Afterlight (21 page)

Her gift to me was Jordan, and I meant to grab the
lifeline he represented with every
ounce of my strength. If the guy ever showed up.

I shivered as Carter bent and hefted up a chunk of fallen rock, wrapping the T-shirt
tightly around it before hurling it into the water. He was half laughing, half crying,
as the missile flew in an arc through the air, splashing into the water partway to
the huge TV someone had drowned at the edge of the arch.

‘You didn’t even get my size right, darling,’ he was sobbing. ‘Typical! RIP, Monny,
RIP.’

As he hugged himself, he scanned the apex of the overpass above us. ‘You can go
now, you can go, princess, it’s all good,’ he whispered.

I couldn’t help a tear running down my cheek, wondering if this was all it took
to set her free. In the end, her unfinished business had been so simple: to find
the one person who’d given her shelter when she needed it most to say
thank you
.

My mobile rang. The sound of it, cleanly echoing, made Carter and me jump. I drew
the thing out of my pocket and the screen flashed up the name:
Jordan Haig
.

Holding up my hand to Carter in apology, I exclaimed, ‘Thank God, J. where have you
been
?’

The static of a bad line greeted me. ‘Hello?’ I shouted. ‘Hello? We’re at the bridge,
the big stone one, on the Merri Creek trail. Jordan?
Jordan?
’

Still hearing nothing but hissing, I dropped the phone as the world exploded into
colours all around me.

I knew I wasn’t dead because my ears were ringing, and through it I could also discern
screaming. It couldn’t be coming from me, because I couldn’t get any air into my
body. Someone had, at some point, punched me in the head, and now they had me in
an excruciating headlock. My face and neck were then forced so hard into the ground
that pain exploded in my nose, behind my eyeballs. I could feel gravel and broken
glass against my cheek, grass in my mouth, earth.

‘See
this
coming, Nostradamus?’ someone laughed, and the pressure eased just enough
to let me take a single gagging breath before rough hands rolled me over again.

I whooped, soil coating my tongue, as I heard sounds of struggle somewhere to my
left. Carter’s cries abruptly stopped.

‘Got the queer?’

Somebody else grunted. ‘Yep.’

The rain beat down as I tried hard to focus my eyes, make sense of what I was looking
at. Crouched over me was a rain-drenched stranger with a dark ponytail, huge shoulders
and a paunch wearing a tooled leather vest, jeans
and weathered Cuban-heeled boots.
They were riding boots, I sluggishly realised. Dad had had some, said they were the
only thing would give a proper grip, rain or shine.

No guy wore Cuban heels these days, unless they didn’t give two shits what people
thought of them, and had the muscle to back it up. Men like my Dad who’d owned a
pair until he died. Died with them on.

I furrowed my grazed brow, trying to think, setting off fresh waves of pain in my
face.

Reavers.
These men were Reavers.

‘O’Loughlin?’ I croaked, trying to reconcile the tall, scowling, overweight figure
with the grainy photo I’d seen on the internet of the man still on the run. Could
be. Give or take twenty kilograms and a dye job.

‘O’Loughlin’s not far,’ someone laughed. The speaker was standing somewhere over
the paunchy guy’s shoulder, far enough back I couldn’t see him. ‘Coppers think he’s
reached Queensland by now,’ the voice added. ‘But we know better.’

There was a round of laughter as Ponytail forced my head around, hard. I found myself
looking, through watering eyes, at the creek flowing by, around and past the big,
black TV buried in the swell, my neck at an impossible angle. Any moment now, I was
going to break.

‘Still good for something, those TVs,’ the speaker said conversationally. ‘All the
locals dump their unwanted shit
here, so we followed suit.’

Horror engulfed me. ‘What did you do to Eve?’ I gagged, already knowing the answer.

‘
Who?
’ said Ponytail sharply, looking over his shoulder and shrugging in the direction
of his unseen companions.

‘Monica, I mean,’ I coughed. ‘Monica Cybo.’

‘Now this is the problem in a nutshell,’ snarled the man I couldn’t see. ‘Everybody
here knows far too much for my liking.’

I knew I was going to die. Some part of me prayed I’d be back at school on Monday
morning like none of this had ever happened; back learning the rules from the ground
up—the nice girl who was good for a laugh, the chick who could take a joke, who was
always a good sport but nobody’s bestie—back to watching Jordan Haig from a distance
and wondering what he was thinking, whether he ever even thought about me for a nanosecond.
But I’m a realist, and even as my eyes continued to probe for a way out, I knew it
was out of my hands and only blind luck would save me now.

As if to crush even that thought, the man I couldn’t see said calmly, ‘I did unto
Mon what I did to Curtis Fallon, Bony Lincoln and a list of others too long to mention—killed
them the same way I had someone take out your fucking woman-stealing prick of a father.
Patience has its own rewards. Always get what you want, in the end.’

I began to tremble uncontrollably as the implacable voice added, ‘The irony is you
coulda been
my
kid if your slut of a mum hadn’t run off with my right-hand man.’

I knew who he was. What had Mum said? No man ever left the Reavers, the brotherhood
you took to your grave. Eve and the other woman, Nadja, were just replacements,
look-alikes, warm bodies, for the one that got away from him years ago.

I began to moan—long and low like a dying animal—and the three men standing around
me laughed and let me go on making that awful noise because it was the last sound
I was ever going to make.

Until the temperature abruptly dropped, and all the noise in me was cut off.

Suddenly, the air was like broken glass, stabbing into my throat, my lungs. It hurt
to breathe. The air on my skin, it all hurt.

Everyone felt it. I knew it by the way Ponytail shivered and whined, distracted,
‘Boss, do we do it here? It’s cold.’

The rain was almost deafening, but it wasn’t the rain making the big man uneasy,
it was the sudden and pervasive smell of violets. Like someone had just dropped
and busted a big bottle of perfume, the smell rising all around us, staining everything.

My wildcard. My beautiful, vengeful siren.

Ponytail shook me. ‘What’s the idea?’ he snarled. I
shook my head, pointing weakly
over his shoulder and heard collective gasping.

It was like the first time I ever saw her.

Eve was silent and resolute, her entire body limned in a soft silver beneath the
shadowy arch, looking as real as you or me. But this time, her focus was elsewhere.
Her eyes were fixed on that big, black TV sticking up out of the water at a crazy
angle, a good three-quarters submerged.

Ponytail scrambled away so quickly he fell over me with a crunch and kept right on
scrambling.

‘Boss?’ the other man standing over Carter quavered. I could hear the creak and scuff
of leather as he edged away, towards the curtain of rain on the far side of the bridge.

The man the others called
Boss
moved forward, and I saw that it was the smoker from
the park. O’Loughlin looked nothing like his photo.

As O’Loughlin stared at Eve’s advancing figure his eyes were almost bugging out of
his pale, strained face, but his voice was all controlled venom. ‘Once a bitch, always
a bitch,’ he breathed. ‘I’ll put you down again if I have to, you dog…’

I didn’t catch what happened next because this was blind luck happening right here,
and if I could get across the water to the path on the other side of the creek, there
would be houses, people who could help me.

I rolled onto my stomach and slithered down the embankment towards the creek bed
as O’Loughlin screamed at his men, ‘
Get her!
’

17

But Eve was repaying me in kind for all the things she’d made me do; all the loose
ends I’d tied up on her behalf. I’d been faithful, I’d shown compassion, and now
she brought the raw wind with her, the storm.

O’Loughlin
, I thought I heard her shriek, the wind her voice.
O’Lough-liiiiiiin
.

Spooked, I tumbled headlong down the rocky embankment. All I could hear was the
sound of men screaming, and the rain.

I plunged into the icy water, gasping as it quickly rose above my knees. Half-blind
in the darkness beneath the arch, I moved in the direction of the abandoned TV parting
the current, intending to skirt around it. The
walking track on the opposite bank
terminated just beyond the TV. If I followed the path back, and cut through the scrub
on that side, it wouldn’t be long before I hit houses.

Behind me, I heard the thrash and roar of an angry man entering the water and I scrambled
out of the shadow of the bridge into the grey open air. The rain struck me like bullets
and my hair was soon plastered to my skull, run-off streaming straight into my eyes.
I was so stiff, so cold, that only fear kept me going.

The water now rose up beyond my hips, then my waist, as I passed to the left of the
TV, giving it a wide berth. Suddenly, pain struck through my right shoulder blade
and I lost my footing and went down, flailing, drinking water.

I felt a big hand grip me by the back of the neck. I was dragged face-first through
the swell. The fist yanked me upwards like baggage.

As I coughed and gagged for air, O’Loughlin snarled into the side of my face, ‘What
Monica failed to understand, is that your kind are
made to be thrown away
. You,
Mon, Joss, Angel—only exist because we
permit
it.’

He pushed me under again, dragging me beneath the surface of the murky water until
my face was inches away from the slime lying along the bottom of the creek.

I caught a glimpse of a bright-blue tarp buried in the silt, flattened beneath the
edge of the abandoned TV.

O’Loughlin held me down, thrashing and foaming,
beginning to see rainbows, at the
very limits of my endurance.

Suddenly, he pushed me face-first into the mud, like it was a taster of things to
come, and I expelled what little air I had left in my lungs. The creek bed yielded,
the mud clinging to every contour of my face, and my frantic movements only exposed
more of the cylindrical, tarpaulin-wrapped thing jammed into the filth. I cried out,
as I realised what it was, dirt and rot and water streaming into my mouth, drinking
it in.

It was
what remained.
What Eve had really wanted Jordan and me to find.

O’Loughlin abruptly let go, and I clawed my way to the surface, spitting and hacking,
lashing out at him, even though I was blind.

He cuffed me in the face and I fell, the back of my head slamming into the edge of
the TV screen. The world threatened to go black. O’Loughlin knotted one of his fists
into the thick fabric around my waist to keep me from sliding further into the water,
while his other hand disturbed the depths around us, looking for something.

‘Mon’s trouble was that she overestimated her importance,’ he shouted through the
beating rain. ‘She
demanded
I choose, and when I wouldn’t, she started offering herself
around.’

I could hear his disbelief.

‘No one leaves
me
. No one.’ He bent lower in the water, grunting. ‘She brought it
all on
herself
. Just as your Dad did, and Angel.’

O’Loughlin squatted suddenly, yanking something out of the murk, his face red and
straining with effort. In his hand was a rusty spade, encrusted with mud from the
creek bed.

He hooked the handle of the spade over one of the broken TV antennae and turned me
roughly so my face was pressed into the top of the set. He pulled my head back by
the hair, wedging my body tight against the screen with the weight of his own body.
I felt his hips grind into me from behind and felt a visceral fear.

‘Like that, do you? Your mum did.’

His laughter was hateful and I caught the silver glisten of a knife blade from the
corner of one straining eye, my throat curved back, taut and exposed. The spade,
hooked alongside me, stank.

‘The rain will wash it all away,’ he said kindly. ‘And you’ll be mud. Just like all
of them.’

There was a roaring darkness inside my head as I waited for the final blow, too weak
to do more than hang there in his grip, drawing one rasping breath after another.

I was on the verge of closing my eyes, when there was a shiver in the air. Before
me, the grey twilight, the rain, seemed to tease apart.

Just the faintest gap in reality, unfurling so quickly—along the vertical, then the
horizontal—that a field of waving grass flashed into existence, rising in the distance
into gentle, undulating hills. Wildflowers blanketed the green-gold grass to the
horizon, and the sky was violet, rainless, filled with scudding white clouds.