Catherine Jinks TheRoad (80 page)

Alec turned on his heel, abruptly. He strode towards the ute. ‘We’ve gotta get out of here,’ he announced. ‘We’ve been pissin about for too long. We’ve gotta get
goin
.’

Peter knew how Alec felt. But he also found that he couldn’t drag himself away from that slow, insidious seepage. Not until he was forced to. Not until his mother called him into the caravan, so that she could check his skin and clothes.

‘You keep away from that stuff,’ she scolded. ‘Do you hear me? That stuff is probably poisonous.’

It was nearly noon.

So now he knew for sure.

Blood from the ground? He knew whose blood it was. He may have left her in a pool of it, back at the farm, but it was coming up here, now. It had followed him here, all this way. It was pursuing him.

He should have known that this would happen – that even death wouldn’t finish her. You don’t rub out power like that with a gun and a hatchet and a filleting knife. You probably couldn’t do it with a silver bullet. He almost laughed aloud – a wild, despairing laugh – but folded the laugh away behind his tongue. No one would understand. None of them knew what they were dealing with, here.

Only he knew. Only he had seen that kangaroo, leaping out of the darkness towards him. She had sent that kangaroo. Somehow, for some reason, she had commanded it to wreck his car. She was the one who’d caused his dog to turn on him. She had called on all the black forces at her disposal, and tried to dismantle his life. God knows what she had told his boss – what she had done to his mate Trevor. One by one, they had fallen to her noxious spells. No doubt this lot would do the same.

He would have to watch them carefully. Some of them might not be people at all. She could do that. She could send emissaries in disguise. That girl with all the make-up – she could be a black snake. Or a crow. There were lots of crows around. One of
them
might be Grace. Now that he had freed her spirit, she could be anywhere and everywhere. She’d even got into his dog, in the end.

He wondered if the whole lot of them were really black spirits. That one there had a gun, though. So that one
couldn’t
be her creature, because machines were the product of civilisation. The rest of them looked pretty harmless, but how could you tell? Grace had looked pretty harmless too.

Gazing around at them all, at their sweaty faces and flapping mouths, he felt the rage boil up in him again. He had to shut his eyes and take a deep breath, folding his hands into fists, so that no one could see them shaking. Why hadn’t he used his gun on that old fool, while he’d had the chance? He could have hijacked the ute and continued on alone. Why hadn’t he
realised
? Even at that stage, he’d been feeling safe enough to use camouflage, like a lizard. He’d been half-convinced that
he
was to blame – that he’d misread the map. Misjudged the distances.

He had been doubting his own powers of logic.

That’s what she had done to him. For so long she had undermined his faith in his own reasoned judgement. Now, however, he knew the truth. Who but she could have closed her fist over space and time? Only now did he understand the full extent of what she was. That frail body had been nothing but a shell, a shell that had fooled everyone – even him. He had thought himself the lone target of her malice. He had never believed that anyone
else
would be caught in her trap. That was why he had hitched a ride with Col. It hadn’t occurred to him that, in her desire for revenge, she would carelessly ensnare these others as well.

But he would find a way out. He had to.

And it didn’t matter how.