5
I
’
D ONLY WALKED
it once, but the after-dark path to her tent was known and easy. The moonlight was reflecting off the silver tops of the storm clouds and off the earth itself. I planned on being quick. The sandwich I’d made her was under my jumper. I slipped my hand into my pocket to roll the smooth sides of the spare shotgun cartridges I carried.
The first drops of rain fell soft around me. I lengthened my stride. The rain increased.
I jogged the last bit, and had the sandwich out before getting to the tent.
‘Denny,’ I said, bending down. ‘I can’t stay.’ I parted the tent door. ‘Den?’
The sky opened above me, and the rain poured down. I crawled inside the tent. The gun caught and I had to take it from my shoulder. I squatted, my head lowered, disbelieving the strength of the rain and the timing. Rohan would be climbing out of bed about now.
The noise of the rain had an isolating effect; it muffled everything beyond my tense body, and trapped my thoughts. Denny’s absence was a frightening thing, because it was evidence of her impossibility. How could I hold this woman? Keep her?
In a poor reflection on my previous life, I could not recall being in such forceful rain. I’d certainly never stood straight and accepted it, let it streak down my face and seep through to my skin. I’d never put a gun between my shoulderblades and set off doggedly into the dark depths of it. The tree roots were already slippery under my boots, like greasy veins swelling up from the ground. Even with the few steps I’d taken I could feel the foliage above me giving in and folding down, letting the rain just come. I loosened my facial muscles and didn’t wipe the water away – if it ran in my eyes I let it. My shoulders relaxed and my hands opened to complete a course for the rain to follow – it dripped steadily from the tips of my fingers.
This was how she came upon me, moving with the rain and in it. She was altogether different – she slipped through it; I saw her coming and marvelled at her sure advancement. But even though I was thinking she was the most exquisite human I had ever laid eyes on, my voice was full of anger and fear.
‘What are you doing!’
She didn’t hear me, or ignored me. She swivelled to look behind her. I was mired in what to do with her. She was as slippery to me as her glistening skin and dripping body. The idea of having to actually physically restrain her flashed irrationally through my head.
‘Denny!’ I yelled. ‘What
are
you doing?’
‘Quick,’ she said, and was suddenly close and shiny-faced. ‘Follow me.’
I was rooted for a moment by those very words – any other instruction would have worked better. She didn’t wait for me, but slipped back through the same rain pattern she’d emerged from, in retreat, as though she’d been released from something central and drawn irrepressibly back. It must have drawn me too, because I caught up to her at the back fence, breathing through my mouth, tasting rain, gripping the top of a squared-off post in one hand and vaulting the wire fence as she had just done.
I ran behind her because she seemed to know the ground. She kept herself far enough in front so that I couldn’t stop her. She knew I would have.
The rain was more annoying around me than on me. I was wet right through now and it didn’t matter. It was what the rain did to every rock and tree and mossy log, and the noise it made, the poor visibility – the general mess it made of reality. It was hard enough – without this
Matrix
-style falling of the world around me.
The thick bush further slowed us – we clamoured instead of ran. The black ground beneath us drained all energy down. You could slip and sprain an ankle; equally, you could get a firm footing. Each safe step was something good. Mostly we slithered over things and reduced the risk of falling by keeping low. Denny still wouldn’t let me catch up. Twice I yelled at her to stop, and on the last angry outburst she waved a frantic hand over her shoulder to silence me. There was only one reason I would have to be quiet. People. It could only be the couple from the farmhouse. We would hardly be trying to get
closer
to anyone unknown.
She crouched in a ferny hollow, between the grey branches of a fallen tree. I came in beside her, looking at her, surprising myself by not screaming for an explanation. The black ground squelched under us. I pulled my arms and legs in tight, curved my back, and tucked my chin down to my chest – whereas she rested one hand on the branch in front of us and straightened her spine. She was looking out through the rain, sticking her head into it as if it might somehow help.
My bearings centred me as I recognised the downward angle of the dark trees, the vague glint of rocks. We were near Denny’s spot by the creek. We’d come at it the long way, circling around. Even though I could see no further than a few feet in front of me I felt confident in my recollection of the place, and of my ability to move in it (though I couldn’t be sure why I’d have to move in it). I remembered the ground flattened out nearer to the deep course of water, but there were no clear areas – it was all rocks and logs and ferns. The bush either side of the stream held endless places to hide, and with good vantage points – we were in one – but the rain had eliminated any advantage. The only advantage I could come at was the weapon on my back and the extra ammo in my pocket. Surprise, threat and intimidation were all lost to the conditions, even physical strength to a certain degree. The rain, or more the intensity of it, forced everything down to the muddy bottom. And I felt closer to the earth, like it took me down a couple of inches. When I looked at Denny she was the incarnation of this, the wet, breathing embodiment of the elusive embrace of nature. Her leg was against mine, and her breathing like my own, her body like my own. I knew why we didn’t hold eye contact or speak above the noise – we didn’t have to. In this we were closer than we’d ever been yet, both of us inwardly captivated.
I remembered something I’d heard about how people think more clearly in the shower because the water purifies the air and leaves the oxygen more easily absorbed; a natural kind of high. I put some of my innermost lucidity down to that.
Denny lifted her face to the rain and held it there a moment. She climbed the log and I knew we’d have to get much closer. I didn’t know what we were getting closer to.
We were crawling now. Somewhere I registered my falling body temperature, the possibility of shivering soon. A different section of my brain processed the feel of spongy moss and fine grit, the clean lines of the broad-leaf plants and the crinkle-cut curl of the fern fronds, and a different part again the danger in the greasy rocks and what lay ahead. It felt like we were playing at something – these were roles we were acting out – and if it wasn’t for the gun on my back, the real weight of it, I might have lost out to the feeling of out-of-body control. As it was I had to keep speaking to myself, in my head, actual instructions:
don’t put your hand there, that branch is weak, bring your leg through
… It wasn’t a drawn-out process, though; time changed under the conditions, and my thoughts were in relation to the measured pace around me. I could say I felt more alive then I ever had, crawling through dense undergrowth, instructing my body, removed and instinctive all at once, but if that was the pinnacle of living, it wasn’t a very realistic place.
At the base of a thick trunk, between its buttress roots, we stopped and considered going closer. We stayed crouched in the softened strips of bark and looked through the rain for anything more than rain. We relegated a few heartbeats to this, one breath or two, but it felt like costly lengths of time, and we set off again as though to get them back.
We heard them before seeing them. A male voice cut in and out, through the rain. They were less than ten feet away. Two vague upright shapes. Right there. If they hadn’t been talking we might have crawled right into them. The man seemed to be angry, or trying to get above the noise. His voice was dissected to snippets of pitch and sound bites. It sounded wet. I felt around me, giving myself an idea of how to use the ground. There was a lattice of small twigs under me; they took my weight and webbed into the soggy earth below. I decided it would be best to kneel on one knee, with the other up to steady me: a standard soldier pose that was extraordinary to set my body into. There was a pitted rock behind me that I rested my heel and lower back against. It had a jagged edge that dug into my tail bone, but not enough to make me move. I seemed to have fluked a good spot, because around me was a raised tangle of dark glistening things, rotting branches. Denny was waist deep in them. She could possibly duck right under them. I needed, though, to be able to stand and move forward. I didn’t like to think why.
I took the shotgun from off my shoulder, and winced as I did because they were just so damn close. The barrel was cold and wet. The stock, oddly, didn’t feel wet. I had no idea what to do with the gun once it was in my hands. I couldn’t point it. I wasn’t going to shoot them? I wasn’t mortally afraid. Surely I’d have to feel something more than this to go on and kill a person?
The man continued disagreeing, or ordering. He didn’t sound very elderly to me. And the other body didn’t look old or female. I wondered how many lies Denny had told, and if Rohan was in danger back at the cabin. I wondered if I had any choice but to shoot them.
A few words stayed strung together through the rain: ‘… there’s no way … let’s go back …’
The other person spoke and it might have been female. I saw the shape was smaller and round-shouldered.
I suddenly realised why I could hear and see them better. The rain was easing. I looked upwards in an effort to see the night sky. The trees were black against the silver-grey behind them. The bush opened up above us, to let this grey light in. Denny lowered herself down in her nest of branches, and I could almost hear her do it. The man’s voice became clear; he lowered it to match the subsiding noise.
‘… she’s our insurance. We have to keep going …’
The rain had stopped, but the run-off and dripping of the bush slowed the transition. The world was reconfiguring right before my eyes, back to normal night shapes and shadows – except for the two humans. They were silhouetted against the gleaming, oily-looking background. If I didn’t move they wouldn’t see me. Everything gave off a sodden aerated crackle, like wet honeycomb, me included. A few birds whistled as if it were day.
‘… she’ll come back now it’s stopped. It’ll work. She doesn’t —’
‘Shh! Just shut up!’
The other person was a woman, and there was a waver to her voice, more than the wet and cold, more like age or sickness. The man too, I could see now he was stooped and thin. They hunched down in their wet clothes and swivelled their heads at every noise.
Denny stood and they swung to face her. Both actions startled me and my arms automatically jerked up to bring the gun to my shoulder. They didn’t see me.
‘Denny?’ the woman said.
Denny ignored her and spoke to me: ‘Shannon, they’ve got a gun.’
I was thrown by her calm voice. She might have spoken that way so I could comprehend it, but it was out of sync with everything. I didn’t believe her.
‘They’ve got a gun,’ she said again, more urgent.
Belief though, seemed irrelevant, and I aimed at the male shape, curled my finger around the trigger and applied some pressure to steady the tremor in my hand. Someone said,
no
. The world pulled away and my breathing replaced the empty space. The ground and rock stayed with me, but little else. I swayed on this new precipice, and in the airlessness. Denny said again, from way down a tunnel, ‘They’ve got a gun!’
I heard, ‘Don’t, she’s – David, don’t move!’
The man moved. His arm came up, it was hard to see, everything dripped, crinkled, contracted, my lashes were wet, my arms were shaking, the high pitch of adrenaline had started in my ears and in my veins, and rain ran like sweat down the sides of my face. It was hard to see.
‘Shannon!’ Denny screamed.
It wasn’t a lack of time, because I had time enough to think how Denny wouldn’t stand like that and put herself in view if they did have a gun, and time enough to realise they’d been waiting down here for her, that she’d put them here for me to come and shoot, and enough time to pivot the foot under me and feel the water squeeze through the side of my boot as I tightened the angle. But also there was no time, and even though I thought all that, I couldn’t process it, or make decisions. The man moved his arm and I pulled the trigger.
The boom travelled through my chest and up into my teeth before it hit the wet air. A wisp of burnt oil and the smell of cordite curled up my nose. Everything flattened with the woman’s terrorised scream – it cut through me at chest height, emptied me, threatened to bleed me out. My head drained, my arms were locked and unable to lower the gun. The earth, the globe, tilted under me – it sucked me down, taking my insides and leaving me hollow. I breathed. It was a gasp, breaking through and struggling up. The woman started moving backwards, screaming over the missing silhouette, the horrible thing I’d hit. She sobbed and said, ‘David, no, oh God, oh God, David.’ She stumbled and fell, and then began screaming high and anguished again.
I got up. It was not as hard as I thought it might be. Once I lifted myself from the hellish hole I’d knelt in I found new strength and a different energy, a sure place of put-aside reason: I’d taken this course and would stay on it to the end.
This,
I would finish.
It was the unravelling of all I’d learnt, all I’d been told and taught – by my mother, by my father, society, and all my peers – the tightly bound principles of the past coiling away to reveal an unspeakable truth. It was an undoing. It freed my mind.
The woman was not as frail as I’d imagined, because she moved fast over the rugged ground. I held the gun, and this hampered me. She whimpered as she scrambled away.
I stood up on the lichen-covered rock; my boots slipped, slowly, down one side. She crossed the narrow river and I raised the gun. She seemed to know and screamed again; it was a raw howl of disbelief. My boots continued their slow slide and she clamoured out of the water and into shadow. The screaming stopped and I could hear her plunging through the bush. Denny crossed the river at the same spot the woman had. She called to me to be quick. I noticed how different her voice was to me now. How different everything was.