Page 157 of The Island

“We know exactly what to do,” Olivia said, pointing the Lee-Enfield at him.

There was no way for Matt to know that the Enfield was empty and that Owen had probably not loaded another round in the .22.

Matt looked at the rifles and put his hands in the air. “Relax, kiddies. I’m not bloody going anywhere. How can I? She stabbed me, and look at me ankle,” he said.

“If he so much as farts in my direction, shoot him the way I showed you. I’m getting my damn penknife back.”

Heather pulled the knife out of the meaty part of Matt’s thigh and put it in her pocket. His ankle was a bloody mess and his thigh wound was surprisingly deep, but he would live.

She examined the wound in her shoulder. It hurt like hell but it was a small-caliber round and she wasn’t bleeding badly—she would live too.

“What are you going to do now, kill me?” Matt asked.

“Well, Matt,” Heather replied, “you’ve found our hiding place, so I guess the smart thing to do would be to kill you. But that would be murder. And that’s not our style. We’re going to get a vehicle and get off Dutch Island and then we’re going to call the cops.”

“And then we’re going to leave you a really horrible rating on Tripadvisor,” Owen said.

49

They tied his hands behind his back with his belt and shoved him in the cave mouth. They took his .22 rifle and made their way to the farm.

They crawled through the grass until they were five hundred yards out.

Olivia and Owen’s plan had been to do this at night. But they could do it during the day’s low tide too. It would just be more dangerous.

They would need a distraction.

The wind was blowing steadily from the west.

Heather pulled up ten little bundles of the kangaroo grass and spaced them each a yard apart. She took out Jacko’s lighter and set fire to every mound. The conditions were perfect. New growth after the rain; dry fuel; steady wind.

The fire caught fast and ran east the way it was supposed to do.

Fire wasn’t scary. If you stood on the windward side of the fire, you could watch it work.

For two thousand generations the Indigenous people had used fire as a tool for managing this terrain. Fire became an enemy only if you couldn’t move.

If, for example, you had to defend a house.

“Come on, kids,” Heather said and they cut south up a small hill.

It was only an hour past dawn and the sun was low in the sky but there was plenty of light for them to see the fire tear through the undergrowth toward the O’Neill farmstead.

Someone started yelling, and men and women and children began heading to the west of the compound. They must have had an emergency generator stored away somewhere because a firehose was produced and it started pumping water from the well.

She wasn’t too disappointed by that. It would give them something to do other than just abandon ship.

“Let’s move,” she said.

They kept low until they were a few hundred yards away and then they got on their bellies and crawled.

They had become good at this.

They crawled to within fifty feet of the farmyard.

Are you sure this is going to work, kids? Heather was tempted to ask but did not. What choice did they have?

They made it to the farmyard and hid behind the big barn. Everyone was out fighting the fire. And there were no dogs sounding the alarm.