Page 16 of The Island

“Yes!” Olivia said, embarrassed now. She folded her arms and stomped to the prow of the boat to be with Owen and her father.

“Is the bathroom OK?” Petra asked Heather.

“If you have a problem with spiders, it might not be a great idea,” Heather said.

Matt took over steering duties while Ivan joined Jacko at the front of the boat. Jacko gave Heather the creeps and she couldn’t help but notice both men ogling Olivia. She hadn’t been sure at first but then she saw Jacko nudge Ivan in the ribs as Olivia bent over to pick something up off the deck. Heather could handle those looks with a contemptuous eye-roll or a cutting remark, but Olivia wasn’t used to this kind of creepy attention from older men. Blue eyes, long legs, blond hair, pretty face—she would be a heartbreaker in three or four years. But not now. Heather was going to say something but fortunately they were getting very close to shore and both men got busy with fending the ferry off as Matt killed the engine and it glided toward a concrete slipway.

“All right, folks, in your vehicles! Be no more than half an hour, forty-five minutes tops, and I’ll take you back,” Ivan announced as he lowered the ferry’s ramp.

“Yeah, get your koala pics and go before Ma rumbles ya,” Jacko muttered.

“Be careful, and seriously, don’t be long!” Matt added to Heather.

They got in the Porsche and set out to explore the island. Heather was relieved to be back in the air-conditioning; Australia was her first experience of a hot-weather climate and she had decided that she did not much care for it. The road wound east from the ferry pier. The landscape was not inspiring. There were no koalas anywhere, just a large grassy heathland that had been burned in a recent bushfire and the occasional eucalyptus tree with a crow in it. Heather looked at the dreary yellow-and-brown nothingness with the feeling that they had been royally conned.

“Well, this sucks!” Owen said, giving vent to what they were all feeling.

“Maybe if we go farther in?” Tom said.

“I think we’re supposed to stay close to the shore,” Heather said.

“We’ll get what we paid for,” Tom said, irritated, accelerating the Porsche.

They drove through a crossroads and came to what was presumably the remains of the old prison. A house and a few tumbledown buildings covered with lichen and moss. An emaciated gray-haired older man stepped out from the shade of one of the buildings and furiously flagged them down. Tom stopped the car and wound down his window. “What are you doing here?” the man asked, amazed.

“We, um, we’re looking for koalas and—”

“You need to leave,” the man said. “This is private land. It’s not safe. You all need to go. Now!”

Heather grabbed Tom’s knee. “I really don’t like it here.”

The man hit the Porsche with his walking stick. “Go!” he yelled.

Tom nodded and rolled the window back up. He was as spooked as the rest of them. They drove back to the crossroads.

“Which way?” Tom said, flustered.

“Left!” Owen said.

“Straight on,” Heather said.

“I think we veer right,” Tom said and took the right road, which soon became a dirt track with long grass on either side.

“Shit! Wrong way,” Tom said. They turned and drove back to the crossroads again.

“The ferry guy said to be forty-five minutes tops,” Olivia said, looking at the clock on her phone.

“Don’t worry, we’ll make that easily,” Tom said, hitting the gas. The Porsche accelerated. The road curved. The sun almost directly ahead was sinking toward the horizon. Something blue caught Heather’s eye. “Look out!” Heather screamed.

A woman in a blue dress riding a bike had come out from a side road, completely oblivious to the Porsche bearing down on her. Heather had a momentary feeling of weightlessness. It wasn’t that the car had lifted off the ground or anything like that; the Porsche SUV was totally safe. This feeling was from another branch of physics entirely. This was the feeling that her life had gone into one of those multiverses Tom was always going on about. In one universe Tom had called the car-rental place five minutes earlier and they’d gotten the Porsche with the radar and the accident-avoidance system. In this universe Heather yelled “Tom!” as the front of the SUV completely enveloped the woman on the bicycle.

5

The disc brakes were powerful but the Porsche had been going too fast and it had too much momentum.

“Oh, sweet Jesus!” Tom cried as the Porsche plowed over the bicycle with a sickening thud. They scraped and slid along the ground for twenty yards before skidding into a drainage ditch. The airbags inflated and Heather was jolted back by her seat belt. They came to a stop as the wheels spun and the engine died.

Heather opened her eyes.