘Oh, you idiot,’ Nathan says.
‘Come back, Alex!’ Marv calls out.
‘Ssshh,’ Oscar says. ‘Shine the lights back there.’
We aim our torches into the bush behind us. See only red and black shadows. We don’t see Alex. But we hear him break from cover and catch a white glimmer through the tree trunks.
‘He’s got a phone,’ Nathan says. ‘Shit.’
Shining like that, headed back towards our enemy, he’s risking us all.
‘I’m going after him,’ Oscar growls, pulling the .38 free from his jeans.
‘You all keep going,’ he says. ‘I’ll catch up.’
‘What if—?’ I begin.
What if he doesn’t catch Alex? What if they make either of them talk?
‘I don’t know,’ he says, tossing me the phone. ‘Just go.’
Then Oscar’s chasing after Alex’s bobbing light.
‘Are you okay with Evan?’ I ask Marv.
He already has my little brother up and is adjusting the backpack. ‘Yeah. Righto. Let’s go.’
‘Shouldn’t we wait?’ Tajik says.
‘He said to go,’ I say. ‘He’ll catch up.’
I know what they’re thinking because I am too: Louis also said he’d catch up to us.
I lead us out of the bush and into the paddock. Marv and Tajik and Nathan follow the path I pick between grassy tufts. I hope I’m right about our red lights not being seen from the road. But a useless bit of trivia flashes into my head to trip me up: a single candle on the ocean is supposedly visible from a 747 at thirty-five thousand feet. A helicopter a few kilometres away might easily spot our scarlet glow moving through the landscape.
No chopper thunders across the sky after us. Minions don’t pop up from a hiding place. It seems to take forever but we eventually reach the far trees, slump down and ease out from our backpacks.
I join Marv, stroke Evan’s cool forehead, envy his oblivion.
‘Is he okay?’ Nathan says, sitting down next to me.
‘As far as I can tell. Are you?’
Nathan rolls his shoulders. ‘Nothing that being very far away from here wouldn’t fix.’
Marv laughs. ‘You’ve got that right. How’re we doing, Danby?’
I hold the phone for them to see that our green dot’s close to the blue creek and red line of road.
‘Up here,’ I say, pointing past those landmarks, ‘is the state forest. It’ll be safer there.’
I don’t know that. Not in the slightest. But it sounds like the right thing to say.
Nathan lets out a long sigh as he stares back across the dark paddock.
‘Shall we wait?’ he asks. ‘Just for a while?’
‘Yes,’ says Tajik.
Marv agrees.
‘It’s nine forty,’ I say. ‘Give him ten minutes and then we keep going?’
We spread out among logs and mounds of earth with our assault rifles aimed south into the night. We listen for any hint of what’s happening: motorbikes, gunshots, explosions. All I hear is Evan breathing in his backpack papoose next to me. ‘Yummy fried rice,’ I whisper to him. ‘You can have it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I’ll find you a toy store. We’ll get a new Big Bear, Sandypants—everything you want.’ I tell Evan more of the fun things we’ll do. It’s as much in the hope some part of him can hear me, as it is me convincing myself there can be light at the end of what’s like a world of tunnels.
I check the phone.
It’s 9.51 but I don’t want to give up on Oscar.
‘Give him a few more minutes?’ I say.
No one disagrees. Even though we all know we’re screwed if Jack’s guys get Alex before Oscar can.
‘There!’ Tajik says. ‘There!’
We feel our way to where Tajik lies in a sniper position behind a fallen tree. Far as I can see he’s staring into a black void.
‘Out there,’ he whispers. ‘I swear it is true. I saw it. There!’
Across the paddock there’s a long white flash. Then a shorter blip. Then another longer one. Darkness resumes.
‘It’s him,’ I say. ‘He’s using Alex’s phone.’
Marv bristles. ‘They could be making him do it.’
I nod. ‘You’re right.’ A weight settles on me. I realise it’s expectation. These three men, all older than me, are waiting to hear what I say next. Surviving Jack, figuring things out, taking point in the bush, being blunt with Alex—somehow it’s all added up to me taking charge. I don’t have time to know how I feel about it. ‘You guys take Evan back inside the treeline,’ I say. ‘I’ll stay here. I’ll answer and wait. If it’s him, I’ll flash you. If it’s not, well, you guys cover me when I start shooting.’
‘Uh-uh,’ Nathan says, somewhere close to me. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
‘I need you to have my back,’ I say. ‘You guys get Evan out of here. Wait for my signal.’
Nathan sighs. ‘Bloody hell. All right.’
Marv lifts Evan from my side and they shuffle deeper into the bush behind me.
I’m alone. In the dark.
White flashes come again. I use my hand in front of my torch lens to respond with a dash-dot-dash. A second later my message is returned: K.
Safety’s off. Finger on the trigger. I sight down my rifle at the white glow weaving across the field. Sweat makes my head wound sting.
The phone glow halts and tilts to the ground. ‘It’s me—Oscar,’ comes a voice.
But there are two figures clumped out there.
‘Who else?’ I call out.
‘I’ve got Alex,’ Oscar says. ‘I’m going to raise his phone to show you, okay?’
He shines the light on them from below, throwing their faces into skull shadows.
‘Come on.’ I breathe out slowly, switch my rifle to ‘Safe’ and turn on the torch to guide them in. ‘We’re just inside the treeline.’
Alex wanders in first. He’s gagged. Hands bound in front of him with a plastic bag. Looks at me like a wounded animal.
Oscar rests a hand on his shoulder and prods him to a tree stump. ‘Sit there,’ he says, clicking off Alex’s phone and putting it in his pocket.
Alex obeys, stares at his feet.
Nathan, Marv, Tajik and I circle Oscar. He looks at us all but what he says is for me. ‘He ran because he thought you were going to kill him.’
I swallow hard. Me pointing the gun at Alex was a mistake.
‘You need to tell him everything’s okay,’ Oscar says quietly.
I tense.
‘Not for him. For us. If you can’t do that then,’ he raises his voice, ‘it’s your call on the other options.’
My call. Other options.
Eyes go from Oscar to me.
I nod and leave them to go to Alex. He blinks up at me.
Seeing his gag and tied wrists makes
me feel bad. This is how Jack treated me.
I crouch down and remove his gag.
‘I’m sorry,’ he blurts. ‘For whining, for running. I’ve got anxiety problems. I’ll try, I really will. I promise.’
I think about Wahhaj, the airline pilot who put his plane into the Sydney Harbour Bridge during the Snap because his passengers’ minds only saw the bad in him. I’ve been like them—only seeing Alex from one angle. He might be scared and selfish but he just wants to survive like all of us. Maybe I’ve been a bully to demand bravery. ‘I’m sorry too,’ I say, meaning it. ‘I really didn’t want to frighten you with the gun.’
Alex wipes his eyes with his bound wrists. The fear slips from his face a second too fast for my liking and his smile looks too much like a smirk. Oscar already told him he was on his last chance. Now he’s getting another one. I wonder if I’m being played.
‘You really think we’ll make it?’ he asks.
It’s already ‘we’ again. I pull the Swiss Army knife from my pocket and fold out the biggest blade.
‘We are gonna make it,’ I say. ‘The question is: are you?’
Alex’s smile melts. ‘Hey, what are you doing?’
I let the knife blade glint in the red light a second. The steel looks bloody. He needs to remember the other option I’ve just passed over.
‘Don’t make me regret this,’ I say.
Alex nods.
I cut through the plastic binding his wrists.
Oscar takes point and we advance to the creek.
We clamber down an embankment, hide under a wooden bridge and share out food and water.
I check Evan. As much as I hate keeping him like this, it’s actually the only way we can escape. Not just because of the mind-tracking thing. Dragging him through this terrain conscious, terrified and crying, would be impossible. But I also couldn’t do it alone. Carrying Evan very far is beyond my capabilities so I’m hugely grateful to Marv for doing most of the heavy lifting. Especially considering that he’s running in the opposite direction to where his own loved ones linger.
‘How you holding up?’ I ask, offering him a snack pack of cheese and crackers.
Marv smiles. ‘Carried a heavier backpack in Nepal,’ Marv says. ‘Of course, I was thirty years younger.’
The Last Shot Page 20