Watcher's Web (5 page)

By the time
she arrived at the wreckage, sweat ran from every pore of her body.
The mist might have lifted, but it was as humid as Darwin in the
wet season. The air smelled of compost, mingled with the
ever-present stink of fuel.

In all of
this, Jessica picked up the scent of burning wood. Had Brian been
able to get the fire going after all? She was annoyed that she
wanted to see him. Yes, he was weird, but right now it would be
good to see his face, to know that he was all right; to discuss
what to do and where to go. Maybe he had even found something to
eat—she was starving. Breakfast. She should have been at school
now, getting her breakfast from the kitchen and sitting down in the
dining hall. Eggs, toast and marmalade, tea.

She pushed
aside the broken branches.

In the leaf
litter lay a body clad in a blue uniform, the Westways logo
embroidered on the chest. Empty eyes gazed heavenward from a face
with translucent white skin, spotted with adhering bits of
bark.

No!
Martin!

The bark
pieces on his face—they
moved.
Fluid
oozed from red trails on his arms and a deep hole in his cheek,
where bits of white shone through—his teeth. The skin on his legs
crawled with black slithery bodies. Not pieces of bark, but
carnivorous slugs eating the skin.

She stumbled
several steps backwards, crashed into a tree trunk.

The
others—Brian and the businessman—where were they?

A bit further
up the slope, another body sprawled on the forest floor, on his
stomach, legs splayed. The jacket of the grey suit had ripped and
his back was a mess of raw, exposed flesh and crawling slugs.
Threads of his shirt, black and singed, clung to his shoulders. She
didn’t need to come closer to see there was no hope. His ribs and
the bumps of his spine already protruded through the skin.

She barely
dared look, but found a third bloodied lump a bit further up the
slope, half-hidden by tree roots.

“No.” Her lips
formed the word but no sound came out.

A glance at
her feet showed slugs crawling out of the leaf litter, swarming up
her legs, on her shoes, on her jeans. She stamped her feet, hit her
jeans, and kicked, again and again.

No, no,
get off me, get off!

She stumbled
through the shrubs, jumping, kicking and swiping at her legs.

GET OFF, GET
OFF, GET OFF!

She hurled
herself down the hillside, sliding, tripping over boulders. Down,
down, into the creek, down on her knees. The slugs came off more
easily in the water and the current carried them away.

Safe.

Safe from
what? A few slugs?

She sat in the
creek, taking deep, calming breaths. Water again seeped up the legs
of her jeans—they had only just dried from falling in the same
creek last night.

Come on,
Jess, you can handle this. You’re not some ninny from the
city.

What was the
best plan? Wait here to be rescued, until the poachers or whatever
they were came back? Face them—by herself?

No,
stupid idea, Jess.
She’d better find a road or something leading to
civilisation. It couldn’t be that far away.

Which
direction should she go? Instinct told her to follow the creek—at
least she’d have water, but the poachers would probably think the
same.

Then
where?

Her gaze went
up the creek bank, up the hill on the other side. Maybe she could
see something from up there.

Move
your bony arse, Jess. Let’s get out of this shit.

That’s what
she did if something troubled her: work hard, go riding, clean out
her mother’s chook pen, fix the fence, or shoot some rabbits.

She ran to the
plane, and threw all the luggage out the door. The businessman’s
laptop computer landed in the leaf litter, followed by Brian’s
weekend bag, which contained only a pair of riding boots, a shirt
and a bag with a horse’s reins. The pilot’s bag contained running
shoes and damp and dirty clothes. Did no one bring anything useful?
Ah, a tool box. That was at least something. And a rope. Now to
pack it.

She turned her
backpack upside-down. An avalanche of school things fell out.
Homework, reading assignments, diary and library books.

Now, what was
in this odd assortment of personal belongings that she could use?
The rope, her spare shirt and pairs of underwear. A small saw, a
hammer and a box of nails, a roll of string.

She added the
water bottle, a plastic bag and the pilot’s empty thermos.

No food—she
had no food.

On the other
hand, wherever she had landed, she wouldn’t be more than half a day
away from some sort of civilisation. People would be looking for
the plane. If she could get clear of this ridiculous forest, they
would find her. Uncomfortable words were there in the back of her
mind.

This
isn’t the Australian bush.

She
heaved her backpack onto her shoulders. In her mind, she could hear
her father’s voice.
If you have a breakdown in the middle of nowhere, don’t
leave the vehicle.
A
memory: an abandoned and bogged four-wheel-drive. There had been
something on the news about German tourists who got lost in the
desert in Western Australia. Blanket-covered bodies in the red
dust.

Stupid people,
her father had said.
Never do that, Jess. Stay with the vehicle.

“Sorry, Dad,”
she whispered and her voice sounded unnaturally loud.

She turned
away from the wreck and trudged down the slope.

At the stream,
she stopped to fill the water bottle. The water was crystal clear
and probably fine to drink. The city girls at school always wanted
to muck around with water purification tablets, but if they were
camping in the mountains, she never used any.

As she
straightened to screw the cap back on, someone touched her shoulder
from behind.

Chapter
5

J
ESSICA WHIRLED
around and faced . . . Brian.

“What the fuck
are you doing here, sneaking up on me like that!”

He took a step
back, wide-eyed. His jacket was dirty and torn, his face smudged
with mud. His hair was a tangle of sticks and branches, and one of
his hands was bleeding.

Shit.
“I’m
sorry. Did you see the others?” Why the fuck hadn’t he responded
when she called?

He nodded,
wordless. There was a hardness to his face that chilled her. What
had he seen last night? How they were killed? Had he been in hiding
until now?

“Are you OK?”
Her heart was still beating like crazy.

He
nodded, again wordless. He didn’t
look
OK to her. Had he thought she was abandoning
him?

“I
. . . I thought everyone was dead.” Stupid. She had seen
a third body on the forest floor, but she should have checked to
see if it was him.

“It’s OK.” His
voice was a lot more subdued than it was yesterday.

She shook her
head. It wasn’t OK. “I’m sorry.”

A wordless
silence hung between them. She studied his face: haggard, dirty,
younger than she had initially thought

She continued,
uneasily, “I was about to leave. I think we need to get out of here
in case those idiots come back.”

He nodded
again. “Do you have any water?”

She gave
the bottle to him, and he took it, screwed the cap off and drank.
All of a sudden, her world had changed. She wasn’t alone, and
someone
had
survived. Not the person she would have chosen, but someone
else nevertheless, and she was glad of that.

He handed her
back the bottle. While she bent down to re-fill it, her stomach
rumbled uncomfortably, acid burning in the back of her throat. She
was hungry, but thinking of the food they didn’t have would only
make it worse. She had to hang on. A day or two at the most and
they would surely find their way back to civilisation. She stuffed
the bottle in her backpack’s side pocket and swung the pack onto
her shoulder.

“Let’s
go.”

“Where
to?”

“Up there. See
if we can find a way out of this bloody jungle.”

She expected
him to argue. Maybe she hoped he would argue, say he had picked up
some sound and a rescue crew was coming. But he said nothing.

And that was
weird, too. Certainly people would be out there looking for a
missing plane?

This is
not the Australian bush.

“Do you have a
preference for which way to go?” she asked, just to make sure.

He shrugged,
not meeting her eyes.

“I was going
to go up the hill, because we might see something from up there. I
also think that those men will think we’ll follow the creek.”

“Fine.”

Well, he
wasn’t going to be much use to her if he was going to act like
this. What happened to his I-know-everything attitude he’d had
yesterday?

Jessica took
the lead up the hill. There was no path, and the hillside was a
tangle of low branches and large mossy boulders. Slippery and hard
to climb. Brian would push her up, and then she would reach down,
hanging onto whatever branches were close, to pull him up as well.
He would grunt with each climb, his hands slippery with sweat. An
odd smell it had, too, reminiscent of wood fire.

Her jeans
stuck to her legs, making it even harder to climb. Riding boots
were not the right shoes for this job either. The soles were much
too thin and smooth.

At least half
an hour had passed by the time she clambered onto the crest of the
ridge. About halfway up, she had already seen that the rainforest
was just as dense up here as at the bottom and they would not be
able to see anything, so it was not as if she had expected a grand
vista, but she felt drained anyway, looking at all those tangled
trees.

She dropped
her pack into the leaf litter. Shit—how much of this blasted jungle
was there?

Brian
clambered up behind her and sank down, his back against the trunk
of a tree. His face glistened with sweat. When she pulled him onto
the last few boulders, she had noticed how his hand had trembled.
No stamina, no bush experience.

She handed him
the bottle.

He gulped,
water running down his cheeks, which she noticed were
smooth-skinned, with still no trace of beard growth.

She
itched to ask how old he was, but she knew even the farm boys who
worked for John Braithwaite already had hairs on their chins at
fourteen or fifteen, and there was no way this man was that young.
Laser treatment? She had wondered why men didn’t use it. How
fashionable could it be to walk around with a hairy caterpillar on
your face? The idiotic fact was that men somehow
liked
having to drag a knife over their skin
every day. They liked their beards, and here was a man who didn’t
have one. At all.

A transsexual?
She saw them sometimes, in the city or out in Oxford Street,
and—well—you weren’t supposed to say so, but usually you could pick
something odd about them. Not that she cared—whatever they did with
their lives was their business.

But with
Brian’s deep voice and his angular face—no way. His light blue eyes
met hers. Jessica averted her gaze. If she knew what was good for
her, she shouldn’t stare at him.

The
silence lingered. She put the bottle back in the side pocket,
taking as long as she could. When she looked up, he was staring
at
her.
Next thing he was going to ask
a question about sparks, or flashes of light.

“Do you think
those men will come back?” An uncomfortable question, but she could
think of nothing else to distract him.

He
shrugged—that seemed to be all he could do.

“
Who do
you think they were?” Or
what,
rather, but that was an uncomfortable thought as
well.

“I don’t know.
I didn’t see.”

More evasion?
Hard to tell. His eyes looked vacant.

“How did you
escape?”

“I ran
. . . fell down the creek . . .” He
shrugged again—the habit was getting on her nerves, as was his
accent. “Don’t know. It was dark . . . I fell asleep
somewhere.”

Asleep? After
all that? She thought she’d called pretty loudly. But she didn’t
press the point. They only needed to walk for a few days at the
most to get out of this jungle. Soon, there would be a dirt road or
a power line they could follow, or maybe a farm house. She didn’t
need to know things he didn’t want to tell her. They’d be rescued
and go their separate ways and she’d never see him again.

Brian met her
eyes in that intense look. Piercing light blue. Eyes of an albino
almost, but his hair was pepper-and-salt grey, the end of the
ponytail still under his jacket. Wasn’t he hot in that thing?

She pushed
herself up. Her muscles screamed protest, but she gritted her
teeth.

“Let’s
go.”

He scrambled
to his feet, unsteady, all thin legs with prominent knees. A
grasshopper, her mother called her for that same reason. Could
never buy clothes that fitted properly.

Freak,
farmhands would call her behind her back.

She gestured
for him to go first, and then stared at his back. He really was
very tall and long-limbed. His fingers were very long, too.

They were
going down the hill again. That was easier, but also more
dangerous. Sometimes there were no branches to hold onto and the
only way down the boulders was to carefully slide on their
backsides and hope neither of them would lose grip and fall into
the bottom-less crevices in between the boulders.