Watcher's Web (7 page)

She
braced for the onslaught of memories she was about to face. Animals
were easy—their emotions were simple, but
people . . .  Painful and ugly memories,
heartbreak, lies and treason, that was the kind of shit people’s
minds unleashed. Once she had probed a classmate and had hurt for
days with what she had found in the girl’s memories. Adults
actually
did
that to
their children?

But with Brian
. . . nothing came.

He had no
thoughts, no dreams. What the hell? Everyone had dreams, even if
they didn’t remember them. How could he have no thoughts? He’d have
to be dead. No, for some reason his thoughts were inaccessible to
her. She stared, heart thudding, trying to think of reasons, other
than that he had some sort of training in avoiding having his
thoughts probed.

His chest
moved with a deep breath. In-out. The exhaled air ticked over her
hands like a horse’s swishing tail. He stirred and mumbled. As
Jessica retreated, he opened his eyes and stared at her as if he
knew she’d been doing something.

“Good morning.
Slept well?” Her voice sounded too high.

He sat up,
groaning. “I’m sore everywhere.” He frowned at her. “Is anything
wrong? Did I say something?”

“No.”

Jessica
couldn’t meet his eyes, and turned to her pack instead. She
trembled. Who was this man?

“I think we’d
better be going.”

Shit. He
was going to notice that his hair had turned white, and wonder why
she hadn’t said anything. It was the sort of thing she
would
comment on, in a normal
situation.

She heaved the
pack up. Her shoulders protested with a stab of pain. God, not more
hills to climb. More moss boulders, more tangled tree roots, there
was no end to it. She peered at the tree canopy, trying to
determine the direction of the sun. West—the direction they had
been heading since leaving the wreck. She plodded off, but after a
few paces noticed the absence of footsteps behind her. Brian still
stood at the creek bank, his face turned up, looking at the tree
canopy.

“Aren’t you
coming?”

“Is there
. . . much point in going that way?”

“Should we be
going any other way?” What did he know about navigation? He’d said
nothing all day yesterday, had been absolutely no help whatsoever
in making decisions. Why the change of mind?

He shrugged.
“We don’t seem to be getting anywhere.”

“
Tell
me, where is this
anywhere
we’re supposed to be getting? Out of this fucking jungle
would do me.” She couldn’t help irritation seeping into her voice.
Hunger stabbed at her belly, made her head pound. She wasn’t in the
mood for arguing. Having a fight would solve nothing either.
They
needed
each
other. She breathed out heavily, stifling jangled nerves. “Do you
recognise anything? Did you hear anything?” Of course he didn’t. He
was just trying to play boss again.

When he spoke,
his voice was hesitant. “I thought, maybe
yesterday . . .”

What
the fuck?
“Yesterday? What did you hear yesterday? Why didn’t you say
anything
yesterday?”

Does
he even speak the truth?
But her heart jumped in spite of her suspicions. Anything
to get out of this bloody mess.

“I wasn’t
sure.”

“What was it?
What did you hear?”

“I thought I
heard branches cracking. That way.” He pointed downstream from the
creek.

“That’s a
reason not to go that way. If those trigger-happy lunatics are
following . . .  What else could it be? If they
were true rescuers, they’d call.”

Shit,
shit, shit.

He stared at
her, as if that thought hadn’t occurred to him.

“Come on,
let’s go before they catch up.”

She started
off, up the hill. This time, Brian followed.

*     *     *

Some time much
later, when the light was turning golden, Jessica scrambled onto an
area of land free of trees at the top of a hill. Cloud brushed the
ground, but within a few steps of the tree line, the mist thinned
and then disappeared altogether. A warm, dry breeze touched her
face.

“Hey, Brian,
look!”

They had
arrived at the top of an escarpment, and below lay a marshy
landscape. Cloud-brushed cliffs stretched to her left and right as
far as she could see. Ahead, a large cloud blocked the sun, its
edges ringed with light. The marsh disappeared from view in a glare
reflected off the water. This looked just like . . . Yes,
she remembered the vision just before the crash. That meant there
would be . . . She scanned the horizon. The island, with
its jagged profile, protruded from the bath of silver like the back
of a barnacle-encrusted whale. Even from this distance, the square
outlines of buildings were clearly visible.

“Where the
hell are we?”

Brian just
stared, his mouth open, green smudges on his face.

“Come on,
where are we?”

Not the
Australian bush.

“I
. . . don’t know.”

“I don’t
believe that. You’ve been hiding something. What is it?”

“I don’t—”

“Yes, you do.
What’s your name? Who are you? You have something to do with this,
don’t you?”

“I tell you—I
don’t know where we are.”

“Does this
look like the Australian bush to you?”

“No, but we
could be somewhere north.”

“
Where
the sun sets in the ocean? Rubbish! The sun
rises
from the water on the east coast. Who are you? Not
‘Brian’. Not Australian, not even from New Zealand. You’ve been
gawking at me all along. Just what are you after?”

“I swear, I
have nothing to do—”

A branch
cracked in the forest.

Jessica froze,
eyeing the wall of rainforest. “Did that sound like footsteps to
you?”

He turned his
head and listened. “Maybe.”

Shit.
“Come!
We have to get out of here!” How could he be so calm?

“No. Stay.
We’ll be fine.”

“How do you
know that?”

“We’ll be
fine, really.”

“Oh yeah, you
know these guys. That’s why they’ve killed two of us, huh?”

“I tell you,
we’ll be fine.”

“In the same
way Martin and the other guy were fine? I don’t think so. I don’t
believe you. You’ve been having me on these past few days. What was
this about going the other way this morning? Why didn’t you tell me
what it was you saw, or heard? You’ve been telling me shit—”

“It was not my
fault, I—”

“I don’t care.
I don’t believe you anymore. I don’t care if you’re happy to let
those gun-happy idiots get us, but I’m going to—”

Bushes rustled
behind him.

There was no
time to think, no time to find a place to hide. Jessica ran to the
jagged edge where the escarpment fell away. Bloody hell, what a
gaping drop. At least a few hundred metres, all the way down to the
marshland. Small shrubs clung to the cliff face, the rock soft
yellow. A bit to the right, the cliff had eroded to form a little
valley. Jessica ran in that direction and hesitated again,
teetering at the cliff edge.

Branches
cracked, and a bush moved violently. The pursuers were at the edge
of the forest. There would be twenty, maybe thirty seconds before
they saw her. She glanced down the gully.

“Brian, if you
want to save your arse, come over here!”

God, it was
steep.

Brian turned
to the forest but didn’t move.

There was
nothing for it. No time to wait for him. She launched herself down
the slope. Her feet landed in loose gravel and slid out from under
her. For a terrifying split second she realised she was falling,
and powerless to stop it. Bushes and rocks whizzed past like blurs.
She clawed at the rock, grabbed at passing branches, and tried to
find purchase in the gravel with her feet. Her hands slid over
stone; branches broke; whole bushes ripped out by the roots,
spraying dust and gravel in her eyes.

With a jolt,
she came to a halt in a pile of stones and was, a few seconds
later, blasted in the back by an avalanche of gravel. Stones
bounced around her, over the rocks into the reed bed.

When her heart
had calmed and the roaring of blood in her ears had stopped,
Jessica became aware of an unmusical clattering, like thousands of
sticks rapped against one another in quick, staccato beats, so loud
it hurt her ears.

She pushed
herself to her feet.

Behind her,
the cliff rose in a towering wall of yellow rock. A white trail
marked the rockslide she had just come down.

A bit further
along the base of the cliff the reed beds gave way to a beach,
which ended perhaps a few hundred metres ahead in a spit of sand.
That beach looked inviting. She could take off her clothes there,
and wash them. Maybe, too, she could find something to eat
there.

Jessica
scrambled down the gravel, shook stones out of her shoes, and
pushed through the shoulder-high vegetation. The clattering noise
was even stronger here, as if an entire army of cicadas lived
amongst the reeds. Mud sopped under her feet and sucked at her
shoes with every step, but eventually she made it to the beach.

At that
moment, the cloud at the horizon moved away and sunlight flooded
the sand, eerie and wan.

Jessica
squinted into the light. Weird. The sun looked so small and blue,
and such an unusual glare gilded the bottom of the cloud that had
just moved away. Almost as if behind that cloud
hid . . .

No, that
couldn’t be possible.

Jessica
stared, her heart pounding.

The cloud
continued to move away; the gilded edge intensified,
until . . .

A second glow
of light flooded the marshlands, more yellow, brighter than the
first.

Jessica turned
around. In the low sunlight, her body cast a long shadow over the
sand. Two shadows rather, which mostly overlapped except for a thin
yellowish edge on one side and a bluish edge on the other.

Two suns.

Until now, she had the
distant hope that the plane had crashed in a hidden valley. That
there was a big lake whose existence had slipped her mind. That the
men had been poachers. That somehow she would come across a road or
a farm and find that nothing strange had happened at all.

Not any
more.

Grey clouds,
sunlight and white water mixed in a haze of tears. She let her
backpack slide from her shoulders.

What was the
point of going on? She might as well lie down and never wake up.
The killers were not poachers, but some kind of alien with
unintelligible motives. She remembered the small size of the
figures and their dreadlocks, and their scent.

They might as
well catch up with her; it made no bloody difference. She was alone
and she would never get back home, where she could lie on her bed
reading while a fly buzzed at the window. Where the breeze brought
a scent of gum trees and magpies yodelled on the roof.

In her mind,
her mother said, “As long as they haven’t found the wreckage, there
is hope.”

No, there
wasn’t. By now, her parents would be mourning her, her mother’s
eyes rimmed with red while stroking her picture on the mantelpiece.
The school would have a memorial service. Mei Ling, Jacqui, her
other friends, dressed in formal school blazers, clutching bunches
of flowers and crying on each other’s shoulders.

Kreeeek,
kreeeeek.

What the hell
was that?

On the sand
between two bushes sat an animal about the size of her forearm. It
looked like a large lizard, with popping black eyes and orange
slitted pupils. Its head was pointy like a snake’s, but the skin
shone with sparkling gold and looked wet like a frog’s.

She stared at
it and the animal stared back at her. Then, as it came to her that
if she could catch it, she could probably eat it, it turned around
and ran off in a gallop-like gait, most unlizard-like, with an
arched back, tail held high. Jessica jumped forward and crashed
through the bushes after the creature, grabbing its tail with both
hands.

A
frightened squeal,
Kreeeeek!

She swung the
animal above her head, intending to smash it down on the sand, but
somehow, it had managed to pull itself up and clamped a pair of
jaws over her thumb. “Ow!” She let go of the tail. The lizard fell
to the sand and scuttled away, across the beach, into the
water.

Jessica stared
after it, panting, her head throbbing with pain.

She
rubbed her thumb where the lizard had bitten. A v-shaped red mark
had appeared, but the teeth hadn’t even broken the skin. Coward
that she was. Anyone else would have clubbed it over the head.
Anyone else who didn’t spend a lot of time fixing up animals.
Shooting rabbits was easy. You did it from a distance.
Bang, bang, bang.
Rabbits were introduced pests
anyway. But to kill an animal by wringing its neck with her bare
hands . . .

She kicked up
a spray of sand in her anger. Having thought of food had made her
stomach pains worse. If she was to survive, she had to slow down,
find things to eat. But she couldn’t even kill a lizard to save
herself.

The ghost of a
breeze touched her sweaty face, bringing the smell of wet mud and
the clattering noise from the reeds. There was also another sound.
Rustling, swishing and a whistle . . .

Jessica peered
over the bushes. Something moved in the reed bed to her left.

The
killers.

Chapter
7