Darwinia

Abby seemed to read his thoughts. She took his hand and held it in hers. “You do what you have to, Guilford.”

“I won’t let them hurt you, Abby.”

“You do what you have to,” she said.

Chapter Thirty-One

The first shot fractured a living-room window.

Nicholas, who had been dozing, sat upright on the sofa and began to cry. Abby ran to him, pressed his head down. “Curl up,” she said. “Curl up, Nicky, and cover your head!”

“Stay with him,” Guilford shouted. More bullets flashed through the window, whipping the curtains like a hurricane wind, punching holes the size of fists in the opposite wall.

“Guard this room,” Tom said. “Lily, upstairs with me.”

He wanted an east-facing window and some elevation. Dawn was only twenty minutes away. There would be light in the sky by now.

Guilford crouched behind the front door. He fired a couple of blind shots through the mail slot, hoping to discourage whoever was out there.

An answering volley of bullets tore through the mosquewood door above him. He ducked under a shower of splinters.

Bullets fractured wood, plaster, upholstery, curtains. One of Abby’s kitchen candles winked out. The smell of charred wood was pungent and intense.

“Abby?” he called out. “Are you all right?”

The east-facing room was Nick’s. His balsa-wood airplane models were lined up on a shelf with his crystal radio and his seashell collection.

Tom Compton tore the drapes away from the window and kicked the glass out of the lower pane.

The house was still ringing with the sound of breaking glass.

The frontiersman ducked under the sill, raised his head briefly and ducked back.

“I see four of ’em,” he said. “Two hiding back of the cars, at least two more out by the elm. Are you a good marksman, Lil?”

“Yes.” No sense being modest. Although she had never fired this Remington.

“Shoot for the tree,” he said. “I’ll cover the close targets.”

No time for thought. He didn’t hesitate, simply gripped the window frame with his left hand and began to fire his pistol in a steady, rapid rhythm.

The pearly sky cast a dim light. Lily came to the window, exposing her head as little as possible, and drew a bead on the elm, and then on the rough shape beside it. She fired.

This was not a rabbit. But she could pretend. She thought of the farm outside Wollongong, shooting rabbits with Colin Watson back when she still called him “Daddy.” In those days the rifle had seemed bigger and heavier. But she was steady with it. He taught her to anticipate the noise, the kick.

It had made her queasy when the rabbits died, spilling themselves like torn paper bags over the dry earth. But the rabbits were vermin, a plague; she learned to suppress the sympathy.

And here was another plague. She fired the rifle calmly. It kicked her shoulder. A cartridge rattled across the wooden floor of Nick’s room and lodged under the bed.

Had the shadow-figure fallen? She thought so, but the light was so poor…

“Don’t stop,” Tom said, reloading. “You can’t take these people out with a single shot. They’re not that easy to kill.”

Guilford had lost the feeling in his left leg. When he looked down he saw a dark wetness above his knee and smelled blood and meat. The wound was healing already, but a nerve must have been severed; that would take time to repair.

He crawled toward the sofa, trailing blood.

“Abby?” he said.

More bullets pounded through the ruined door and window. Across the room Abby’s cloth curtains began to smolder, oozing dark smoke. Something banged repeatedly against the kitchen door.

“Abby?”

There was no answer from the sofa.

He heard Tom and Lily’s gunfire from upstairs, shouts of pain and confusion outside.

“Talk to me, Abby!”

The back of the sofa had been struck several times. Particles of horsehair and cotton stuffing hung in the air like dirty snow.

He put his hand in a puddle of blood, not his own.

“I count four down,” Tom Compton said, “but they won’t stay down unless we finish ’em. And there might be more out back.” But no second-story window faced that direction.

He hurried down the stairs. Lily followed close behind him. Her hands were shaking now. The house stank of cordite and smoke and male sweat and worse things.

Down to the living room, where the frontiersman stopped short in the arched doorway and said, “Oh, Christ!”

Someone had come in through the back door.

A fat man in a gray Territory Police uniform.

“Sheriff Carlyle,” Guilford said.

Guilford was obviously wounded and dazed, but he had managed to stand up. One hand clasped his bloody thigh. He held out the other imploringly. He had dropped his pistol by the sofa—

By the blood-drenched sofa.

“They’re hurt,” Guilford said plaintively. “You have to help me take them to town. The hospital.”

But the sheriff only smiled and raised his own pistol.

Sheriff Carlyle: one of the bad guys.

Lily struggled to aim her rifle. Her heart pumped, but her blood had turned into a cold sludge.

The sheriff fired twice before Tom got off a shot that sent him twisting against the wall.

The frontiersman stepped close to the fallen Sheriff Carlyle. He pounded three bullets into the sheriff at close range until the sheriff’s head was as red and shapeless as one of Colin Watson’s rabbits.

Guilford lay on the floor, fountaining blood from a chest wound.

Abby and Nicholas were behind the useless fortress of the sofa, unspeakably dead.

Interlude

Guilford woke in the shade of the elm, in the tall grass, in a patch of false anemones blue as glacial ice. A gentle breeze cooled his skin. Diffuse daylight held each object suspended in its even glow, as if his perception had been washed clean of every defect.

But the sky was black and full of stars. That was odd.

He turned his head and saw the picket standing a few paces away. His shadow-self. His ghost.

Probably he should have been afraid. Mysteriously, he wasn’t.

“You,” he managed to say.

The picket — still young, still dressed in his tattered uniform — smiled sympathetically. “Hello, Guilford.”

“Hello yourself.”

He sat up. At the back of his mind was the nagging sensation that something was wrong, terribly wrong, tragically wrong. But the memory wouldn’t yield itself up. “I think,” he said slowly, “I’m shot…”

“Yes. But don’t worry about that right now.”

That sky, the sky full of stars crisp as electricity and close as the end of his arm, that bothered him, too. “Why am I here?”

“To talk.”

“Maybe I don’t want to talk. Do I have a choice?”

“Of course you have a choice. You can cover your ears and whistle ‘Dixie,’ if you want. Wouldn’t you rather hear what I have to say?”

“You’re not exactly a font of good news.”

“Take a walk with me, Guilford.”

“You walk too much.”

“I think better on my feet,” the picket said.

Just as in burned London a quarter century ago, there was a forced calm inside him. He ought to be terrified. Everything was wrong… worse than wrong, some surge of memory suggested. He wondered if the picket was able to impose an emotional amnesia on him, to smother his panic.

Panic would be easy, maybe even appropriate.

“This way,” the picket said.

Guilford walked with the picket up the trail beyond the house, among the brush and wind-twisted trees. He looked back at his house, small and alone on its grassy headland, and saw the ocean beyond it, glass-flat and mirroring the stars.

“Am I dead?”