Chapter 34 #2
“Only I wouldn’t want to give them a shock,” he said. “Like you—”
“Yes,” she said. “My husband. And another man.”
“And another man?” he said, eyes blinking rapidly and then slowing. “So what are you? A throuple?”
It wasn’t just the calm inappropriateness of the question that was so unnerving.
That wide, close-mouthed smile that was so weak looking somehow also filled her with a horrible conviction that when it opened his tongue would whiplash out of it like a toad snatching an insect out of the air.
She tried to keep a grip on herself, wondering if it was the fear that was making her almost hallucinate these things, or if she had finally just run mad after so much time spent alone.
The one thing that kept her moored in this unsteady moment was the solid conviction that he was real and dangerous.
“No,” she said. “Just my husband and his brother.”
“And they’re in the house?” he said.
“Yes,” she said, cursing herself for the dryness in her mouth that made her sound more like rasping than talking.
“Right,” he said, then furrowed his eyebrows “Only… they weren’t there when I went through it.
Place was empty. And there was no sign of more than one person living there.
One of everything on the edge of the sink.
One toothbrush in one bathroom, no toothbrush in the other.
Monastic, I thought. Though I thought it was someone who’d now buggered off this island with the rest of them.
I didn’t think anyone was still in residence. ”
His hand was now dangling casually close to the orange hatchet handle. If his eye hadn’t flicked to it and then flicked back even faster she might not have noticed.
“They just came back with me,” she said. “We were swimming.”
He looked at her closely, as if he was starting, wanting to believe her even. And then the smile did something to itself that twisted it from wide and weak to just nasty.
“In my arse you were,” he said. “It’s just you and me, and you got no reason to be lying to me or to act so untrusting and scared. I’m not going to hurt you.”
He’d have been more convincing had he not pulled the hatchet out of the chopping block.
She’d worked for NGOs in dangerous places.
She well might be a woman going a bit strange and wonky living alone on this emptied island, but she was still all the earlier stages of herself under that wonkiness.
She was still the tough girl who’d undergone the mandatory safety training, the escape and evasion drills, the self-defence classes before being sent in-country to help others.
Because you can’t help others if you can’t help yourself.
So when he suddenly lurched forwards and tried to grab her by the towel round her neck and yank her towards him, she didn’t try and pull away but went with it, coming towards him faster and with less resistance than he was braced for, making him stumble back a step, catching himself just in time to meet the heel of her right hand punching skywards in a brutal uppercut that caught him under the chin and sent his head snapping back.
He staggered and gagged, too shocked to swing the hatchet, and then she stepped back and launched a savage kick upwards at his kneecap.
It was a move taught to incapacitate an attacker and make them scream as the patella was hacked loose and north into the tendons and muscles of the upper leg.
The Krav Maga instructor who had assured her that it would work – more than half a dozen years and a lifetime ago – also told her that if she was ever surrounded by a group of attackers she should pick the one who was the obvious leader and make him scream in pain before anything else happened.
The thinking being that if the followers saw her do that to their leader they’d pause for a moment and that might give her the valuable life-saving time to get a head start on running away from them.
Running away was, the instructor said, always Plan A.
Always, always better to run than fight.
He drummed that into them for the four days of the course in a brightly lit gym space in east London that had a smell of optimistic citrus cleaning products laid over a faint but ineradicable base note of feet.
And whether or not that applied physiology and consequent psychology was right remained unproven at this point, because the whole kick-the-kneecap-loose plan was predicated on wearing boots or shoes.
And just too late she remembered she wasn’t, and then, almost instantaneously why it would have been a good idea.
He yelped, but more in surprise than pain, and instead it was she who gasped at the impact and the crunching jolt travelling up her own leg as she broke toes instead of dislodging his patella.
He stared at her, and now the smile was gone and a different kind of wetness was pouring from his mouth. Dark, red-black wetness.
“You thtupid bit—” he began, and then dropped the hatchet as he felt for his mouth to see why his voice sounded so wrong, or perhaps why his tongue has throbbing with so much sudden pain.
He gagged as he found the damage, the gouts of blood pulsing from the wound made by his own teeth catching the tongue as she had smacked his jaw shut, half severing it.
It was the moment of horror that bought her the time that saved her as she corkscrewed and slipped her head out of the towel and followed Plan A.
Better to run than fight.
Always.
She sprinted for the fields, for the wide space where she would be able to hide in the falling darkness, or at least see him coming, running for the folds and humps of the distant machair that she was sure she knew better than him.
By the time she’d had her second thought and wondered if she should have tried to barricade herself in the house it was too late.
The adrenaline had only masked the pain of her broken toes for the first couple of hundred yards and now it made her wince and gasp with every other step.
She heard the dispiriting kick of the starter-motor on the quad bike behind the house and then the sound of it bumping and clanking into the chase behind her.
The pain in her foot was serious now, making her limp and slowing her and she hadn’t even reached the gate at the mouth of the Road to Nowhere.
But she still careered onwards, unbalanced and squint as she was, throwing everything into a furious lurching sprint, because she was running with a plan now.
If she could get to the fenced fields she could jump the first wire and run diagonally, while he would have to take the quad the long way round to get to the open gate at the other end, by which time she should be able to get over the next fence, which would mean he had to double round and travel twice as far to make the next again open gate into the second field.
And by that time, in her hastily concocted plan, she would have reached the relative safety of the machair humps and the back of the dune system where her knowledge of the terrain would help her hide.
There was even a weapon of sorts out there, if she could get to the old shovel.
It was a good plan.
The falling darkness that she had hoped would cloak her was cut by the bouncing headlight of the bike cutting a swathe through the thickening murk as he rounded the corner of the house, the trailer it pulled clattering and complaining and making its motions swervy and jumpy as it clanked and roared across the uneven ground towards her, eating up the precious distance she’d gained with absurd speed.
She felt herself pinned by it like a searchlight as it cast her long jolting shadow across the grassy lane stretching ahead of her.
She gritted her teeth and told herself she just had to make it over that first fence.