Page 98 of The Island

A mosquito had settled on her left arm. Only the female mosquitoes bit you, because they needed blood to make eggs. There was, Petra noted, no female solidarity between them. Petra didn’t mind. “Live, little mosquito, make your eggs,” she said and it flew away from her, satiated.

She had gone about four hundred meters.

It was time to make some noise.

She stopped and caught her breath and looked back.

The two teams were converging on the beach where they had been.

“Where are you going, you bastards!” she yelled in her best Johnny Rotten voice and ducked back into the gully.

That will do the trick, poor dead Hans said in her head.

“I think it will,” she replied.

She could hear the dogs. Four of them. Four dog voices. Twenty human voices. Kids with them. What kind of sick people were they to bring their children with them?

She ran on as the gully got narrower and narrower.

Surprisingly, she found that she wasn’t so much scared as sad.

What a waste. All the things she knew. All the stuff about humans and their mores. All her travels. All her languages. She had English, French, Dutch, and German.

All the experiences. Working in the university. That year in Mali. That terrible year where she’d studied the effects of tragedy on nurses in the children’s cancer ward in Amsterdam. Those were the real heroes, the nurses who worked there. She’d written a book about it. It had been translated into German and Danish.

The dogs.

Coming up fast.

Faster than her.

She wasn’t that old. Hans wasn’t that old either.

They’d almost never argued. Not even about having kids. We’ll buy a house and ride our bikes and we’ll travel, Hans said. We’ll see the world. We don’t need kids dragging us down. Too many kids on the planet anyway.

The gully was at an end now. She’d thought it might come to an end in a little spring or a pool of water she could drink from, but there was nothing.

She stopped and looked behind her. Dogs and men coming her way.

Good.

She picked up a flat rock and climbed out of the ditch.

“There they are!” someone yelled.

Here I am. Watch what a retired Dutch woman in her sixties can do.

She ran east. She didn’t look back. She kept running. She was surprised that one of the motorcycles didn’t draw level with her but all the fissures in the ground might be impeding their progress.

It was no problem for her. She jumped the little trenches and ditches and ran up the gentle slopes.

They had let the dogs off the leashes.

She didn’t look back.

The dogs weren’t barking. This was all business now. The motorcycles had ceased their whining.

She was too fast for the flies.