I stepped down from the rock and onto the body of the man. He was on his back, his chest pushed up from something under him, his arms hanging either side, his legs twisted and caught in undergrowth. I imagined a bloody wound hidden in the wet black of his torso. I pulled my foot back while my momentum was set forward. To stop from falling on top of him I pushed out with my slipping foot and dove into nothing. For a moment there was only wet air around me. The gun was in both hands across my body; I pushed it forward to break my fall. Halfway through this action I hit the boulders and sticks in front of me. The fingers and knuckles on my left hand took the full brunt of impact. They crushed between two unforgiving surfaces, rock and steel, and I was sure they were broken. I might have cried out, but then my face followed through. The moment my face hit, the sensation of falling left me and instead the rocks, gun, the sticks and mud came up as a wall in front of me. And I smacked into it. The wall was riddled with harmful points that set off like firecrackers down the length of me. A terrible crack and snap near my collarbone cancelled all the other pains, even my hand. My face skidded on bare rock, one arm jammed and was wrenched back; my hips and legs took blows and scratches of their own. I tumbled downwards and with my legs catching up, I might have somersaulted but for my caught arm, which brought me around. I hit something else, something worse for a second because it encased my whole head, and swallowed me in shock right down to my shoulders. My left hand felt this new pain too – the hand that still held the gun. I moved in this cold encasing pain, and I understood my head was under water. The gun was underwater.
I knew I should get up, but while the cold current eddied around my head I didn’t have to test that one particular shoulder, and I could pretend cuts and scratches were all I had. One good thing was that my crushed hand still gripped the gun – it wasn’t broken. But any relief I felt was tempered by the memory of the crack and snap of my collarbone.
A hand grabbed the back of my shirt and I was hauled from the tannin-tasting water. I bellowed in pain. My body slipped on the mossy bank and I fell to my knees in the river. Denny was knee deep in the water in front of me. She helped me to my feet.
‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’
It seemed a strange thing to say, with a dead man behind us.
‘My collarbone,’ I said.
Her hands came up quickly.
‘This side?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
It was raining again, lazy drizzle. I tilted my face as much as I dared and let it fall soft on my skin. I prayed to a god I didn’t believe in. The smooth stream deviated around my legs and the squashy bottom seemed to accept my boots. I recoiled from Denny’s fingers as she prodded, feeling for a break.
‘Can you use that hand?’
I made a fist and moved the arm. ‘It hurts, but I can.’
Her fingers made a pinching line from just below my throat and followed the collarbone right along. She did it quickly. Shooting pain and nausea weakened my knees. I twisted away from her, moaning as I did.
‘It’s not broken, I don’t think.’ She ran her hand through the water beside her. ‘But you’ve done something. It’s deep, like a puncture wound?’
This made sense. I remembered other things about the fall, a branch across the rock, and the dagger-like smaller branches coming off it, visuals and sensations I’d not comprehended until now. The cracking sound and the stab of pain was a stick driving in and snapping. I was confident enough to feel with my own hand, to slip it below my shirt and inch along, fearful of feeling something foreign, like splintered wood protruding from the wound, or sinking my fingers into a terrible void.
‘Can you run?’ she asked.
I withdrew my hand, changing my mind, not wanting to know out here. ‘I’m not sure. I think …’
‘Or you’ll have to give me the gun.’ She was drawing back. ‘I don’t want it. So tell me you’ll come. I need you, Shannon.’
What had felt like forever must have been seconds, because we were only fifty metres the other side of the river when we caught sight of the woman, madly crashing ahead. Denny stayed beside me. The support she offered me was the stuff of nightmares. It was unspoken encouragement derived from every step in the cold and dark, every glance up and every calculation. What linked us as we moved together would bind us forever and change everything between us.
The woman wasn’t thinking, because once out of the bush she ran up the centre of a flat plantation track. We struggled out of bush and onto clean ground. My body roared as one wound, one exposed nerve, head to toe. The track had deep ruts and scoured out watercourses. The gravel and mud mix was slippery, so we ran up one side on the grass. Pine forest crowded in on one side and a smaller blue-gum forest on the other. The mushroom smell of the thick carpet of pine needles overpowered the clean scent of blue gums. I thought I caught a whiff of polluted air, smoggy and with the after-rain odour of the paper mill, the smell of Rohan’s work clothes, but I must have imagined it – unless the trees still held the pollution and leached it out over time.
The woman was stumbling and sometimes running with her hands on the ground. All she had to do was run into the plantations and we probably wouldn’t find her. I didn’t want her to though; I wanted this over.
We drew close enough to hear her wailing, out of control. She heard us and her wailing changed to a lower primal keen. She ran to one side. We could easily catch her. Denny was calm and steady beside me, looking at me. I raised the gun. Everything hurt, but the pain was removed, off in a corner and waiting for later. We dropped back to a slow jog and I aimed at the woman’s back and squeezed the trigger. The gun clicked, and nothing else.
It didn’t faze me. I don’t think anything would have. I simply stopped and cracked the gun, let the failed cartridge drop, and took two more from my pocket. Denny ran ahead and passed the woman. It was something to see. The track was becoming steep, the woman was scrambling, bent double, and Denny overtook her, sleek and black. She didn’t look at the woman, or run fast; she paced each step and seemed to have attributed the right amount of energy to every moving muscle. The woman stumbled towards the pale trunks of the young blue-gum forest.
I was surprised by my shaking hands as I attempted to reload the gun. I dropped one cartridge and had to jam my hand into my saturated pocket to get another. Both women disappeared into the obscurity between the rows of trees. At last I snapped the gun shut and set off for the spot they had been swallowed into. I heard a voice call out behind me, but I dismissed it and stayed on track, thinking I would come back to that, thinking this was a circle I must complete, and if I deviated I’d be lost.
The section of plantation timber we were in must have been pruned and sprayed not long before the virus broke, because the ground between the trees was relatively free of low branches and blackberry. A few blackberry bushes scratched around my legs, but not enough to impede me. But the rows were deceptive – so perfectly spaced and straight that new paths would lead off like a crosshatched maze, in every direction. The tree trunks were as thick as a man’s arm and the leaves began at head height. I had to duck.
Denny called to me. It was not my name, or any word, it was a raw summons and command. It contained in it information no words could translate. I knew where she was and how to get there. I knew she had the woman trapped or down. And what I was to do. I breathed and disbelieved. My body and my brain worked on regardless and I floated in the midst of it all. I remembered what my father once said:
God is not removed from us. He was tired, He was hungry; He suffered and felt pain. He is in all of us
.
I ran into a clearing. The ground fell away at my feet. Moonlight reflected off the rippled water below me. It was a small plantation dam – soupy water in a deep, gouged-out hole about the size of a backyard swimming pool. My boots stuck in the clay and I stepped backwards. The woman was yelling in the dark to my left. ‘I didn’t know,’ she screamed.
Denny said something I missed because I was lifting my boots from the sucking mud. The woman sobbed something about a set-up.
‘Don’t,’ Denny said, and there was a thud. ‘You let it happen. You knew and did nothing!’
I walked closer, peering through the light rain, the gun up.
‘
Nothing
!’ Denny yelled.
The woman’s shape lurched out of nowhere, straight at me. I backed up. The bent shadow was gasping for breath and one arm was dangling down. She kept coming. The water was too close behind me. My heel dipped into thin air and I felt on the edge of something. For the first time I saw the woman’s face; she was ghostly-white, luminous, her skin slack and her mouth hanging open, her hair long and wild around her. She looked up and we froze, locked together in a moment of mutual disaster.
‘Shannon!’ Denny shouted. ‘She’ll push you!’
I don’t know if the woman had thought to do it, or if Denny put the idea in her head, but I watched the woman’s face tighten with the possibility of it. Her arms came up. It was point-blank range. Her hands snatched for the barrel of the gun. My centre of balance tipped back, beyond correction. She grabbed the gun and tried to point it away from her; she stopped me from falling and sealed her fate. I squeezed the trigger. The blast threw me back and away from it all; I was propelled one way, and she the other.
The ground rushed up greasy and soft under me. I landed awkwardly and rolled my ankle. Righting myself, I slid down on my side, going with it, knowing only water was below me. The few sharp rocks were nothing compared to my earlier fall. The bank was not as steep as I’d thought. I found my feet and skated in the wet clay down into the water, and then waded in up to my knees in an attempt to stop without falling over. The water was milky and gritty. Denny stood on the bank above me.
‘You right?’ she asked.
I didn’t answer.
‘She’s dead,’ Denny said. ‘They’re both dead.’
The rain lightly pattered around me, rippling the water. I still held the gun. Its barrel was half-submerged. ‘Is that it?’ I said. ‘Is that what you wanted?’
‘Yes.’
I bent my knees and half-turned to push out into the deeper water. I took the gun under with me. The water was tepid. It held me together. For a long moment I floated and clung to my disbelief; I likened it to the oxygen dissipating through me and breaking down, leaving me desperate for more.
It seemed only right to suffer my burning lungs, so I stayed under until I felt ready to explode.
The water streamed from me, it made me so heavy I could barely move under it. After the tannin taste of the river this water was powdery and cut, blunt on my tongue. Denny inched halfway down the bank to help me out. To feel her hand made me heavier still. She had to brace and pull hard to get me up; she staggered as I came up and over the bank. We let go hands and stumbled our separate ways.
I found myself in another remarkable pose: on all fours, in soft clay, vomiting. I thought if I took all the exceptional poses from the night it would not be real, how the positions I’d put my body into changed it from being a dream sequence in my head. Rohan was behind me, talking. I don’t know how long he’d been there. He was asking Denny how many people there were. They spoke with some severity, but not nearly enough. It was me, I understood; I was totally alone in my new perception.
A stranger in every sense, I walked over to them. They looked up and watched me come. The woman’s body was behind them. I brushed against Rohan as I passed; he looked untouched and pure to me – clean-faced, wet but neat, everything in place and in order, so solid.
The woman’s body was too small, and splayed out like a flung rag doll. It was outlined against the light clay under it. Blood darkened the puddles around her and branched away in streaks. One arm was almost blown off and her face splattered with blood.
‘Did either of you touch them?’ Rohan asked.
‘She was holding the gun when Shannon shot her,’ Denny answered. She paused long enough for Rohan to grasp the implications of that. ‘He’s been in the water, so most of it’s probably washed off.’
‘Christ …’
‘It’s too far out, they couldn’t have been infected.’
‘No,’ Rohan murmured. ‘I mean, what happened?’
I noticed rain fell differently on the dead – flatter or something, like the lifelessness of the body transferred to the rain just before it hit. She was a blank space in existence, a black hole on earth, and until she was broken down and back in the soil, or dismembered by foxes and picked over by birds, she did not belong.
‘Did you know them?’ Rohan asked Denny. ‘Were they the people from the farmhouse?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know them.’
‘Did the man have a weapon?’
‘I thought so,’ she said.
‘And they threatened you?’
‘It just happened. It was raining, we didn’t know …’
‘But you thought you saw a gun?’
‘Yes,’ Denny answered.
‘And you followed them into the bush?’
She nodded. ‘I heard something and ran down to Shannon on the veranda. We both followed them.’
‘Why did you go after them if they were running away?’ Rohan was leaning forward in his effort to look into Denny’s face.
‘Oh God, I don’t know. I don’t know.’
‘We protect the cabin,’ he said to her, ‘and ourselves. That’s what we do. Tell me it was self-defence.’
I walked away, and kept walking. In my mind I took the route back to the cabin; I attributed time and energy to each section. The bush would be hard, and I had to pace myself for that, but I knew I could do it – I could put myself on the veranda, I’d do that much, then I didn’t know. It was possible I’d not be able to take the final steps inside, but the veranda would be all right, I’d be home.
They didn’t follow me straight away, and I know why – it was odd leaving that oval of dim light and milky water; to be able to walk away was almost more shocking than the dead woman settling in the mud. Wasn’t there a crime to cover up? Evidence to destroy? Wouldn’t we spend all night digging and burying, slopping around in mud and blood? I couldn’t help but feel that the pressure of social order would make it better – if we had to fight about what to do with the bodies, about what to say to the police, if we feared being found out, then at least I could be sure I’d done something wrong.