‘Run, Molly, run!’ Greta shouts, twisting her body in the grip of the heavyset Kane.
Molly sprints through a gap in the group left by the stunned and bleeding boy.
And the day sky talks to her now. ‘Run, Molly, run,’ it says. And she listens. She listens so well. She bashes through ferns and figs and palms and her shoulders and legs are scratched by the thorns of weeds. ‘Don’t look back, Molly, don’t look back,’ the day sky says.
‘Greta!’ Molly screams, as she turns into the detouring path that took her away from the silver road and down to the bad ones.
‘Don’t look back, Molly,’ the day sky says.
She runs and she runs and she runs.
‘Greta!’ she calls to the sky.
‘Don’t look back, Molly,’ the day sky says.
And Molly sprints on through the scrub and she bursts through a fringe of palms back to the side of the creek where she leaned happily against a rock reading the works of William Shakespeare.
‘Greta,’ Molly says.
‘Don’t look back,’ the day sky says. ‘Run, Molly, run.’
But she stops. She turns around, sucking air into her lungs, and she knows now why the sky asked her not to look back. The bald man with the bloodied nose is bursting through a natural fern wall and charging at her. She turns to run again but he’s too fast, too filled with rage, and his right hand grips her shoulder and the momentum of his running is enough to drag Molly along the creek bedrock, the skin on her kneecaps and shins tearing away against the sandstone surface, and he drags her to the creek and he dumps her head, face-first, into the water and her world exists only underwater now.
Clear water. Bubbles from her mouth. Pebbles on the sandy creek floor. The bald man holds her head down and the shock of these actions unfolding within a second causes Molly to suck a belly full of water and that water has nowhere else to go but to circle around her good heart that has been turning, turning, turning to stone.
*
George Kane dragging Greta along the ground by her right arm. The man in the hunting jacket dragging her by her left arm. Greta kicks uselessly at the earth.
‘Let me go!’ she screams. ‘Fucking animals. Animals! Let me go!’
There is spit coming from Kane’s mouth. Sweat across his face. He turns to a man in a black stockman’s cap with a red work shirt and braces.
‘Kenny,’ Kane says. ‘Go help Hoss with the girl.’
Kenny runs off towards the thin path Molly ran down moments ago. Kane points at Shane, the red-haired boy, now with a rag pushed hard against his left ear, still stunned by the actions of the gravedigger girl.
‘Crank the plant up!’ Kane barks.
‘She chopped my ear off!’ the boy says, sounding as hurt by this event as he is confused.
‘Just get the fuckin’ crusher started!’ Kane hollers.
And Greta hears the spitting of oil inside a rusting generator and then she hears the movement of cranks and pulley systems coming to life again and she’s being dragged along on her back and she can see flashes of cloud and blue sky and she leans her head back hard to her left to see where she’s being taken.
Greta screams, a primal howl. Deep terror in it. But rage in it, too. Fight. She thrashes along the ground and an arm slips free and she punches at her captors. The man in the hunting jacket kicks her hard in the stomach and the blow winds her and she sucks deep for breaths that don’t fill her lungs.
‘Lemme go,’ she says, but the words barely come out.
George Kane stands over her now as she lies flat on the ground, his face – his disfigured and crusted face – close to hers. His right hand is big enough to grip both of her cheeks and squish her lips together.
‘Don’t you see?’ he sneers. ‘Don’t you see, pretty girl? We cannot let you go, pretty one. You will run back to what’s left of your home and you will tell the survivors of that airborne apocalypse that you have found a paradise deep in the scrub and they will come for us and they will bring all their fear and prejudice with them and they will turn our new sanctuary into the same hell they just watched burn to dust.’
Then the thumping. Greta turns her head and sees the three rusted steel-block stamps piled on top of each other thumping into flattened earth. Thump. Thump. Thump.
Kane grips Greta by the neck and pulls her. Closer, closer, closer to the thumping stamps of the crushing plant, which feels alive to Greta, a living thing of metal and oil, monstrous and hungry, with rotating arms and jaws and a need to crush her skull like a block of mineral-rich quartzite.
Kane shouts at the red-haired boy. ‘Rope!’
*
Molly drowning. Molly with nothing left. The bald man’s right arm forcing her head into the still creek water. She is Ophelia now in the grip of the brook. She will not have her Christian burial. Maybe she doesn’t deserve one, anyway. She thinks of her father in the fork of the tree in Hollow Wood Cemetery. She should have buried him properly. She counted at least six holes the Japs had dug deep enough with their sky bombs. She could have pulled Horace from that tree and placed him in one of those holes and sent him back to the earth that made him.
But she had to walk away. She had to find Longcoat Bob before it was too late. She had
