Terror Stash (3 page)

She took a deep breath and poured power into the grip of both hands.

Now
. The wave hit with a roar and the board faithfully tried to climb the sharp ascent. Halfway up the wall, just as the wave was starting to curl over and form a barrel, the weight on the board pushed the nose through the wall. The power of the wind on the sail was enough to pull them right through the peak and onto the gentle down slope on the other side.

She gritted her jaw against the strain on her left arm. Greg was buoyant enough in his suit, but he was a two hundred pound deadweight dragging at her shoulder and fingers.

She wanted to move beyond the breakers into the swells behind them, where she didn’t have to keep watching the waves. The wind obligingly towed her past the next breaker and the next. Suddenly they were clear of surf and rising gently on the swell.

She let the boom go. The sail toppled and slapped into the water.

She sat down, straddling the board, and did her best to pull Greg onto it with her. She managed to haul his shoulders up, enough to keep him above the water. That almost submerged the super-buoyant board, but it freed Montana’s hands so she could check his breathing and heartbeat. She couldn’t feel for a heartbeat through the thick neoprene of his spring suit, so she felt his wrist. Her salt-wrinkled fingers were shaking badly from lactic acid build-up from the strain they’d just endured. Finally, she sensed the flutter she’d been searching for and relaxed.

She slapped his cheek—not softly, not hard, but sharp enough to get his attention. “Greg, wake up. Greg! You need to wake up and listen to me. Come on, now! Wake up!”

He stirred, jerked away from the slapping and coughed out a mouthful of seawater. The coughing wracked him for a moment or two, then he drew a deeper breath. “Whu’fuck?”

“That’s it. Talk to me, Greg. Come on. Wake up and tell me how pissed you are a sheila’s pulled you out by the scruff of your neck.” She smiled a little. Greg was an old-fashioned Australian boy. To his way of thinking, sheilas—women—had no right surfing. It was a man’s pastime and women just took up all the good waves screwing around with their pretty boards. Montana had heard it more than once, for Greg didn’t know the meaning of voice modulation.

“My fuckin’ head...” It was a guttural growl.

Montana felt carefully around the matted, sandy hair. It was possible he might have taken a knock against the reef. With a swell like this, the reef would be barely covered once a wave had swept over and because the waves were high, along with the surge at the base of them, he could have been rolled and dumped right onto the reef.

“We’re just going to stay out here a while, where it’s smoother.” She probed systematically over his skull using all eight fingers. “There were plenty of people on the beach who saw what happened. We’ll sit tight and someone will get a boat out to us. You got that, Greg?”

“Yeah-uh,” he muttered and swallowed. It was coherent enough an answer to satisfy her for now. His eyes were half open, but it was enough to let her see the pupils were evenly dilated.

She kept talking. He’d be listening to her voice, pulling his thoughts back together around her words, working to make sense of what she was saying. “It’ll take a few minutes, because they’re going to have to bring a boat up from the launch ramp and that’s going to be a challenge with these waves. But you’re comfortable enough, right, Greg?”

“Head. Hurts.”

“Yeah, I’m looking now,” she assured him. Her fingers edged over what felt strangely like a crease in his skin and she explored it. About half an inch long, not very deep, but definitely an impact point. She pulled her fingers away and grimaced. They were covered in blood.

“Ah,
dammit
,” she murmured, her heart sinking. She straightened up and examined the lazy plains of water and the backs of the breakers closer in. Nothing disturbed the surface of the water, but that didn’t mean a thing. Sharks didn’t always cruise the surface with their dorsal fins on display.

Hanging in the water beneath the board, her toes curled and her thighs quivered. She shook Greg a little. “Greg, listen. You’re bleeding. Do you understand what that means?”

A long silence. Then, a guttural croak. “Sharks.”

“Yeah. So I’m going to take you in now. I can do it, but you’re going to have to hang onto the board. Do you think you can do it? That’s all I need from you.”

“Surf in?”

“With the sail, in this wind, we’ve got enough power to pull us both in. But I can’t do it one-handed. I won’t do it if you don’t think you can hang on. We’ll have to take our chances here instead and wait for a boat.”

“Shark bait,” Greg muttered.

“Up to you, fella,” she said. “But I think we should go in. I’ve seen you crush tinnies in your left hand, so it’ll be a cakewalk for you. I’ll even tell you when to take a deep breath.”

She hoped he couldn’t hear the shaking in her voice. While the enormous waves had cowed everyone else out of the water today, they’d merely been a bit more of a challenge, to her way of thinking. But sharks frankly terrified her. They were eating machines with prehistoric survival instincts and virtually no brain. You couldn’t reason with something like that. There was no mercy if it decided you were its next meal.

In fact, it could already be circling below them right now, sizing up her dangling feet and the bulk of Greg’s body hanging off the barely floating board, called by the siren song trail of Greg’s blood.

The thought was enough to get her to her feet with a painful spike of adrenaline bolting through every muscle in her body. She reached over with practiced balance to fish out the pickup rope attached to the mast. She hauled on it, putting all her body weight into it, to coax the sail up out of the water and into her hands. “Greg, can you hear me?”

“Yeah.”

“Roll over. Roll over onto your right shoulder. It’ll put your left hand right next to the ball joint of the mast.”

Slowly, Greg reached over with his left arm, using it as leverage to roll himself over onto his stomach. He caught at the rubber-encased ball joint where the sail was fixed to the board and gripped it with both hands.

She let the sail fill with air. The board nudged listlessly forward. Greg’s weight would make it move like an ant in treacle, but all they needed to do was keep moving. The waves and the wind would do the rest.

The motion of the board pulled Greg around so that most of his torso was lying along the back half of the board. Montana stepped over him and slipped her left foot under his upper chest. “Well, at least I don’t have to worry about losing my footing,” she said. The cheeriness was forced but she didn’t know if she was doing it for Greg’s benefit, or hers.

She leaned against the sail and turned it until it picked up the full power of the wind. The board responded, pulling them towards the beach and gradually picking up speed.

She checked over her shoulder, then glanced ahead. About twenty-five feet, then they would be into the breakers. It was essential they have enough speed by then to be able to pick up a wave and surf it, or Greg’s weight would pull them under the water.

Greg was a long-time surfer. As the board picked up speed, she saw him shift his grip, improving it. “It’s coming,” he croaked, even though he was facing forward.

“Hold on,” she warned him as she felt them being lifted. The board began to slide down the building wall, picking up speed. Faster, faster.

Just like that, they were riding the wave. Her relief thrilled her as much as her pleasure might have if she’d been riding the wave for fun. The thunder of the wave around them battered at her ears. Truly a monster wave. Only one this big, combined with the great wind, would have the power to move both of them and the board this fast.

She adjusted the sail minutely, for better speed, more power, to keep in front of the wave. Nothing fancy, no turns, dips, flips—just a simple slide down the face of the wave for as long as it lasted.

It was a long two-minute ride into the beach, but at last she felt the wave lessen and begin to die. The wind would pull them the rest of the way in, but Greg was about to be embraced by sandy surf—the soup, as the surfers called it. “Deep breath,” she warned him.

She saw his back expand as he obeyed. He closed his eyes, protecting them.

The foam and surf boiled up around them as the wave died. They were close enough to the beach now that she was able to identify some of the people rushing down the sand towards her. The South African guy had his old-fashioned long slab of a board under his arm. It would make a good stretcher.

The others were striding into the surf, wading out with their arms swinging hard against the undertow, coming to meet them.

Montana kept the board easing forward, running on pure wind power, until the tip nosed into a dozen pair of willing hands. The back end swung around, pushed by the water, bringing Greg with it. More hands lifted him out of the water and carried him to the long board waiting on the beach.

It was only then she let the sail drop. It took five seconds for her hands to uncurl enough to let go of the boom. She slithered off the board and pulled it high up onto the sand. She worked alone. The others were crowded around Greg, caring for him. Finally, he was lifted and carried up the long beach towards the car park.

For this bunch of anti-authoritarians, calling an ambulance wouldn’t occur to them, but they took care of their own. Someone would already have their car running, waiting at the entrance to the car park. Greg would be rushed to the hospital in Margaret River with at least two mates to keep him company and keep an eye out for him on the trip there. Someone else would have begged, borrowed or simply commandeered a first aid kit and that would be in the car with them. One of the companions would be cluey about first aid and would minister to Greg on the way there.

Surfers, no matter where they came from, no matter how long they’d known each other, were brothers from the mitochondria upwards. It was hard-wired into their genes, and Montana knew she would never be part of the family. But that was okay. That wasn’t why she came out here week after week.

Steve stuck his head out. The hot air rushing past the window ruffled his hair and bathed his sweaty face, while he listened to the sound of trees whipping past the cruiser at exactly one hundred kilometers an hour.

He’d been on the job since five, with only another three hours to go, but tiredness was already biting at him. He shouldn’t’ve stayed up sanding the replacement verandah railing so long last night.

He pulled his head back in, put his cap back on. “You think, maybe, you could goose that accelerator just a tad?” he said to his partner. “My granny used to drive faster than this on her way to church.”

Chris Goonewardene rolled his eyes. “We’re at the speed limit,” he pointed out. “And didn’t your granny live about two hundred kilometers from the nearest church? She’d have to drive fast if she wanted to make it that day.”

“We’re responding to a call for assistance, mate. We’re
supposed
to drive faster.”

“Only if there is a life in jeopardy,” Chris said primly. “Which there isn’t. Just some snooty Yallingup yuppie with a beef.”

“Doesn’t matter who made the call. There’s a problem we have to check out.”

“Yeah, a problem on The Hill. You just know it’s going to be a woman wearing silk, bitching about cockies crapping on her lawn.”

Steve took off his cap again, to let the air ruffle his hair. It was already too damned hot. “Hey, at least she’s got someone to call. On the station, there wasn’t a cop for over a thousand klicks.”

Chris rolled his eyes again.

Steve ignored it. “I ever tell you about the day Albert Cunningham showed up at our station?”

Chris screwed up his face, making his dark eyes squint. “That was your head ringer, right? He planted a row of dope in the greenhouse and your mother thought it was basil and dried it and everyone got high on her spaghetti for the next year?”

“No, that was Eddie Campbell. Albert Cunningham was an aboriginal who grew up on the station next to ours.”

“The one three hours away?”

“Yeah, the closest one. Anyway, he fell into bad company and one way or another, ended up in prison in Geraldton. He only put up with that for about a year, though. He was an outback lad and Geraldton’s prison is one of those old convict-built ones with the tiny cells. So he broke out. Along with a couple of mates, they stole a car and a few rifles and started shooting and stealing their way north, heading for the Pilbara.”

Chris nodded. “For home. Right.”

“Once he was north of Carnarvon, he pretty much knew he was home free. The cops were too far away to catch up with him and he was into territory that wasn’t theirs. He knew it backwards, he’d walked it all his life.”

“What happened?” Chris asked. He’d been sucked in despite his cynicism. “He came to your station?”

“He had to cut across ours to get home, but he never made it. Three hours before he reached our boundaries, about forty men in the area gathered in our sheep shed and they were armed to the teeth. Mostly rifles that were used for culling herds and knocking off crows and beer bottles. I watched them stand around that shed, figuring out how they were going to do it and I watched my dad and old Mr. Hay team up together and head out in my dad’s ute.”

“I thought your dad and the Hays hated each other?”

“They did.”

Chris shook his head a little. He was lost.

“Point is, they were applying the law that day because there was no one else around to do it. Yeah, my dad and Mr. Hay hated each other’s guts enough to puke when they saw each other, because of the way they ran their stations. Mr. Hay used pesticides and did round-ups with horses. He also ran a bootleg distillery out the back of the shearing shed and he’d sell the product for five bucks a bottle. My dad didn’t drink, but he ran a diggers’ game of two-up in his shed every Saturday night and thousands of dollars changed hands.”

Chris wrinkled his forehead. “They’re both illegal, though...”