The Practice Baby

by LM Ardor

  Adam hesitated then turned back to the car. Dee ran. In the time it took him to get through the gate she’d be at the first creek crossing. The water would slow him down but would it be long enough? All the photos in the world wouldn’t bring Leah back to life once Adam got away with her in the boot. Dee had to believe that help was on its way.

  She got across the creek easily in the Blundstones and clumped up the narrow mud slope between the steep sandy banks on the other side. The boots were full of water and left obvious deep muddy prints. The bush rose steeply to the right, up the hill to where she’d been. If she went back up she could check if help was on its way as well as send the video. At least then the world would know what had happened to her and Leah. Up the hill she’d be visible for some of the way. Adam was fitter, he’d easily catch up with her before she could get a message out.

  If Leah was dead already she should save herself, get away as far as she could. The chances of Adam finding her in the bush were minimal.

  But if Leah was alive Dee had to stall longer. Adam didn’t need to hurt her. His complaint to the medical board was going to destroy her credibility. He thought there was no mobile coverage and would realise she hadn’t got the video out yet. He didn’t know about the pictures from the top of the hill or that help was—might be—on its way. The phone was the only thing that could be used against him. If she gave him hope he could catch her and get the incriminating evidence, he might hang around longer and help might arrive in time.

  She took off the boots, dried her feet on her shirt and crossed to the other side of the path in bare feet as the four-wheel drive churned through the slippery round stones of the riverbed. At the top of the rise out of the creek crossing, Adam stopped. Dee could see him looking at her footprints. Her breath was loud in her ears; she opened her mouth to minimise the noise. Her heart thumped so loudly she was sure he’d hear it if he got close.

  A dense thicket of she-oaks grew where the stream meandered through low ground to make a marsh. Joe had warned her not to deviate from the track even though the grassy cover looked solid in places. She shuffled under the low branches. The ground was covered in a cushion of the long soft needles of the she-oaks.

  Adam opened the door and got out. He paused to look around then moved up the hill in the direction of her footprints. He disappeared quickly. Dee wriggled back under the low branches of she-oaks. She moved slowly to warn off any snakes, although Adam was more dangerous than any of the creatures in the bush.

  Go on, go up, go after me. She willed him to pursue her as she calculated how far to let him get till she could get to Leah.

  There was no sign of him further up the hill. This was a game to him. How long would he fall for her trick? She felt sure his eyes were scanning the bush right now. How close was he? How long would he wait?

  She wanted to run to Leah—and do what? Yell through the door, smash a window and drag her out into the bush? None of those options would be any use. A rock would smash the car window but how would she move with or hide an unconscious body? Any noise would bring Adam right to them.

  Keep your nerve, wait, she told herself. She slipped the phone out of her pocket and switched it to silent.

  She scanned upwards. He could be up there waiting for her to move or he could have crossed back to her side of the track further round the hill and be creeping up behind her.

  She needed him to be out in the open so she could keep a safe distance between them.

  As she watched the hill she realised Adam could be anywhere. If he stepped carefully he could be only a few metres behind her before she noticed him. She slowly scrabbled across the ground till she was closer to the creek where he could not sneak up on her. In between sustained attention to the hill, and any birds that might be disturbed and break cover above the canopy, she tried to scan 360 degrees every minute or so. The bush was eerily still. No birds or scuttling small mammals or reptiles anywhere near. It was probably just her presence that had silenced the normal activity. Don’t let it be Adam.

  On the day she’d found Leah in the national park the girl had appeared as if from nowhere. She was no colour, a beige blankness that blended perfectly with the bush. Dee could do with some camouflage.

  She-oaks grew in wet places, the edges of streams and marshes. Dee dug down under the bed of dry needles and found damp mud. It smelt of rotten egg gas but she rubbed it all over her arms, face and neck. She looked down at herself, the boots were already satisfactorily filthy. Her jeans were handy for the back of Joe’s bike and sliding down the hill on her bottom but denim navy wasn’t a bush colour. She scrabbled for more mud but the first hole was now just water. For a while she used her left hand till that was just water too. Slowly she wriggled backwards. Her T-shirt was beige, it needed patchy dirt to break up the uniformity. Her jacket had been pinched from Eleanor. A zippered hoodie in a light pinky-orange cotton knit. The wind protection of the zip and the hood to cover her hair were useful on the bike but in the bush it was totally high-vis. She quickly slipped it off and rubbed it with clods of thick blackish mud from close to the edge of the creek.

  She had no idea how much time had passed. Her bottom was the only thing that wasn’t muddy so she wiped her hands clean on it and slipped the phone out of her pocket.

  Shit. She remembered her hair, bright red with a white streak. You could probably see it from outer space. She slathered more clods of smelly mud all over her hair too. Her Army Reserve training was coming back. A weapon would be good but for now she needed to rely on her wits and what she knew of her opponent. He was fit but it was gym fitness not bush fitness. Adam had no respect for her capacity to fight back. Both were flaws she could exploit. And he really hated to get dirty.

  It was fourteen minutes since the last message to Raj. No chance of help yet.

  She opened the hoodie and used her teeth to tear off a pocket from the inside. She tore off some smaller shreds of fabric and stuffed them into her jeans. She broke off small branches and stuck them through her hair and into her top. Monty Python and the Holy Grail popped into her head. She didn’t want to be the knight who thought he could fight on after all his limbs were cut off. No, she was disguised as a ‘shrubbery’.

  She looked at the phone again but she couldn’t remember what time it had shown before. She went back to the message time. Another five minutes gone. Her brain was on overdrive and she couldn’t trust it to judge how long had passed. She turned down the light on the phone and started the stopwatch. They had to be somewhere between twenty to forty minutes from Moruya. No chance of help for another ten minutes at the earliest. She silently willed Leah to keep breathing.

  In a short time, a minute or possibly seconds, three crows rose cawing loudly from about a third of the way to the summit. It had to be Adam. Let it be Adam. She needed to know for sure. If he was up the hill she had a good five or ten minutes till he got back. There were some small rocks in the mud. They were the only things she could fling any distance. She found one she could throw. She tossed it at a hollow tree trunk across the creek. No reaction. Further away on her side of the creek she’d spied some blue objects gathered together, a bowerbird nest. Hopefully the nest owner was waiting for a female to be attracted by his display. This time she chose a bigger rock and lobbed it right into the middle of the blue collection. The male came out fighting, wings extended, feathers fluffed and screeched blue murder. That was enough. If Adam was close she would hear him move.

  Dee counted to sixty, probably around thirty seconds. No Adam, so she got up and went to the creek where she stepped carefully across leaving a trail of muddy footprints from her boots on the other side. She laid her trail of a torn fragment of orange hoodie and some broken branches. Her heart was thudding. It must be strong or she’d have dropped dead of a heart attack by now.

  She told herself to pay attention. She couldn’t afford to waste a second.

  She let her bright red phone case slide down the slope above the creek so it came to rest on a ro
cky ledge out of reach of the path and of the creek. The cover landed on its side. From above you couldn’t tell it was empty but from below you could possibly see it was just a cover. If Adam wanted it he’d have to scramble down the mossy bank and hopefully fall into the sucking mud. Dee broke off a sapling and managed to reach far enough to push the cover back from the edge. There was no way to tell now if it was only the cover or the real thing.

  No time to dry her shoes again so she walked backwards, carefully putting each foot on a previous footprint. It was good; it made the prints look fresher. She needed to be quick. She snuck back under the low branches just as there was a noise above the car. Adam crashed through the spindly undergrowth of juvenile gum trees. He stood on the track in front of the car about 100 metres from her and scanned the bush. His eyes passed right past her without a flicker. Apparently he didn’t see her but who knew how that machine brain of his worked. Maybe he had seen her? He started to walk into the bush at a slight angle to where she was. He’d pass within a few metres of her. If he had seen her she’d be too close to escape when he pounced. Her legs twitched with the need to run. It was almost impossible to lie still with him so close. She had to hold her nerve and hope he’d see the fragment of hoodie.

  His hair was ruffled, and there was dirt on his trousers. Dee had never seen him with a hair out of place before. He stopped just five metres away. His back was to her.

  ‘Dee, this is silly. If you want Leah to get help we have to hurry, come on out. You know it’s the only way.’

  The idiot was looking right at the creek and a torn patch of her jacket. Dee waited, she took tiny breaths to keep quiet.

  Look, look! she urged silently.

  Adam walked a few metres on; too close to the bowerbird’s exclusive domain. The brave bird charged him. Adam jumped but recovered quickly. He looked around and spied the orange patch. He walked to the creek but hesitated at the edge, dirt and mud were not his style.

  ‘Dee, you know this is going nowhere. Leah needs medical attention. Is her life worth these idiotic games? Come out and we’ll go straight to the hospital.’

  Just look harder, she mouthed.

  Adam reached down and undid his shoelaces and put his socks and shoes neatly together. Then he undid his pants, stepped out of them, folded them neatly and sat them on top of the shoes.

  Yes, yes, you idiot. Bare feet would give him no grip. He was in the water, up to his ankles, slipping on the mossy rocks. He almost fell before he took the sensible course and followed Dee’s footprints across the larger rocks that were mostly out of the water. He scrabbled to get up the bank and walked the few yards to the torn orange patch.

  He squatted and looked down. Yes! He must see the muddy handprints she’d made on the rock above the phone case. He had to guess she’d leant down to try to retrieve the phone. Even if he was suspicious he couldn’t afford to ignore it. If he had the phone all his troubles were over.

  Adam stood and walked away along the path. Dee’s heart sank. Was he blind or so focused on her that he would leave the phone? She calculated the distance to the car. Would the keys be in the ignition or his pants? Neither scenario fitted but he hadn’t taken them out of the trouser pocket when he took them off.

  She was about to make a run for the car when Adam reappeared on the track above the creek. He had a long straight gum branch in his hand. He lay down on the rock and used the branch to try to pull the phone case up. Maybe he was onto her and wanted to see if it was the phone or only the case. The branch wasn’t quite long enough and he wriggled further out over the rock. This time he seemed to have connected and pulled the branch back up towards him. It was almost right up, near his other hand when something red clattered down the slope into the creek. Dee heard Adam mutter an expletive. He never swore.

  She checked the time—another eighteen minutes. That made thirty-two minutes since Raj called for help. Were the police on their way? Leah’s brain could be compressed from a haemorrhage. The lower part of the brain, the part that controlled the vital functions, would be squashed down through the hole for the spinal cord at the base of the skull. As the delicate tissue was compressed Leah’s heartbeat would fail, her breathing falter then stop. Every minute counted. The girl needed medical attention. Dee had to make sure Leah was still alive when help arrived.

  Adam had retraced his steps, this time across the higher, safer rocks. He looked upstream. It was about ten metres to where the phone case had fallen, across large slippery boulders and some dark pools. It was impossible to tell how deep they were.

  He jumped in. For the first few metres the rocks on her side of the bank blocked his line of sight. Dee moved quickly. She was tempted to check his trousers. She hadn’t seen him take the keys out of the pockets. But she knew him. He wouldn’t leave them. It was too risky. It could even be a trap to get her out in the open.

  Once he saw the empty case he’d be back. As he walked up from the creek bed he would be eye level with her hiding spot. She needed to be ahead of him. The rational thing for him to do was to get rid of Leah and then organise help to deal with her and the video.

  The only place to stop him was the next creek crossing.

  The boulders blocked Adam’s view and the water cascading between them was noisy enough, Dee hoped, so he couldn’t hear her. Her body was stiff as she wriggled out of hiding. The boots were stiff too but had stretched a little across the toes. Her instinct was to run to Leah. Instead she ran to the track, too scared to look back. Her footsteps sounded thunderous. At the bend she snuck a look. There was no sign Adam was out of the creek. Relieved, she sucked in desperate lungfuls of air. Her breathing wouldn’t be heard over the sounds of the water. But she was uneasy, the picture in her head was wrong, she looked again—where were his shoes and trousers?

  Suddenly her left leg was gone from under her. She fell face first onto the edge of the track. Her foot was held fast. Adam was below her using her ankle as leverage to pull himself up the short steep bank of the road. His grip was steel. This was it, if Adam got hold of her she was dead. A sudden force of hatred filled her, how dare this murderous iceman touch her again. Her brain was instantly clear—be quick, get him while he’s off balance. She shot her right boot out in his direction and connected hard with something flat. Simultaneously she grabbed handfuls of pebbles and dirt. The grip on her ankle was gone. She used the force of her kick to turn herself over and jump up to her feet.

  Adam was on his back two metres below her, one hand scrabbling to get upright and the other palpating his bloodied nose.

  ‘Never, ever, touch me again,’ Dee screamed at him as she flung a sharp rock right into the middle of his forehead. He stopped and looked up. She threw the rest of the dirt and pebbles in his face then ran for the creek faster than she had ever run in her life.

  *

  At the crossing she went slightly upstream, hid behind a rock and stopped to catch her breath. Her hands were shaking. As she gulped air, she shook her head in wonder at how she had managed to get away. Keep going, she reminded herself. Adam wouldn’t be far behind her and she doubted if she could summon the adrenaline to fight him off a second time.

  She scrambled up the bank under the cover of shrubs without leaving obvious footprints. Fifty metres on and she was now on the coast side of the hill. There was a vibration in her pocket. A message from Raj: ‘Help on way’. She held the phone up at all angles. The signal was gone. The main road was within view. The distance was a kilometre or more and was all paddocks, open country with straw-coloured grass that offered no shelter or camouflage. If she went towards the main road she’d get reception but also be a sitting duck for Adam once he got past the second crossing. He’d be gone before help arrived. Leah would never be seen again. It all depended on how long it took him to recover from her attack. No, she couldn’t risk open ground.

  She found a spot in a grove of gum saplings about fifty metres upstream from the crossing.

  The sound of the four-wheel drive came f
irst then she saw it approach slowly, very slowly. Adam’s rage at being beaten would fuel his need to get her; would drive him to make mistakes. Perhaps his slow speed was to keep down the noise of the engine or to look for footprints. There was still a chance; she had to wait till he was in the right spot.

  The big four-wheel drive bumped down the side of the creek. This was the more challenging crossing. The bed of the creek was made of round river stones slippery with moss. It was more than five metres wide and deep enough to reach the car doors. Adam would hate to get his shoes wet.

  As soon as he was into the tricky bit of the crossing Dee jumped out and waved the phone.

  ‘Stop!’ she shouted.

  Adam didn’t see her in the shadows. She screamed at him but he drove on. He’d be across in a minute. Dee pushed at the big flat rock beside her. It was too heavy to topple to make a splash. She had to make him notice her. She tucked the phone into her bra and squatted down close to the water. She hit the surface as hard as she could with the full length of both arms and hands to make a splash. It was a risk—the phone was her only evidence. She couldn’t get it wet.

  Adam turned his head. He’d seen the splash. Dee stood up and waved the phone. He stopped. She didn’t have long before he would come after her. She relied on him to not get out straight away in the middle of the stream. Sure enough, he hesitated. When he accelerated to drive out of the water the car shuddered, and he accelerated more. The tyres dug deeper. Dee moved upstream. There was a pause and she heard the engine tone lower. He’d worked out to engage the lowest gears. The sound of the engine became a high-pitched whine as the tyres dug deeper down into the smooth round river pebbles.

  Once again, Dee had a choice, go uphill or across open ground. Uphill, Adam had the advantage because of his fitness but she’d also find more reliable phone reception. She turned upwards and was fifty metres up when the engine shriek stopped. In another few seconds she heard the car door. She hoped he’d taken his shoes off. Bare feet would make the mossy rocks more difficult. With luck he’d fall; maybe break an ankle.