It was a very little girl with big brown eyes.
“I’m looking for my car keys and my phone,” Heather said.
“Did you set the grass on fire?” the girl asked.
“Yes. I’m sorry about that. I probably shouldn’t have done that. I thought everyone would go and fight the fire and we could escape.”
“It’s OK. It goes like that every year in the summer. We’re used to it. I’m Niamh, by the way,” the girl said, offering her hand.
Heather shook the hand. “Heather,” she said solemnly.
“Your phone and the keys will be in Ma’s room. At the end there.”
“Thank you, Niamh,” Heather said.
She walked to the end of the hallway. The door opened onto a hot, dusty, stuffy room with a massive four-poster bed, a tallboy, and other ancient pieces of wooden furniture. The walls were covered with faded black-and-white photographs of men with elaborate beards and women with elaborate dresses. There was a framed ship’s ticket from Liverpool to Sydney and next to it a photo of a pretty, ridiculously young girl with a suitcase trying to look like a grown-up.
“Jesus! What do you think you’re bloody doing!” a voice said.
Heather turned. It was Ma with a little blond-haired boy she was leaning on for support.
“It’s time for us to go,” Heather said.
“I don’t give you permission to go,” Ma said.
“You’re not in a position to give permission,” Heather said.
“It’s my island!”
“It’s not your island and it never was. Where’s the key to the Porsche?” Heather asked, pointing the rifle at Ma’s head.
“You won’t shoot.”
“Ask Jacko if I won’t shoot. I’ll shoot you and your grandson.”
“You’re an animal!”
“Where’s the key!” Heather screamed, pointing the empty rifle at the little boy’s head.
“Nightstand. Right next to the bed,” Ma said.
Heather saw the key in a little dish beside the bed on top of all their phones. She shoved the key and the phones in her pockets.
“What’s all that yelling, Ma?” a dazed-looking Danny asked, wandering in from the hall. Heather pointed the empty Lee-Enfield at him.
“Hands behind head, kneel on the ground! Now!”
Danny got down on his knees and put his hands behind his neck. “This isn’t fair,” he wailed.
Heather walked behind him. “I’m sorry about Ellen. I really am,” she said and hit him in the back of the head with the heavy rifle stock. Danny fell face-first onto the ancient floorboards.
“As soon as they see you coming, they’ll back the ferry offshore. You’re screwed,” Ma said with a cackle.
“We would be screwed if this was an island,” Heather replied.
A cold lick of hatred in Ma’s eyes. She fortune-told. She could see what this young woman would do to all she had built here if she was allowed to live.
It was also a look of recognition. A mirror. She’d come here as a young woman and mixed things up and married in and destroyed things and built things all those years ago.
Ma lashed weakly at her with her cane. “I’ll have you, you bitch!” she said furiously.
“Well, you’d better move fast.”
Heather ran down the hall. She waved goodbye to little Niamh and bolted down the stairs. She darted across the farmyard to the Porsche.
“It’s me,” she said as she opened the driver’s-side door. Olivia, in the front passenger seat, grinned and relaxed her grip on the rifle. Heather placed her foot on the brake and pushed the start button, and the Porsche roared into life.
She drove around the farmhouse, checked where the sun was, and headed east.
In the rearview mirror, she saw Matt on horseback galloping into the farmyard.
“Matt!” Olivia said.
“On a horse!” Owen added.
“I see him! Damn it. Keep an eye out behind us, Owen, they’ll be after us soon,” Heather said after a minute.
“I think they already are!”
“No way!”
She looked in the mirror.
A bunch of them had piled into the Toyota Hilux and were getting it going.
She looked ahead.
Red sun.
Lens flare.
In her head, music from the Pixies, “Gouge Away”—a little on the nose, but so be it.
She drove over the boggy heath, the Porsche bumping over the land. Not their land. Never was.
She hoped the kids were right. She hoped the pamphlet from the prison was correct. Two days a month, on the low tide with the full moon and the low tide with the new moon, Dutch Island became a peninsula.
“Look out!” Owen said and she swerved around the wreck of a VW Beetle, beautiful in its red rust, sitting in the grass like an ankylosaurus.
If they crash, they get another car. If we crash, we’re dead, Heather thought.
A bullet smashed into the rear window.
Olivia screamed.
“Everyone OK?” Heather asked.
“I’m OK,” Owen said.
“Should I fire back?” Olivia asked, holding Matt’s rifle.
“Just keep your head down, honey! Both of you!”
She drove around a tree stump and went straight toward a channel that might have been an old drainage canal or a river made wider by the rains.
The hood of the car dived nose-first into the canal and three things happened at once: something heavy ground against the axle, the car veered sideways, and a sheet of mud and brown water sloshed onto the windshield.
“Incoming!” Owen yelled as they slewed toward the wall of the far bank of the channel. They hit it sideways; the car stalled and then stopped.
She hit the wipers and the water-spray button. Nothing came out of the water spray and one of the wipers seemed to be broken.
The other worked and cleared a narrow arc in front of her face.
Visibility zero on the passenger side.
If they were impaled here against the side of the bank, it would be the end of them.
She looked in the rearview.
They were still on her ass.
She shifted down to low gear mode and pushed the start button. “Brace yourselves, kids!”
The car shuddered.
She pushed on the gas pedal until it was nearly on the floor. “Come on!” she said.
The engine growled and the Porsche seemed to understand what she wanted. Its front wheels struggled for purchase in the trench, churning mud and then slowly getting a grip. When she had sufficient momentum, she aimed for the far wall, and the Porsche began to climb over.
It climbed at a thirty-degree angle and she wondered if they were going to flip onto the roof.
Another bullet hit the back of the car with a clang and a terrifying ricochet through the side window. Glass splinters struck her on the right cheek.
“Come on, baby, you can do this, you ugly piece of shit!” she said, and thus encouraged, the Porsche crawled up over the trench and onto the heath again.
She switched back to drive mode and glanced in the rearview. She watched the Toyota disappear into the trench and held her breath for three seconds until she saw it struggle out again.
“Shit.”
Only a quarter of a mile clear run to the ocean now.
The ground was boggy but the Porsche didn’t mind. She heard it ascend through the gears. Third gear. Fourth.
Another bullet dinged inside the cab and punched a hole through the windshield. This time, the entire windshield cracked.