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Thirty-Six

I opened my eyes.

All I could see was darkness and dusty ground and shadows that stretched out at odd angles. What had happened? Everything was blurry and strange. It reminded me of ducking my head beneath the surface of a swimming pool on sports day. The cheering from the stands suddenly muted and dulled; my heartbeat in my ears; and then all that noise returning, incomprehensible for a second, as I broke back up into the air to take a breath.

I rolled onto all fours and vomited into the dirt.

Broken fragments of memory slotted together in my mind.

The farm.

Aspinall.

Sarah.

Panic flared as I remembered where I was and what I was doing here. My right hand was pressed to the ground. I noticed there were shadows playing over it, and then I heard the sound of fighting from beside me to the right.

I turned my head.

Two people were wrestling on the ground a bare couple of meters away. At first, that was all I could make out, because their bodies were only half illuminated by the lights, and they were rolling this way and that. Puffs of dust were rising from the ground, and the shadows spilled out like fingers opening and closing against the dirt. One of the men suddenly shouted out in pain, and a moment later the light caught Craig Aspinall’s face, now sitting astride the other figure.

Aspinall pulled the knife out of wherever it had been stuck in the man beneath him, then raised it and brought it down with a thud into the front of his shoulder. The impact caused the other man to lift his head, and when his face caught the light too, I realized it was my father.

Aspinall pulled the knife out and raised it again, his free hand gripping hold of my father’s hair, turning his head to hold the target steady.

And somehow I moved.

It was as much a stumble as anything else—a desperate half fall across the short distance between us—but I managed to loop my left arm under Aspinall’s, and my right behind his back, joining my hands at the far side of his head, and the momentum took him off my father and sent us both sprawling into the dust on our sides. With my chest against Aspinall’s back, I kept my hands gripped tightly together as best I could, then tried to hook my foot over to pin him at the ankles. As we wrestled, the shattered lights of the compound whirled around us. The ground was at my back, and then against my elbows with Aspinall underneath me, but then the two of us were rolling, his weight on top of me again. I lost track of where the knife was, or if he even still had it.

You do not let go , I imagined my father saying.

You do not give up.

But Aspinall was much stronger than I had expected, fueled by that burning rage inside him, and my own body seemed watery and weak in comparison. I caught a flash of light on the knife, and slackened my grip and reached out to grab his wrist. But he moved as I did, squirming out of the loosened hold and catching me hard in the face with an elbow. The world filled with stars again. And then Aspinall was on top of me, lifting the knife up into the night air.

There was no time to avoid the blow.

But then there was a sickening thud as my father swung the wooden post into Aspinall’s head. The strength of the blow knocked Aspinall off me and into the shadows to my side. I rolled over, my father stepping across me, and I watched as he raised the post again before bringing it down in an overhead strike that landed where Aspinall’s face must have been.

The force of the collision took my father off-balance. He stumbled back toward me. I thought he was going to trip, but somehow he gathered himself, corrected the half fall, and ended up kneeling down in the dust next to me.

We looked at each other.

Silence for a moment.

And then I realized that, from off to the side, I could hear Aspinall attempting to breathe through the remains of his face. It was a horrible, sickening noise.

And it sounded for all the world like someone was whistling.