She moved carefully around the house, staying wide, counting exits. There was a back door, six windows on the ground floor, four upstairs. All boarded up. She didn’t have time to set up the tarp and build a fire, prepare food. Walking through the day meant she hadn’t collected water either, and that would be a problem soon but she couldn’t think about it right now. She needed to lie down under shelter. Sleep.
She dug a hole under the bushes for her pack and ground mat but she kept the torch and the pistol. The knife was in her belt. She went into the house steadily, holding the torch over the gun.
All the rooms on the ground floor were empty. She would sleep down there, near the back door, once she’d checked the upper rooms.
She was almost at the top of the stairs when a man came out of darkness onto the landing. When she turned around there were two more down below, blocking the exit, she didn’t know where they’d come from. Turned back and lined up her pistol on the man upstairs and kept going, onto the landing, her hands shaking hard. He paused long enough for her to reach the window but then she had to turn her back on him again to kick at the boards, blind and violent, and she heard him coming, not hurrying now he’d guessed the gun was a bluff, that there was no way out. Li felt the same inevitability, something essential draining away inside her. But as she dropped the gun and reached for the knife, she felt something start to give under her boot. A rotten plank. He ran at her as it splintered, shouting to the others, feet on the stairs, and she dropped the torch and turned and steadied the knife with both hands, aiming for his heart in the dark as he ran right up against her, right onto it. The point of entry cleaved muscle and sinew, not his heart but his shoulder, up into the armpit. They fell back against the boards together and the boards gave way, she could feel his heart beating but then he let go, sucking air, and she wrenched the knife out of him and forced her way through the window without looking.
The roof of the porch broke her fall but it threw her balance, too. She rolled, fell again and landed on the hard dirt below with her ankle bent under her. A burst of pain. She tried to get up, couldn’t. No time anyway – she could hear the others coming, couldn’t think, pressed against the edge of the porch and felt a gap in the planks low down that shouldn’t have been big enough but she forced herself backwards through it.
The door banged open and they ran out onto the porch, directly above her. The high beam of a hunting torch stabbed the dark. One of them shouted a question to the man upstairs and he yelled something back, enraged with pain. Her hand closed around some small stones in the sand and she threw them low and hard into the dark. They made a scattering sound out in the scrub, and the torchlight twitched that way.
A rustling behind her. There was something else under the porch. Probably a snake, dormant in the cold until she’d disturbed it. She held still until the rustling moved away, further under the house, and the fear of the snake became the fear of them hearing the snake and she realised she’d pissed herself and soon they would smell it. She wouldn’t let them drag her out they’d have to come in and get her in this confined space with her knife she could kill one of them at least if they didn’t have a gun but she couldn’t keep going like this it wasn’t possible it had to end tonight now trapped or poisoned under this trap house or dragged back inside by men who were too angry to remember some use they might have had for her tomorrow or next week.
She lay in her piss with her ankle swelling up, while the man upstairs suffered and raged and the other two hunted her in the scrub. One of them always stayed close to the house. It would be dark for a few minutes and then torchlight would flick across the dirt in front of her. Hours passed. Her body shook uncontrollably and her mind refused to save her. Her mind told her they wouldn’t keep looking this long unless they had a reason. Something worth their time. Her mind dug things up and unspooled them for her in the dark. Whispers and rumours from the road, the boat, makecamp. Things that might end with you inside the XB but maybe not whole. She tried to force them out and a clear memory surfaced, of playing spotlight with Matti and Robbie and Frank in the olive grove. Dark early but not too cold yet, the air smelling of woodsmoke. Matti wanted to hide on her own but then she’d come racing to Li, between sweeps, and Li pulled her in close against the trunk and felt her heart beating and they stayed there, still, as the torch got closer. And then Matti screamed and gave them away.
She fought sleep but it took her anyway. Every time she woke they were still out there. Matti said, The Takeaway was chasing me and he was going to steal my eyes, the colour of my eyes, and my voice and make a cardboard of me and throw me in the sea. She said, Mum, can the Takeaway steal grown-ups?
It was still dark when they came back from hunting. She waited for the torchlight to find her point of entry but it passed over the porch without stopping. Maybe the gap looked too small, or they were too fixated on
