Page 127 of The Island

“I’m scared,” she said.

“What are you…afraid of?”

“Killing someone in cold blood.”

“Heather, please remember…that it is not you…who is killing me. They have killed me. They are the killers.”

She tried not to look directly at him. But she couldn’t help it. His face was a mess of bite marks, scabs, wounds.

“Please,” Hans said and she pushed in with the blade and together they cut his throat.

She scooted away quickly from the arterial spray, almost bumping into poor Petra.

The ants had eaten the skin off Petra’s face, and parts of her skull were glinting in the arc lights.

Hans bled out in under a minute. They were together again in death.

She shivered and allowed herself tears.

She took a deep breath and nodded at him.

A thought occurred to her. If Petra was here and Hans was here, why wasn’t Tom here too? What had they done with Tom’s body?

She looked frantically for him for a minute or two but it was obvious that they’d done something else with Tom.

Why?

Because they needed Tom.

Because they were going to put Tom in the car with her and the dead kids over on the mainland. They were going to try to make it look like a bad car accident. Over there, well away from here.

They were going to disappear the Dutch couple, but Tom must be in storage somewhere. A freezer in the house, no doubt.

She shook her head. “It’s not going to fly, is it, Petra?”

The intelligent Dutch woman’s dead skull grinned at her.

The Australian coroner would not be fooled, right? Sooner or later he or she would look under a microscope and notice that Tom’s cells had been distorted by ice. Ice in the heart of an Aussie summer? That didn’t make sense. The coroner would call the cops; the cops would trace the last movements of the doomed family…

She nodded grimly to herself.

That would do as a plan B. Screw them over from beyond the grave. Plan A was to screw them now. It was time to carry out the second part of Hans’s request. Enough hesitation.

She pulled on the nearest peg chaining Hans to the ground, the one at his left foot. Tugging it and wiggling it was the way to get it out. Heather hauled on the one next to it, and after some effort, it came out too. She heaved on the final peg at his left wrist. Hans was ready now to get his portion of vengeance.

38

Owen looked at the snake from behind his wall. He had built the wall inside his head, a wall with bricks just like in Minecraft. He hid behind the wall when he didn’t want to deal with things. There had been a lot of not dealing with things over the past year. He had not dealt with his mom’s death. He had not dealt with his dad meeting Heather. He had not dealt with his dad marrying Heather. He had not dealt with Heather moving in. He had not dealt with coming to Australia and his dad being murdered. He had not dealt with the three of them going on the run from actual Mad Max psycho-killers. Most important of all, he hadn’t dealt with the fact that all of it was his fault for hiding behind his wall and saying nothing…

The wall’s bricks were made of cinder blocks. Big gray cinder blocks that in Minecraft you could move around easily but that were harder to move in real life. He peeked over the top of the wall into the real world, into real life.

It was definitely a snake. The fire must have awakened it.

Snakes didn’t bother you unless you bothered them—if you stepped on one by accident or something like that. Snakes, everyone said, left you alone. Australian snakes were no different. He knew a lot about Australian snakes. He had researched Australian snakes on his phone and his computer for days before the flight. He hadn’t just read Wikipedia. He’d read e-books and gotten an actual book from Amazon. Owen knew he wasn’t good at sports. Everyone said he had “learning difficulties.” Some of the kids called him dumb when the teachers weren’t in earshot. His mom and dad had fought hard for the schools to accept his diagnosis of ADHD, and now he took his medicine and got more time on tests. He hadn’t had his medicine for three days now. Normally when he took a break from Ritalin and his anxiety meds, he got jittery and stressed, but he wasn’t feeling stressed now.

He felt OK watching the snake uncurl itself and crawl in the direction of sleeping Olivia. It was about six feet long and brownish yellow. In this part of Victoria, it could only be an Australian copperhead.

The Australian copperhead had hollow fangs filled with venom at the front of its jaw. He remembered completely verbatim what Wallace’s Snakes of Australia said about the copperhead: “Their venom is, by Australian standards, only moderately toxic, nevertheless a bite left untreated can easily kill an adult human. There is no copperhead antivenom.”