Stormchild

  Von Rellsteb stiffened in shock, while an astonished Lisl half turned toward the sudden threat.

  “Put the guns down!” Jackie’s voice was hysterical. “I’ll shoot!”

  Von Rellsteb heard the desperation in that threat, and he must have realized that Jackie was almost helpless with nervousness. His eyes flicked toward me, and I could see what he was thinking, that he could step out of Jackie’s line of sight, then shoot me, but to do that he would leave Lisl exposed.

  “Shoot him if he moves a finger!” I called to Jackie, and I wished she would shoot anyway, but I knew she would not. It was a miracle that she had even managed to aim her gun toward von Rellsteb, but she was about as likely to pull her trigger as eat a pork chop. Her sudden appearance had gained me time, but it would be my responsibility to talk Jackie and me out of this unexpected stand-off. “You can’t kill me,” I said to von Rellsteb, “so you might as well drop your gun. Both of you.”

  “Why can’t we kill you?” Von Rellsteb, despite having Jackie’s gun aimed at his back, evidently found my defiance amusing.

  “Because the San Rafael is coming back here”—I was snatching arguments out of the thinnest air—”and the women who arrived on the San Rafael will tell the crew that you murdered me, and that’ll be the end of you.”

  “You are telling me the game is up?” Von Rellsteb mocked me with his use of the stilted cliché.

  “Of course the game’s up, you fool!” I snapped.

  “Not really,” von Rellsteb said happily. “I shall radio the San Rafael and tell them that their two passengers have decided to join our little band of conservationists, and that therefore they have no need to go so far out of their way. I think they will be grateful to be spared the expense of the fuel, don’t you?” He smiled. “I also think, Mr. Blackburn, that if your very nervous rescuer truly planned to kill me, then she would have fired at me already”—he paused to make certain I was directly in his rifle’s sights—”so fare thee well, Mr. Blackburn, fare thee well.”

  And the gun fired.

  Jackie screamed terribly.

  Lisl began to turn. I threw myself backward, instinctively falling away from the expected bullets.

  Von Rellsteb pitched forward.

  Jackie still screamed.

  I fell against the wall and bounced back towards Lisl. The sound of gunfire was obscenely loud, echoing off the walls and filling the house. Bullets were chopping across gilt-framed pictures and churning the wall’s horsehair plaster into dust and ruin. Picture glass shattered bright, mingling with the blood that was spurting vividly across the room.

  It was von Rellsteb’s blood, because it had been Jackie who fired.

  She had fired her rifle on automatic and, by luck more than judgment, her aim had been perfect. So perfect that her stream of bullets had literally exploded von Rellsteb’s chest. She had turned his torso inside out, so that blood and bits of lung tissue and shards of bone and strips of heart were spraying across the carpeted floor.

  And Jackie was screaming with horror.

  Lisl was falling as she turned. She was smothered in blood, but it was not her blood. She had caught her dying lover’s last heartbeat and now she was twisting her rifle toward Jackie whose own gun was now empty. I threw myself forward. My movements were stiff. My clothes were heavy and waterlogged. My joints ached. I moved like a man underwater.

  Lisl saw my movement and began to swing her gun back toward me. I heard Jackie scream again, and Lisl’s gun jerked once more toward her. I had sprawled on the bed’s thick and fluffy eiderdown that was drenched with von Rellsteb’s blood. I scrabbled for the Lee-Enfield. Lisl was ignoring me, aiming at Jackie, and then the heavy rifle was in my hands and I could not remember if the safety catch was on or off, but I didn’t have time to find out so I just pointed the barrel and pulled the trigger, and the muzzle was still caught in the eiderdown so that the expanding gasses and the speeding bullet exploded a blizzard of duck feathers, and the bolt would not work because it was also trapped in the thick folds, but I managed to force the bolt to ram another round into the chamber, and I fired again, but Lisl’s face had already disappeared in a bright eruption of blood where the first bullet had struck her. The second bullet banged through her gullet, jerking her head forward and back, and then she slumped into a sitting position with her blood pouring thick and shining to make a puddle between her legs.

  “Oh, my God!” Jackie was panting. “Oh, my God!”

  The room stank of blood and cordite.

  Feathers floated in the dusty air. Lisl’s red hair had been made a brighter red by her dying blood in which two drifting feathers had stuck to give her an oddly festive look. For a second I thought she was still alive as her hands twitched and I almost fired again until I realized that I was merely watching her fingers contract into the claws of death. They twitched, curled, then she was still.

  Jackie was sobbing helplessly.

  I disentangled the Lee-Enfield and worked another round into the chamber. There were yet other gunmen at large and I had already foolishly allowed myself to be ambushed once.

  Von Rellsteb’s dead body voided a long fart.

  Lisl’s body slumped sideways. The room looked and smelled like a slaughterhouse.

  Bile was sour in my throat. I slid off the bed and stood up.

  “Oh, my God.” Jackie recovered her breath, choked, breathed again, then staggered into the room. “I tried to warn you they were coming”—she was speaking very fast as if she would lose track of her words if she spoke slowly—”because I saw their boat come, so I kept firing the gun. Oh, my God!” She had gasped the words out like a small girl delivering a very important message she did not wholly understand, then she vomited.

  The candle guttered. Outside the window a baby was crying. It was still raining.

  I stepped over the horror and gathered Jackie in my arms.

  And Genesis was almost, but not quite, finished.

  By dawn the unhappy Genesis survivors were back in their ruined house. They had no fight left.

  As a group they had believed that their aims could best be achieved by violent confrontation, yet, when their methods had been used against them, they had collapsed like a pricked bubble.

  Except that Nicole had not collapsed, and, if von Rellsteb had told me the truth, she was even now sailing back for her vengeance. One other Genesis boat had returned in convoy with von Rellsteb and now rode at anchor beside his catamaran in the settlement’s bay. That left two Genesis boats still at sea: Nicole’s catamaran and the second sloop. I did not fear the sloop’s return, for, like the other crews, I suspected their hostility would crumble when they saw the full measure of their community’s defeat. But Nicole, everyone assured me, was made of grimmer stuff. Von Rellsteb’s radio operator, a glum Californian, confirmed that he had reached Nicole’s boat on his single sideband set, but claimed to have forgotten to ask Genesis Four for a precise position report. I did not believe him, and, encouraged by the Lee-Enfield’s blackened muzzle, he confessed that Nicole’s catamaran was hurrying home, but was still some three or four days from making a landfall.

  In the wet dawn I disabled the two Genesis yachts by cutting their running rigging and emptying the oil from their engines. I then ran the engines till the pistons seized, hauled in the yachts’ anchors, shot the guts out of their radios, then left them to drift until they beached themselves close to the burned-out trawler.

  Once the boats were finished I wrapped the bodies of von Rellsteb and his lover in sailcloth and dragged them through the cloying mud to one of the tanning sheds. I assumed the Chilean authorities would want to see the two corpses. Not that I cared, because I would be long gone.

  Jackie, aghast at having killed, went to the sea’s edge in the dawn and sat for a long time with her head in her hands. I thought she might have been praying, and perhaps she was, but when her prayers were done, or her thoughts finished, she came and held me very tight. She said nothing and when I tried to speak
she just hushed me. She just wanted to be touched.

  Molly Tetterman, released from her prison, took it upon herself to organize the dispirited Genesis survivors. Molly could no more resist organizing other people than a bee could desist from making honey, for, while she believed herself to be a nurturing earth mother, she was, in truth, a feminist sergeant-major, who discovered in the sodden wreckage of the settlement a challenge worthy of her talents, and thus she cowed, drilled, and bullied the Genesis survivors into making some small efforts for their own comfort. She rescued food from the ruin I had made of the kitchen and handed out warm clothes from von Rellsteb’s wardrobe. She harassed the men into cleaning up the mud-drenched rooms, and used her gentler talents to comfort the scared children. Molly, in brief, was just what a shattered Genesis community needed, and just what I needed, for her bundles of energy freed me from the need to make a similar effort.

  Molly looked after the settlement’s survivors, while I crippled their boats and wrapped their dead. Then, in mid-morning, I limped through the remains of the vegetable plots toward the escarpment. Stephen, I remembered, was still imprisoned on the ridge.

  Jackie caught up with me beside a pond that had been a cabbage patch before I released the reservoir. Where the dam had been there was now nothing but a smooth, high valley that hung above the coastline. A small stream spilt over that lofty rim to glitter in the wan morning light. “What do you think of Molly?” Jackie asked in a tone of voice which implied that she expected to hear my heartfelt expressions of admiration.

  “She overwhelms me,” I said, “but I’m glad she’s here, because she can look after this place till the authorities get here.” Once David arrived I proposed to contact the Chilean authorities on Stormchild’s radio and tell them about the murder of the Australians, and about the body they would find in the high rocks above the limestone quarry, and about von Rellsteb and Lisl. They would not, however, find me because, as I told Jackie, I intended to take Stormchild and intercept Nicole’s return.

  It took me most of the scramble up the wet escarpment to outline those plans. Once at the top I released the freezing Stephen from the rock cleft. He was pathetically grateful, but less so when I unceremoniously kicked him over the escarpment’s brink to tumble him helplessly down the steep slope toward the flooded settlement.

  Jackie and I stood together on the rocky summit beside the wreckage of the radio mast. The wind whipped at our coats and drove cold rain toward the empty bay where the burned-out trawler lay like a black scar against the rocks. “Suppose the missing Genesis boats get back here before the authorities arrive?” Jackie asked nervously.

  “I’ll leave you these two guns. Personally I doubt that you’ll need them. I suspect Nicole will follow me, and the other boat will know the game’s up. They won’t fight you.”

  It took a tired Jackie a moment before she realized that I planned to sail without her. “You don’t want me to come with you?” She asked with a hurt intonation.

  “More than anything in the world,” I answered truthfully, “but you’re not coming.”

  “Why not?” Her voice was guarded.

  “Because Nicole isn’t like the rest of Genesis. She’s not going to collapse at the first hurdle. She’s fighter, and her boat is crewed by the most fanatical of all von Rellsteb’s recruits. I don’t think she’ll give in without a fight.”

  “But what does she have to gain by fighting you?” Jackie asked.

  “Nothing now,” I said, “because it’s all over, but she may not see it that way. She’s obsessed; she lives in her own world where everyone else is out of step.” I paused. “I hope I’m wrong about her, but she could be a very angry and very lethal young woman right now.”

  “So why are you going to find her?” Jackie asked.

  “Because she’s my daughter. Because no one else will help her. And because I’ve come all this way to find her, so it seems stupid not to take the last few steps.”

  The wind lifted Jackie’s fair hair which was still bleached from the sun and salt of our Atlantic crossing. “I think it’ll be safe for me to come,” she insisted with a gentle defiance. “Nicole must know that the Genesis experiment is finished, and that there’s no point in fighting anymore.” She looked worriedly up at me. “Besides, you can’t sail Stormchild on your own, not in these waters.”

  “Of course I can,” I said with a confidence I did not altogether feel, “and David will help me,” and even as I added those words, glorious and sudden, and with her great sails white as innocence, Stormchild appeared in the Desolate Straits.

  /David, noticing the empty quay, motored Stormchild to the berth vacated by the burnt trawler. He looked exhausted; he was so tired that he could scarce raise the energy to berth the yacht properly. “It’s one thing to sail across an ocean,” he explained to me, “but trying to stay safe off a lee shore is no joke. I’ve hardly slept in two nights or days!” He fastened the last fender to protect Stormchild’s hull from the stone quay, then stumbled ashore. His eyes were red and his face deep-lined.

  Berenice Tetterman had already jumped ashore and was running toward her mother, who, in turn, was hurrying toward her daughter. They met, they clasped, they wept, and I felt tears in my own eyes as I realized I would probably never again feel a daughter’s clasp. Lucky Molly, I thought, and I tried not be jealous. Mother and daughter hugged each other, both talking at the same time, neither listening, but both happy and both crying.

  David, embarrassed as ever by a display of sentiment, turned to stare at the burned-out trawler, the beached yachts, the flooded fields and the gaping hole in the escarpment’s ridge where once there had been a dam. “What happened here?” he asked at last.

  I described the night’s events as we walked toward the house. He grimaced when I told him of Jackie Potten’s return, and seemed to flinch when I told him I hoped to marry her. He sighed when I described my bombs, and shuddered when I claimed to have shot both von Rellsteb and Lisl. I took the blame entirely on myself, so that the authorities would not give Jackie a hard time.

  David, suddenly alert, smelt something wrong in my story. “They were both armed?”

  “Of course. I wouldn’t have shot them otherwise.”

  “They were shooting at you?”

  I nodded. “Automatic weapons, too, and all I had was the good old Lee-Enfield.”

  “So you shot them both from the front?”

  It was an odd question, but also a very shrewd one. I hesitated before answering. “No. Well, yes. I shot von Rellsteb in the back, but not the girl.”

  “So von Rellsteb wasn’t shooting at you?”

  “What are you?” I asked. “Counsel for the prosecution?”

  “The police are going to ask a lot of very awkward questions,” David said, “and I just want to make sure you don’t tell them lies.”

  “I won’t tell them anything,” I said. “I’m sailing away from here and I don’t intend to summon any help until I’m well offshore.”

  David, who had been walking beside me toward the house, suddenly checked. “They’re already on their way, Tim. I called them last night.”

  I stared at him in horror. “You did what?”

  “I called the Armada last night. Good God, man, what else was I to do? You summoned me here with a radio message that was virtually inaudible! For all I knew, it was a trap! So, of course, I reported the matter to the authorities. The Armada should be here later today.”

  “Oh, God!” I blasphemed.

  “Does it matter?” David asked.

  “Of course it matters!” I retorted angrily. “Because once the authorities are here they’re going to stop everyone leaving. They’re going to want statements and fingerprints and God knows what else. We’re going to be tied up in Chilean red tape and that means I can’t head off Nicole. Not unless I leave now!”

  “Where are you going?” David shouted after me. I had begun running back toward the quay.

  “I’m going to find Nicole,” I
turned and explained to him, “because I want to see her alone before she goes to jail. I haven’t come this far to run away from her, whatever she might be.”

  “What do you mean?” David caught up with me.

  “I mean,” I said, “that Nicole is a killer. She planted the bomb on Slip-Slider, David, not von Rellsteb. It was always Nicole.”

  “Oh, my God.” David was stricken. His face went white.

  “So I’m going to find her.” I turned away.

  “No!” David pulled me back, then gestured at the flooded fields and at the the scorched facade of the house. “You’ve done enough, Tim. There’s no need to do more. There’s no need to risk more.”

  I shook my head with exasperation. “You don’t understand, David. Nicole is in hell, and only one person can go down and save her now. That’s me. I love her, and I can offer her salvation of a kind, but what I can’t do is walk away from her.”

  “You’re not God,” David said.

  “I have to find her,” I said, “and touch her before they put her in chains. Is that so bloody bad?”

  David held my shoulders with his strong hands. “We agreed,” he said urgently, “that if we found evidence of wrongdoing, then we would leave it to the authorities. The Chileans will let you see Nicole. You’ll have your chance with her.”

  I shook myself free. “I make my own chances, David.”

  “You aren’t thinking straight!” He took hold of me again. “You mustn’t do this, Tim! No good will come of it! Let the competent authorities deal with it!”

  “The competent authorities,” I said, “will clap her in jail, and maybe even put her to death. Do they have the death penalty here? I don’t know, but whatever happens to her, I first want to go down to her hell, and take her hand, and bring her back to the light. Doesn’t your faith approve of that? Or don’t you believe in hell anymore?”

  “I believe,” David said simply, then frowned at me. “You want me to come with you, don’t you?”