The man’s momentum carried him along the road, head over heels. Both he and the recoil knocked Theresa off-balance, and, because of that, the second attacker overshot his mark. He swiped at her in passing, then slowed and doubled back. The maimed man was struggling up, dragging his smashed leg.
Theresa regained her balance and bolted. She’d spotted an avenue of escape, a high boundary fence—one of those double-thickness ones with a flat top. She saw how close to the eaves of its house it came. Theresa scaled the fence, planted her heavy soled boots on its top, and sprinted along it. She made the leap from the fence to the roof, and her free hand caught hold of the ventilation pipe of a toilet cistern. She grappled with her other hand, the gun scoring the coating on the steel roof tiles. Showers of volcanic grit fell past her as she swung a knee up onto the roof. The PVC guttering shattered.
Theresa clambered up to the spine of the roof, straddled it, and pointed her gun back the way she’d come.
Her pursuers had lost interest. They didn’t even linger looking up at her, like dogs that have treed a cat. They just departed, one at the same breakneck pace, though not in pursuit of his group. The other dragged himself across the road to join the postie, who had finally torn the letterbox from its stand and, blinded by it, had blundered into a front garden rockery. The maimed man took the postie’s hand. He did it gently, and for a moment Theresa thought he might lead the postie out of the shrubs, and onto more even ground. But instead the man brought the postie’s hand to his mouth, as if about to kiss it gallantly. He pressed the postie’s fingers to his lips, then commenced to savage them.
Theresa’s spread her knees and dropped her head, shaken by a bout of retching. Everything went black. She was going to tumble off the roof. She clapped her free hand onto the ridge, and her fingernails prised more grit from the tiles. She put her gun down and planted her foot on top of it. Then she held on for dear life, fighting her own plummeting blood pressure. She tried to slow her breathing. ‘I’m hyperventilating,’ she thought. Then she made herself say it out loud. She might not be a police officer armoured with procedure anymore, but she was still a human being, with language.
There were no cries for help. That was the thing. Theresa had seen injuries, aggression, atrocities, self-mutilation, but had heard nothing from any of the victims or perpetrators. Nothing articulate or expressive. No matter how hard she strained her ears, Theresa couldn’t hear anything human.
After a while she gingerly lifted her head. From her vantage point she could see over the rooftops of the houses on Beach Road. She couldn’t see the beach, but further out was a trawler, coming into the bay, trailing a wedding veil of hungry gulls. It was such an everyday sight. Theresa stared at it for a time, resting her mind. Then she scanned the settlement: the billows of smoke, seemingly solidifying in the windless air; her patrol car in the fringe of the haze, lights flashing red, white, and blue. She peered hard at every corpse, checking for signs of life—not because she hoped to help anyone, but only to see whether they still presented any danger.
The postie was on his knees now, so tranquil that he seemed to be at prayer, his hands an offering to the maimed man and his voracity. The dragged child had been abandoned at the end of a trail of gore. And the running people had run on.
A block ahead, just before the road rose and forked for the bypass, Theresa caught sight of a man walking down the centreline. He was carrying a woman in his arms. There was something about the way he was moving, something less absorbed than the people Theresa had seen so far. He had a contradictory look of effort and aimlessness that seemed somehow normal. The others had been energetic and zealous—they’d moved as if they had places to be and urgent things to do.
Theresa stayed still and watched the man come. Once he was close she saw that he was a rangy fellow with thick silver hair and reddened, bright blue eyes. The woman in his arms was bonelessly limp.
Theresa called out to him. ‘Hey!’
He spotted her, then glanced at the patrol car. He had been looking for her. He’d come to find the emergency services.
Theresa called out, ‘Don’t move. I’ll be right down.’
He crouched and laid the woman on the ground.
Theresa slithered down the gritty roof, hung off its edge for a moment and dropped onto the lawn. She strode towards the man and he got up quickly, holding out his hands in a gesture of fearful supplication.
She went briskly past him and waded in among the rocks and flowering shrubs. She went right up to the man feasting on the postie’s fingers, and shot him in the head. Only after she’d shot him did she say to him, ‘Stop that.’ Then, ignoring his victim, she went back to the couple on the road.
Theresa hunkered down and put her fingers on the woman’s neck. The woman’s skin was cool already. She turned to the man. ‘What’s your name, Sir? Mine is Theresa—Constable Grey.’
‘Curtis Haines. This is my wife, Adele.’
‘Are you injured, Mr Haines?’
The man shook his head. He sat down on the road, and pulled his wife towards him so that her head lay in his lap. ‘A woman back there in the antiques shop—she’s dead too.’ He stopped speaking and his throat worked.
Theresa knew she should ask for details. She was scared of the bleak, faraway look on his face—but she’d have to write all this up eventually.
This brief moment of forward planning came to an abrupt end, punctuated by a clang, as the postie collapsed, and his metal-encased head impacted with a rock.
‘Mr Haines, I’m sorry,’ Theresa said, ‘but right now I’m reluctant to hear what you have to say.’
He nodded. He understood.
She unhooked her radio from her vest and put it down on the road to fiddle with its dials.
Curtis Haines said, ‘You have a black eye and a cut on your cheek. You need first-aid.’
‘Maybe later,’ Theresa said, as though he’d offered to buy her a drink.
‘That would be easier if you’d use both hands.’
Theresa’s hand had been clenched for so long that blood had set like mortar between each finger. She laid the pistol down, giving it a little shake to loosen it. With two hands free she was better able to manage her radio. She reached Belle.
‘Oh, thank God,’ said Belle. ‘No one survived the helicopter crash. Where are you?’ There was a forgetful hesitation, then, ‘Over?’
‘Belle, I want you go back into the reserve and lock the gate. Keep out of sight. I’ll be up to get you as soon as I can. Over.’
‘Tre,’ said Belle, ‘what’s going on?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘So—you haven’t got things under control?’
Theresa looked at Curtis Haines. He just stared back, his hands wandering over his wife’s silky grey bob.
Theresa tried to pull herself together. In her best, steely, police officer voice, she said, ‘Just do what I say, Belle. Over and out.’
A truck horn sounded somewhere to the west.
‘I should probably check that out,’ Theresa said to Curtis. Then she routinely attempted once more to raise anyone else. There was nobody. She clipped her radio back onto her vest, got up, and stooped to gather Adele Haines’s legs in her arms. Curtis took Adele’s shoulders and together they lifted her.
‘Shall we use your car?’ Curtis said.
Theresa didn’t want to retrace her steps. For a moment she was lost in blank indecision. She only came back when Curtis spoke. He told her that his car was the Volvo up the road, opposite the hairdresser. ‘If that’s better,’ he said, and she heard the kindness and concern in his tone.
They set out, and he led the way.
Curtis Haines and his wife Adele hadn’t planned to stop in Kahukura, but when they got to the turn for the bypass Curtis spotted an antiques and collectibles shop. Adele was looking at the hairdresser on the other side of the road—C
url up and Dye. She laughed and pointed. Curtis smiled, then waited for his wife to notice that he was pulling over, and why. He waited for her face to light up. He loved watching her face light up.
Adele saw the shop. ‘Thank you, darling.’ She flipped her sun visor down, refreshed her lipstick, and got out of the car.
Curtis changed the CD. He reclined his seat and closed his eyes. He drifted off for a few minutes. It couldn’t have been long, because the CD was only on track two: ‘How High the Moon’.
What woke Curtis was a police car. It blasted past, sirens going. It went about half a kilometre down the road, then screeched to a stop. Its brake lights flashed and flickered. Its siren gave a few further whoops, as though in protest, then cut out.
There was something threatening in the silence beyond the car’s sealed windows. Curtis turned off the stereo and let his window down. After a minute he heard, from somewhere up ahead, a woman shouting, her voice hysterical. Surely not the police officer. Whoever it was sounded as if they were trying to shout the world back into its proper order.
Curtis looked over at the antiques shop and saw that a strange woman had hold of his wife. The woman was younger than Adele, but nevertheless wore spectacles on a chain, as some elderly women do. The spectacles were balanced in the woman’s spray-sculpted hair, their chain flapping against her cheeks as she was wrenched back and forth by Adele, who was struggling to free herself. Adele clawed at the woman’s arms, while the woman held Adele’s jaw open and dropped things into her mouth.
Curtis didn’t know how he got out of the car. Later he remembered the dimpled brass of the shop’s door handle in his grip and the cheery sound of the bell above the door. As it was, he simply found himself at his wife’s side.
It was coins that the woman was posting between Adele’s lips—lumpy coins, not perfectly round. Old coins, of blackened silver and greened copper.
Curtis grabbed the woman and shoved her away. He heard the money fall and roll about on the wooden floor.
Adele didn’t make a sound.
The woman staggered back, then regained her balance and looked about. Her eyes were so wide that Curtis could see the strained pink fibres connecting her eyeballs to her eyelids.
There was a fireplace in the shop—not one that worked, for it was filled with a brass coal scuttle crowded with dried hydrangeas. There was a fire-set on its hearth, and Curtis was worried that the woman would go for the poker. He looked about for a weapon of his own, then saw that Adele was on the floor, struggling, her face blue. She was choking.
Curtis hauled Adele upright. He put his knuckles in under her sternum and pressed hard with his other hand. He pushed. She heaved limply in his arms.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
Curtis pumped and relaxed, pumped and relaxed. He shouted his wife’s name. He tried to use her name to tear at time itself, the seconds that kept passing.
He didn’t even look at the mad woman. He had forgotten her. He wasn’t waiting for the poker to fall, to injure him—he’d forgotten that too. He lowered his wife to the floor and sank down, holding her, rocking her, calling her name. Finally he got up and looked about for a phone. There was one on the wall behind the counter. Curtis ran to it, snatched at the receiver and punched in the emergency number before hearing that the phone was dead. He tried several times, then remembered that Adele had her mobile in the pocket of her jacket. He hurried back around the counter and bent over his wife, searching her pockets. But Adele’s phone had no signal.
The woman was still in the room. She stood, motionless, in front of the hearth. When Curtis looked up from the phone’s display and met her gaze she raised her brows and nodded at him in an approving manner, as if congratulating him on his distress.
Curtis picked up Adele and staggered to the door. Then the woman was beside him. He shrank from her, but she only wanted to open the door for him. Its brass bell chimed. Curtis plunged out into the street. He looked back in time to see the woman collapse. She gave a sigh, then folded and diminished, as if someone had let the air out of her.
Curtis peered up the road at the blue and red lights of the police car. He clutched Adele to him, and headed towards it.
At first he hurried, as if there was something that could be done. Then—because he was a year shy of sixty, and had problems with his right hip—he had to stop and rest for a while. He cradled his wife and stroked her hair. The sun had warmed it, but the skin on her forehead was cool. ‘Darling,’ he said softly.
In the road ahead the air was oily with the heat of fires, and full of flakes of soot.
Holly and her mother had spent the weekend at a family reunion. On the Sunday Holly’s brothers had taken her aside to remark that Kate looked low, and to ask: was that rest home Holly had found really the best arrangement?
Of course it had been Holly who’d had to do everything: find Kate a place, persuade her to move, help her sort her possessions, sell her house.
The rest home Holly found was Mary Whitaker in Kahukura. There were better equipped homes, and better ventilated ones. There were places with fully carpeted floors and larger rooms. These were all more expensive, and closer to Nelson. But Mary Whitaker had grounds with mature rhododendron bushes and magnolia trees. It had daffodils, jonquils, and narcissi sprouting on its damp lawns. It had a veranda around three sides, and a 180° view of Kahukura Bay. Holly had totally zoned out when she first saw the view. The rest home manager had been telling her things about Kahukura—a quiet, tight-knit community—but Holly only stared out to sea, where two separate rainfalls were coming down from livid patches in a wholly grey sky. Thick pillars of shadow—rain, faraway, but still dynamic. She’d thought, ‘I’d come here to die.’
Holly wasn’t keen to tackle her mother about her living situation—which she could do very little to ameliorate, anyway. She doubted that her mother’s subdued mood was depression, but she’d promised her brothers she’d ask. Holly thought it would turn out that it was only a displeased silence, that Kate had a grievance, which Holly would hear about in due course.
It was an hour yet till lunch was served at Mary Whitaker. There was time to take a small detour along the winding gravel road that climbed around the boundary of Cotley’s Orchard and led to a new subdivision, with roads and streetlights, and a billboard with a map of the sections for sale.
Holly drove up to the subdivision. She parked, and they got out to study the billboard and see which sections had sold and which were still to go.
It was a sunny spring day. The trees of the arboretum behind Kahukura Spa were coming into leaf, brilliant green below the sombre bush of Stanislaw’s Reserve.
‘Not a power pole in sight,’ said Holly, admiring the view.
‘Over this side the power cables are all underground,’ Kate said. ‘There used to be pylons crossing what is now the reserve. They moved them, and buried the workings when they had all the machinery up here to dig the trench for the predator-proof fence.’
‘You’re getting to be quite the local.’
‘Well, Holly, it seems people go on chattering about property values and improvements even when they’ve one foot in the grave.’
They watched a helicopter take off from the spa, a sizeable red and white machine.
‘I hate that noisy thing.’ Kate frowned at the helicopter, which, without warning—without any sign of engine trouble—suddenly swooped at the hillside before it, and flew straight into the ground. Its props splintered. The helicopter momentarily disappeared inside a bloom of bright, black-edged fire.
Kate grabbed Holly’s arm. She sagged, and Holly caught her. For the next minute Holly was busy, manhandling her mother to the car, leaning her up against it while she opened the door.
Once she was seated Kate groped for her daughter’s handbag. She produced Holly’s phone and passed it to her. ‘Never mind me,’ she said. ‘I’ll be fine presently.’ br />
Holly punched triple 1. The phone didn’t ring. She looked at its display. No signal.
Holly got in the car and started it. ‘We should go and make sure help is on its way.’ She turned to watch where she was backing. There was only the groomed hillside behind her. Then, without any warning, that view—new lawn and fluorescent pink boundary pegs—snapped closed, like the virtual camera shutter on her smartphone. There was a dark pause, then Holly became aware of her mother’s hoarse shouting, and that she was being shaken.
Kate had one hand on the handbrake. ‘You fainted, Holly. And, honestly, I thought I would too. The car stalled and rolled forward. We were nearly over the edge.’
Holly checked her phone again. ‘We have to go somewhere where we can get a signal.’
Kate gestured at the spa, the town. ‘Plenty of people will have seen the crash. You shouldn’t move till you’re quite sure you’ve recovered.’
They heard another loud impact down in the settlement. A truck blasted through the intersection by the supermarket with the twisted remnant of a motorbike beneath its front wheels. The sparks from the crushed bike were as bright as those from a welding torch. Then the bike’s petrol tank exploded. The truck continued on regardless, surfing on flame, and leaving long flaming tyre tracks. The tangle of vehicles finally came to a halt at the next intersection, where they burned.
Holly and her mother stared at the fire. They waited to see people rushing to help—shopkeepers with fire extinguishers. To see what you would normally expect to see.
There was a thin thread of siren. It came closer, then was shut off. They glimpsed flashing red and blue lights in the smoke at the intersection.
Holly and her mother waited to see more help arrive. Long minutes went by. Tens of minutes. During that time they heard gunfire. But no more police cars, or fire appliances, or ambulances appeared.