The Dead of Night (17 page)

We all made soothing noises: "Of course you should," "You did the right thing," "That's exactly what I would have done," but I don't know if it had much effect.

In the middle of all my own mess of emotions I shuddered as I thought of the terrifying night Fi had spent, trying to shake off those footsteps in the dark bush, heading at last for the tree, but not knowing if she would find only the silence of the night there, knowing only that she was too tired to go any further, knowing that when she reached the tree she might have to turn and face her death. This had been a terrible night for all of us, but perhaps for Fi most of all.

That was assuming Lee was OK.

Robyn started speaking again.

"It's still pretty dark. What are we going to do? We've got Lee missing and this guy unconscious, right at the foot of our ladder back to Hell."

Homer finally stirred into a little life again. It was an effort for all of us. We were trying to think normally, to
talk normally, but the words seemed to come out slowly, like toothpaste slowly squeezed from its tube. "We can wait a bit longer," he said. "Put yourselves in their minds. They're not going to be wandering round the bush at this hour looking for survivors, or even for one of their own people. Too dangerous for them. And they probably think they got everyone anyway. This guy chasing Fi, he was a one-off I think."

"What happens..." I said. I had to clear my throat and start again. "What happens if after another hour or two this guy is still alive?"

Homer didn't look at me. Hoarsely he said, "What you did to that guy back in Buttercup Lane, the one I shot..."

"That was different," I said. "I did that because he was going to die anyway. It was euthanasia."

"Look at this bloke," Homer said. "He's not going to live. Or if he does he'll be a vegetable."

"You don't know that." But I tried to explain the real difference. "That was in hot blood," I said at last. "I don't think I could do it in cold blood."

One of the things I find strangest and hardest is that we were having such conversations. We should have been talking about discos and electronic mail and exams and bands. How could this have been happening to us? How could we have been huddled in the dark bush, cold and hungry and terrified, talking about who we should kill? We had no preparation for this, no background, no knowledge. We didn't know if we were doing the right thing, ever. We didn't know anything. We were just ordinary teenagers, so ordinary we were boring. Overnight they'd pulled the roof off our lives.
And after they'd pulled off the roof they'd come in and torn down the curtains, ripped up the furniture, burnt the house and thrown us into the night, where we'd been forced to run and hide and live like wild animals. We had no foundations, and we had no secure walls around our lives any more. We were living in a strange long nightmare, where we had to make our own rules, invent new values, stumble around blindly, hoping we weren't making too many mistakes. We clung to what we knew and what we thought was right, but all the time those things too were being stripped from us. I didn't know if we'd be left with nothing, or if we'd be left with a new set of rules and attitudes and behaviours, so that we weren't able to recognise ourselves any more. We could end up as new, distorted, deformed creatures, with only a few physical resemblances to the people we once were.

Of course, in among all this we had moments—days sometimes—when we acted in ways that were "normal," vaguely like the old days. But it was never the same. Even those moments were warped by what had happened to us, by the horrible new world that we'd been forced into. There seemed no end to it, no clues as to what we would become, nothing. Just day-to-day survival.

Homer had leaned over the young soldier on the ground and was going through his pockets. He gradually accumulated a little pile of items as we watched in silence. It was hard to see details in the dark, but there was a wallet and a knife and a couple of keys. Then, from a breast pocket, he pulled out a little torch, no bigger than a pen, and switched it on. In its light I saw
just how badly hurt the soldier was. There was blood coming out of his ears and nose, and his scalp was matted with blood, so that the hairs of his head were wet and stuck together. I also saw how young he was. He could have been younger than us. His smooth skin looked as if no razor had ever touched it. I had to remind myself urgently, harshly, that he was a potential rapist, a potential killer. At the same time I knew I couldn't kill him.

"We could move him a long way off," said Robyn doubtfully, "so that they wouldn't connect him with the tree and the cliff."

"And if he wakes up?" I asked. "We're not doctors. We don't know what might happen."

"He'd at least have concussion," Robyn said, even more doubtfully. "He probably wouldn't remember where he was or what happened."

No one bothered to point out all the flaws in the plan.

We sat there quietly watching. After about an hour I began to realise that the young soldier was going to solve the problem for us. I realised that his life was slowly ebbing away. He was dying on the ground in front of us, as we looked on without a word being spoken. We made no move to save him, though I doubt if we could have done much anyway. I felt sad. In the short time we'd been gathered around him I'd come to feel that I knew him, in a strange sort of way. Death seemed so personal, so close, when it came slowly, almost gently, like this. In touching him it touched us all. Every quarter hour or so Homer switched the torch on, but although it was still dark under the trees, we
didn't really need it. I could see each rise and fall of the uniformed chest, could feel each struggle to draw the next breath. I began to hold my own breath as he finished exhaling, willing him to find more air. But gradually each breath became lighter, and the pause between each one longer. A feather resting on his mouth might have fluttered a little as he reached for another moment of life, but the feather would not have lifted at all.

It had been a cold night, and it was a cold morning, but for once I didn't feel it. Fi was huddled against me, her face turned away from the soldier, and she helped keep me warm. Every so often she shook, with a spasm that might have been caused by the cold. Robyn sat beside the soldier's head, watching him calmly. There was something beautiful about her face as she gazed at his. Homer sat behind his head, also watching calmly, but there was a dark shadow on his face and an impatience in the way he sat bent forward, like a cocked rifle. It made me nervous to see him like that.

There was a distant crack through the trees, like the falling branch I'd heard earlier. There'd been noises all night of course, as there always are in the bush: the yowl of possums, the howl of a feral dog, the wing-beating of owls; a breeze through the trees and mysterious rustles in the undergrowth. I was used to all that and didn't respond; hardly noticed it. But this was different somehow, and I sat up a little and turned a little towards it. And then heard the shout.

"Ellie! Homer! Are you there?"

Wild relief ran through me.

"Lee! Over here!"

We heard his blundering footsteps then, running and
crashing towards us. I stood and moved a few steps in his direction. He came clumsily through the tall trees, squeezing through a narrow gap right in front of me. I held out my arms and he grabbed me and hugged me, but all I could feel were the bones of his body. I didn't feel love or affection or warmth from him, just an ugly roughness, and relief perhaps. He pushed me away and looked around him. "Anyone got any food? I'm starving."

"No," Robyn said, "nothing."

"We've got to get out of here," Lee said. His eyes had passed over the soldier on the ground, but he hadn't shown any surprise. Now he focused on him. "What's he doing here?"

"He followed Fi," Homer said.

"He's still alive," Lee said.

"Yes."

"Well, what are you waiting for?"

I wasn't sure what he meant. "We were waiting for you," I said. "And we didn't know what to do with him. But I think he's close to dying."

"We've got to go," Lee said again. His eyes scanned the ground. Suddenly he bent down and picked up the soldier's knife from the sad little pile of possessions. At first I thought he'd then overbalanced and fallen on the boy. I even gasped and started to say "Look out!" But I realised at once that it was deliberate. Lee had landed clumsily with his knees on the boy's chest and at the same time had buried the knife in him, aiming at the heart. The boy gave a terrible gasp and both his arms lifted slightly, with the fingers flailing. Homer switched on the torch and in its sharp, focused light,
like a scalpel, I saw the face go very white, and a rush of blood pour from the mouth as it slowly opened. It stayed open. Then something left the face, a spirit or something fled from it, and he was dead. His face became the colour of water, no colour at all.

Fi was screaming but then she took a big gulp and stopped herself, as though she'd swallowed the last scream. She put her hand to her mouth and gave a little-hiccup. Her eyes were wide open and she was staring at Lee as though he were a monster, Jack the Ripper. I was scared of him myself, wondering if he'd change forever, if he'd become a devil. Robyn was hyperventilating, with her hands to her throat. Homer backed away, eyes staring, his hands behind him as though looking for support. There was no support there. I just stood with my mouth open, looking at the young body on the ground. Homer had dropped the torch and I bent down and picked it up.

Lee stood and walked away a couple of steps, then came back. "Let's get rid of him," he said, but all the anger and harshness had gone out of his voice. He sounded almost normal, except that I didn't know if he'd ever be normal again.

"We can't bury him," I said, my voice shaking, on the edge of hysteria. "There's no time and we haven't got tools."

"We'll move him down to the gully," Lee said.

None of us moved, until Lee shouted at us, "Come on, don't just stand there. Help me."

I took his head, which was amazingly heavy, and Lee picked up his feet. None of the others was in any shape to help. We struggled along with the body, trying to
pick a wide enough path through the bush. After we'd covered only ten metres I was sweating. I couldn't believe how heavy this light guy was. I was starting to drop him, but then Robyn arrived beside me and helped.

"We'd better not drag him," I said, "or they might see the tracks." I was shocked at myself for saying something so cold-blooded, but neither of the others reacted. We limped on, each of us reluctant to be the one to say stop, until somehow we'd reached the head of the guily. We swung our arms as much as we could and rolled him heavily into it.

"He sure didn't help much," I said, shocking myself again, but I was trying to make everyone feel better, to drag us back from madness a little.

We stood there, looking at him. His body was all arms and legs now, a sprawling broken doll, with his head tipped back at an awful impossible angle. Without a word Lee turned away and went into the bush and came back towing a branch in each hand, which he then tossed over the soldier. Robyn began to help him, then I joined them. We spent ten minutes throwing rocks and branches on the body. It wouldn't stop the smell, and it wouldn't stop the feral dogs and other carnivores, but we had to hope that if there was a search it wouldn't last more than a day or two. That seemed a reasonable hope.

Soon we seemed to arrive at an agreement that we'd done enough. The grey among the trees was lightening quickly as the day spread into the bush. We stood there for a moment. I felt weird, like I didn't want to walk away without saving anything. I glanced at Robyn, and
although her eyes were open and her lips weren't moving, I felt certain she was praying. "Say it out loud," I urged her. She looked at me in surprise. I said it again: "Say something out loud."

"I can't," she said. She wrinkled her brow for a minute, then said, "God, look after him." Then after a pause she added in a strong voice, "Amen."

"Amen," I said, and after a moment Lee said it too.

As we walked back to the others he said to Robyn, "If you'd seen what I saw last night you wouldn't be praying for any of them. And you wouldn't be wondering if we've done the wrong thing. They're filth. They're vermin."

I understood then why he'd pushed the knife into the soldier's chest, but I was still scared of him for having done it.

So often it's the little things that are the hardest. We'd had a night of death and horror, of fear and panic; we'd seen many people die and we'd seen one die at the closest of quarters. We'd lost many of our possessions—anything we'd had in the tents at Harvey's Heroes campsite was gone forever. But trying to climb that tree to get back into Hell was the hardest thing of all.

Before that though I found I hadn't lost everything. We were standing waiting at the base of the tree for Robyn to return. She'd taken the odds and ends from the soldier's pocket and gone back to his bush grave to throw them in. She'd even picked up the knife, all sticky and red. It made me think of picking up Homer's bloody shotgun at the Buttercup Lane ambush, and I shuddered in memory when I saw Robyn reach for the knife.

The only thing we kept was the torch.

So there Lee and Fi and I were, waiting for Robyn, watching Homer, who was using a small branch to sweep the ground and conceal our tracks. We had to avoid drawing any attention to our stepladder. And as we watched, Lee felt for my hand and put a small object in it. It was warm and furry, and for a second I thought it might have been something horrible. I looked down with my mouth squirming. It was my little chocolate brown teddy bear, Alvin, only the size of a cigarette packet, one eye missing and both ears chewed, a big worn patch on his bum, but my Alvin, my bear.

"Oh Lee," I said, my eyes filling with tears. "I thought I'd lost him."

I also meant: "And I thought I'd lost you."

He just shrugged, but I knew he was pleased.

"How'd you find him? Oh Lee, I was getting scared of you. You seemed like you'd changed so much."