Dark Horse (13 page)

‘You’re going to get it wet.’

Heath stripped down to his waist. He laid the lid across the top of the container, blocking the screen from Sarah and then went over to the hessian sacks in the corner. He lifted the top sack and shook out the worst of the rat droppings and dust before rubbing his torso dry. He returned, smelling like a rat.

‘You have to go back up to the shed now,’ he told her.

‘We’ve been through this together. I want to be here when we make the call.’

‘Sarah, leave.’

‘It’s my battery powering it.’

‘Go and be with your horse in case a helicopter comes; she’ll be frightened. The rain is easing.’

Sarah listened to the rain and looked at it out the window; it was falling lighter.

‘They’re probably on their way,’ Heath said. ‘You’ve been worried all this time, well now is when you really should be worried. If you don’t properly secure her, she’s going to bolt.’

Tansy was still at the wooden fence. The rain had dropped off to drizzle. There was no sea lapping at Sid’s Gap. The world was as they’d left it seven days ago – wet and green, a turbulent sky full of rolling clouds and a few hints here and there of the summer blue that lay behind it. Sarah tethered Tansy to the back wall of the shed. She didn’t bother changing out of her wet clothes or drying herself; she paced and waited. When the minutes stretched on, she went inside the van. The gun wasn’t in the drawer beneath the bed where she thought he’d put it.

On opening the drawer though, Sarah heard a faint scraping sound. A piece of card or paper was caught and rubbing at the back of the drawer. Sarah peered into the dark recesses. She could just make out the object – a small cardboard box. She stretched her arm into the tight space, straining, her fingertips wriggling to reach the box. It had been tossed to the very back. The open flap was caught in the drawer’s sliding mechanism. Sarah tore it free. She felt a thin plastic edge within the box. She had an idea then what she had found.

Sarah sat on the van floor with the Nordoxin painkillers box in her hand. Heath had popped out all the tablets, discarded them. The two blister pack sheets were empty. She could guess his defence already: if she’d confronted him about the missing box, he would have used her admission of suicidal thoughts against her. He’d claim that he was saving her from herself. She flicked the box and its empty sheets across the van floor, watched them slide and skate.

Having pulled the drawer all the way out, Sarah had dislodged it from its rollers. She juggled it back into place and then impatiently shoved the drawer shut. The van rocked. Something small dropped onto the floor beside her.

Sarah moved a ball of used gladwrap. One silver bullet had come to rest on the floor in the corner. Heath had been so long dressing that morning because he’d been searching for it. The bed sheets were stripped back, the pillows piled in the centre. Sarah could imagine him the night before, fumbling in the dark to empty the magazine, careful not to wake her, working fast, dropping one of the bullets. She picked it up and rolled it between her fingers. She felt like throwing it away, tossing it in the direction of the empty blister pack.

Tansy whinnied. Sarah got up and went to the van door. She slipped the bullet in her pocket. Her mare was rearing up on her tether. Tansy kicked and pulled hard to be free of the steel railing.

Sarah ran down towards the stable, looking as best she could up into the sky, but the sound wasn’t coming from above, it was lifting from the earth, not a helicopter, but a rumble that shook the shed. It rattled the tin and steel. Sarah froze.
Not again
.
There was no way a wave could be on top of a mountain.
If a wall of water hit them now, Sarah would know the globe had tipped, and that nothing was the same anymore. The rumble died away as quickly as it had lifted. Tansy continued pulling on her tether.

‘Shh . . . it’s okay . . .’

A strange smell entered Sarah’s nostrils. She dismissed it, concentrating on her mare. She went into the stable.

‘Hey, it’s okay.’

Tansy was having none of it. She backed up and snorted. Whinnied loudly to be untied. The smell got stronger. Sarah sniffed the air. Dirt? Powdered rock? The scent of earth. She turned around.

Now that the rain had stopped, Sarah could see Sid’s Gap and the bush around it. From where she was standing, she shouldn’t be able to see Sid’s Gap. The hut usually blocked the view. It took a few seconds for Sarah’s eyes and mind to work together. Then the picture formed. All that remained of Hangman’s Hut was the chimney. The rest of the building had collapsed.

S
arah had the presence of mind to grab a shovel and a crowbar before sprinting out into the rain and towards the hut. She came to an abrupt halt after the toilet block (still intact) and at the place where the ground had once gently sloped away but where it now dropped away sharply. The lower part of the camping ground had slipped a metre or two. There was a soggy and gaping wound in the earth. The slip had brought down the walls of the hut. Not even the hut’s chimney had fared well against the elements this time. It was leaning, threatening to crash down over those parts of the hut still upright.

‘Heath,’ Sarah shouted out over the buckled building. ‘Heath!’

She followed the slip to where it ended and then ran down around it and to the site. Wet air was smoky with rock dust and pulverised mortar. Sarah scrambled her way closer. She dragged the shovel and crowbar with her. Sections of the building had been reduced to piles of stone. The area around the front door was demolished. She made her way there first, carefully pushing the rocks and timber beams before trusting the debris with her weight. Something big was working against her, and Heath. Their run of bad luck had gone on too long and it was as though the earth didn’t want them on it anymore. Not only did the world not care for them, it was going to do everything in its power to kick them off. But Sarah shouldn’t think this way. The collapsed hut wasn’t bad luck, it was natural that the camping ground had moved – no tree roots to hold the soil firm or soak up all the water. The real anomaly, if she thought about it, was that the rain and earth, the floods and fire, the bugs and snakes, the cads, mostly stayed away. When they did show their face, it was a shock. It shouldn’t be. Sarah should think herself lucky that she didn’t face a landslide every damn day of her life.

Sarah heard a shout. She stopped crawling.

‘Heath!’

She listened.

His muffled cry was coming from a half-collapsed section of the hut beneath the chimney. Sarah forgot safety and scrambled over the roofing iron. Dust clogged her nostrils. The stone chimney leaned ominously above.

‘I’m here, I’m here, I’m here . . .’ he was calling.

Sarah climbed down into the semi-upright section of the hut. She crouched amongst the fallen stones and broken bits of plywood on the hut floor.

‘I’m here,’ was clearer now, and as though he could see her.

But she couldn’t see him. Dust and bits of woody fibrous material filled the air. Hearing the vibrancy in his voice was heartening, more than heartening – it was a welling of white-hot emotion inside her, an absolute clamour in her heart, and in her mind the searing knowledge that he mattered to her, a lot. She ducked down and shuffled carefully into an area where the roof was intact but had lowered to within a metre of the floor.

‘Over here . . .’

She crawled under a broken beam.

Heath had a real skill for lounging, relaxed while in peril, he was sitting on the raised hearth, leaning with his back against the stone surrounding the fireplace, covered in dust, with one leg up and with his elbow propped on it. The top of his head brushed against the fallen ceiling. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to think Sid’s having a lend of us.’

Sarah got to her feet. She was able to stand, semi-upright. ‘No, it’s you, you’re trying to disappear with the same dramatic style you appeared.’

‘I’ve failed.’

He was bare-chested, fully coherent, undercover, but he was trapped. His left leg, the leg with the injured knee, was stuck beneath a large ceiling beam. One end of the beam was amongst a pile of rubble; the other end was still connected to the lowered ceiling. The timber beam wasn’t applying pressure to his leg, it was, though, resting heavy on the ground, and Heath’s foot was stuck between it and the stone hearth.

‘All right, let’s move this thing.’

From his sheltered position he couldn’t see his full predicament – the chimney leaning over the site, the rocks, slurry, a mess of heavy timbers, tin, scaffolding poles, all the things suggesting that getting him out might not be the simple task he imagined. He put his hands on the beam and pushed.

‘Slide the crowbar under.’

To release his foot was going to take a lever-type action. Sarah crouched and pushed the crowbar in under the beam. He pushed and she levered up. The beam had the same impossible weight of a car – it didn’t give the impression of being
that
heavy, and if in the right position it could be pushed a tiny bit, therefore there was something tantalisingly moveable about it . . . but, all the same, it wasn’t going anywhere under the steam of two people. She slid the crowbar out. They coughed and caught their breath.

‘Did you get onto anyone? Are rescuers coming?’

‘Weather is coming.’

‘What kind of weather?’

Sarah was careful not to look up as she said this.

‘High winds.’

Her face must have given something away, or he guessed.

‘Is it the renovation that’s collapsed? The renovation has given in, that’s what’s happened, right?’

Until then Sarah assumed he knew what had happened; she wasn’t quick enough to hide her surprise that he didn’t.

‘Is it a slip?’

‘It’s stopped.’

He began pushing at the beam again with all his might, red-faced in an instant. ‘Give me the bar, we gotta move this . . .’

‘Don’t panic.’

‘The whole place could go any moment. How much is slipping?’

‘Only above Sid’s Gap.’

‘Fuck. Is the shed still standing?’

‘The slip starts after the toilet block.’

‘Is the chimney down?’

‘It’s down,’ she lied.

‘I can’t sit here waiting for the ground to slide out under me. This beam will cut my fucking foot off. Get it off me.’

‘The phone?’

‘No,’ was all he said.

‘Did you leave it by the door?’

‘Yes. I thought it was the renovated wall coming down . . .’ He looked around, re-assessing his predicament. ‘I ran this way to get clear of it. How much ground has moved?’

‘It’s not a huge slip. When exactly is the wind coming? Did they say?’

‘Soon. Why?’

Sarah got down low to look again at the position of his foot and to gauge how much room he had. He’d managed to take his boot and sock off on his own. His foot was pale and his ankle was grazed and bloodied from where he’d scraped it on the rocks of the hearth trying to yank it free. She felt the gap with her fingers. Heath lifted his foot and tried again to free it. He angled it all different ways. She could tell by his breathing it caused him pain to move it. ‘It’s so close,’ he said between his teeth.

‘You’re good at this – think, try not to panic and think, we have to lift the beam and bring it this way a bit. We have to do it before the wind comes. There were no saws or anything like that when we looked?’

‘No.’

‘A chisel?’

‘I would have noticed one.’

‘I could counterbalance the beam or something?’

‘Shit – I can’t think!’

‘Shh, we’ll get you out.’

He frowned. ‘Is the floor solid beneath the beam right the way along?’

Sarah looked. ‘Yes. But the earth has come up under it, so we can’t go down through the boards, although . . . I don’t think we could drop the beam anyway – if it comes down any further it might crush your foot.’

‘But the floor is solid?’

‘Yes.’

She was quiet, letting him think.

‘The jockey wheel, on the caravan,’ he said, ‘maybe that will be enough; we can put it under and use it like a jack.’

‘Would it be strong enough?’

The ceiling creaked and shifted above them. It rained down a shower of pulverised mortar.

‘Just get it!’

Sarah sprinted up the bank and into the shed. She dropped to her knees beside the caravan tow bar. The jockey wheel was chained and padlocked to the bar. She had suspected as much. She kicked the padlock in frustration. Sarah held her head and willed clear thinking. Had she seen any keys for the padlock? If there were any in the van they would have found them days ago. Making the situation so much worse was that the jockey wheel was a strong cylinder of steel, the handle to wind it was robust: it looked like it could do the job Heath wanted it too. Maybe Heath had seen keys and taken them. He’d taken everything else he’d laid eyes on.

After getting together a box of things – food and water, blankets, dry clothes, headlamp, torch, all the sharp knives and pointed implements she could find, hard hats, safety goggles, and while searching for the stashed set of keys for the jockey wheel (last ditch effort, just in case), Sarah found her gun. Heath had put it under the mattress. Beside the gun was the coil of cord that had been tied to the top of the van.

Sarah wasted precious seconds staring at the cord.

All this time she’d been sleeping on top of a looped length of cable. Put there to tie her? There so that Heath could have, at any time, grabbed her hands in the dark, tied her up before she knew what he was doing?

Sarah returned to the hut and found Heath leaning to one side, stretching for and collecting all the loose stones he could reach, putting them in a hessian bag he’d dragged up from the floor, pushing the bag down beside his leg, filling in the gap between the beam and the hearth.

‘What’s that for?’

‘A barrier, to stop the beam crushing my leg if the ground moves again.’

Sarah passed him a hard hat.

‘It’s padlocked.’

‘You don’t remember seeing any keys?’

‘I was hoping you did.’

He ducked his head to put the hard hat on. ‘No.’

Sarah sat the box beside him on the hearth. ‘I did find a couple of things.’ She took the cord from her pocket and tossed it in the box. ‘Imagine if you’d tied me up, Heath? Would’ve been pretty ironic. I’d be bound and gagged and unable to come down here and save your arse.’

He looked at the cord in the box. ‘Jesus, could we concentrate on one thing at a time? Is the slip any bigger? Has the ground moved any more?’

‘Not that I can tell.’

‘Sarah, I wasn’t going to tie you up.’

She noticed then that he was hunched whereas before he could sit straight. A wave of panic rose again. Rubble shifted and tumbled somewhere in the collapsed hut.

He began sorting through the box for cutting and sawing implements. His hands were shaking.

‘Did I mention that after saving Jasper from the wombat hole, my worst fear became being buried alive?’

‘Are you sure no rescuers are coming?’

‘The wind is going to gust up to one hundred kilometres an hour; they can’t come. And the chimney is up and leaning this way, isn’t it? That’s why you’re worried about the wind.’

‘Maybe if we prop all this up.’ She touched the lowered ceiling. ‘I’ll get scaffolding and we’ll make a box around you, until they come.’

‘Scaffolding won’t make any difference, it would just pin me in.’ He patted and groped at his pockets. ‘How quickly can you ride down to the plateau and back again?’

‘I . . . depends what the road is like.’

‘How quick?’

He unzipped a side pocket and took out a set of keys.

‘I could do it in . . . two hours. An hour down and an hour back, if I ride hard.’

‘I’ll start trying to chip through this, in the meantime you ride down.’ He passed her the keys. ‘My car is there. On the plateau.’ He stopped and waited for her reaction to this. It showed in his simple and blunted gaze that he was aware of the corner he’d painted himself into.

‘Okay.’

‘It’s bogged behind those plantation logs, you know them?’

‘Yes.’

‘In the drawers in the back of the ute is a hydraulic jack in a bright red bag. Don’t forget the handle. It’ll be in the bag, but check. The jack should fit in your backpack. Also get the boltcutters from inside the car, for the jockey wheel, as a back-up.’

‘You think I should leave you for that long?’

‘We could stuff around here trying different things but it’d be a waste of time. The jack will lift it.’

Of the four keys on the ring, the biggest was for a Toyota. The brand name was stamped into the metal. The teeth were worn smooth and discoloured. There was a green-coloured key, a plain silver key, and a small cabinet-type key, broken, the tip snapped off. The key tag was a set of miniature dumbbells with
The Fitness Club
written on the small metal bar.

‘Sarah . . .’

She looked up from the keys.

‘Will you come back?’

‘Of course.’

‘No.’ He was quiet a moment, a grave expression on his face. ‘Will you come back no matter what?’

‘I’m not going to leave you trapped.’

‘If you do come back, I won’t forget it.’

She took off her watch and gave it to him. ‘If I take longer than two hours it’ll be because of the track and washouts.’

‘Help me put my boot back on. The shoe might save my foot if this thing moves.’

He passed her his boot and sock. Sarah got down on her belly and reached under the beam to put on his sock and shoe for him. If the ground shifted at that moment, and the beam dropped lower, her hands and arms would be crushed.

She finished loosely lacing his boot. He reached down through the gap and began hacking at the timber beam with the blade from his pocketknife. The timber sounded tightly packed, fine-grained and dense. He used a palm-sized stone to strike the end of the pocketknife. The cramped conditions made this action almost impossible.

‘From the plateau, you’re going to be able to see down to Spinners Creek. You’re going to see the rescuers and the machinery. Sarah, they know we’re here. They’ve been trying to repair the bridge and get across. But even if they’re close, they’re not going to be able to get up here as quick as you can on Tansy. You know that, they don’t. If they see you, they’ll try to stop you.’

‘I’m getting the jack and coming back, that’s what I’m doing.’

‘Don’t let them see you or they’ll stop you.’

‘Heath – I’m coming back.’

‘My name’s not Heath.’

Sarah straightened. She kept her gaze down. She concentrated on keeping her focus on the task at hand, the task ahead. ‘I don’t know if I want to hear any more right now.’