While I live

CHAPTER 21

A long wait followed, maybe four minutes. I heard a murmur of voices at one stage: I think when they saw their dead buddy lying on the top steps. I knew they were still making their way up the stairs though. I heard occasional whispered comments, and the slow ‘urrrhhh’ noise of a step as the weight was gradually taken off it.

A head suddenly appeared, almost at floor level, looking along the corridor both ways then quickly withdrawing. It was like a tortoise sticking out its neck, but just for a moment. It happened at a speed no tortoise would have recognised. I was left wondering if I’d imagined it.

I didn’t think he’d seen me. I eased back a little further into the doorway. Gavin prodded me. ‘What?’ he asked, with a whisper. It intrigued me that a deaf kid was so good at whispering and moving quietly. Maybe he’d learned it during the war.

‘One soldier,’ I mouthed back, holding up a finger.

‘One?’

‘I saw one. There are more.’

I took another peep. Lucky I did. I was just in time to see a guy dart across the corridor, crouching low. He went straight into the main bedroom. Another one dashed across almost immediately afterwards. He seemed to be covering the first man. They were both inside the bedroom now. I heard shouts from in there. It seemed like the classic stuff, straight from the manual of how to enter a room which could be full of people with guns.

Sweat was pouring off me, and I mean pouring. I thought my shoes would squelch if I tried to move. I was having trouble seeing through my wet eyelids, wet hair. I shook my head. I tried to control my sweating by a simple act of will. Could I turn it off just with the power of my mind?

I kept peeping. The two men came out of the bedroom. At the same time another guy joined them at the top of the stairs. One guarded the left-hand side, facing my way, the other the right-hand side, towards Alastair’s bedroom, the third knelt by the guy we’d whacked with the cricket stuff. If they were drunk, it wasn’t showing. Maybe fear sobers you up pretty fast.

I didn’t dare peep anymore for a while because of the man looking our way. Instead I glanced back at the window, wishing it were open, like the ones we’d seen from the tank. I wondered what we could do if and when they came for us. Could Gavin and I leap through the glass? A spectacular head-first dive? I nodded at Gavin and then at the windows and I think he got the idea. I left him to try to get them open and had another sneak look out the door.

This time I got down low to do it. As I extended my head a few centimetres I heard a crash. I dared the snatched glance which was all I could allow. One of them was bouncing out of the door of Alastair’s bedroom looking bloody scary; I think another was just behind him. The third was getting up from where he’d been kneeling beside the guy we’d hit. Something about the way he moved made me think that his unconscious friend wasn’t going anywhere for a long time. Or to put it another way, he had already left for a long journey.

And I figured that while one was doing the quick medical inspection the other two had checked out Alas-tair’s room and found it empty. Now they knew we were down this end of the corridor.

I heard a longish squeak behind me. I whirled around and gestured at Gavin. He was trying as hard as he could, but the window was stiff and difficult. I waved him away; it was too dangerous.

I had to look again. The men might be right outside the door and about to burst in to the room. I pointed Gavin towards the bed and made wild hand movements to tell him to go under it, but I didn’t have time to see if he obeyed.

I lined up with the frame of the door and slowly let myself lean out. My flesh crawled. I saw only one of them and he was all of three metres away. I shrunk back in to the room. I ran on soft feet to the bed and took a position on the other side. It had come to a shootout then. I’d get one of them for sure, and maybe a second one if I were lucky, and I generally had been lucky since the war started. But the third one would get me and then Gavin. Homer would have to take his chances, would have to look after himself.

Suddenly one of them flashed past the door. I knew what he was doing. I could see it in my mind so clearly. He would now be standing on the other side of the doorframe, gun held high, waiting for his mates to take up their positions before two of them burst in, with the third backing them up.

As I saw it happen in my mind, so it happened in real life. Two of them, guns ready, appeared in the doorway, gazing into a room that to them looked empty.

And in the next second, the next instant, they swung around instead.

I heard it too, the sound that had distracted them. The telephone ringing. The mobile telephone. It played ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’. It was Homer’s mobile phone. And as they both, with a single movement, like they were choreographed, pointed their hand guns at the cupboard door in order to riddle it and Homer with bullets, I shot them both in the back.

It was the perfect accidental ambush. I saved Homer’s ass. He maybe didn’t deserve it, but I saved him. And Gavin’s ass, and mine with it.

The third guy took off. I heard him leaping down the stairs three, four at a time. I felt too weak to follow him. A door banged. Suddenly the house was silent. From the window Gavin must have seen him because he suddenly called, ‘Ellie, shoot him.’

He pointed down into the yard. I had a bullet left but I wasn’t going to use it. A moment later I heard a vehicle start up and take off. They must have hidden it nearby.

I stepped over the bodies, getting blood on my shoes from the pools that were already puddling on the corridor floor. I opened Homer’s door, being careful to warn him in advance: ‘It’s me. Don’t smash my head in.’

I’d got that right. He had a golf club at the ready.

We went downstairs.

We found Shannon first. She was in the sitting room, tied up, not in good shape. Homer saw her, went white, looked away, folded his arms. I was angry with him, not for any logical reason. I said, ‘I’ll look after her. Go find the others.’ He muttered something I didn’t hear, and skittered out of there, collecting Gavin on the way.

I undid Shannon. She rolled onto her side and covered her face. ‘It’s OK,’ I said, one of those meaningless remarks, not at all true, and not much better than ‘You’ll get over it’, or ‘I know just how you feel’. At least I didn’t say those things.

I wondered what I would feel in that situation and what I’d want done for me if an Ellie-type person dropped in out of the blue, so I ran to the kitchen, got a big bowl, filled it with warm water, picked up some face flannels and towels and soap from the bathroom, and hurried back.

I was getting worried that I hadn’t heard from Homer about Shannon’s parents and brothers. ‘Oh God, please don’t let them be dead,’ I prayed as I knelt beside her.

I cleaned her up and dried her, as gently as I could. There was a bit of blood but I couldn’t see much sign of injury. Physical injury, that is. Then Mrs Young rushed in, pretty much hysterical, as you would be, but that didn’t worry Shannon, although she hadn’t said anything yet. They hugged and hugged. Once I realised I couldn’t do any more, I went out.

When Homer told me that the other Youngs were OK — he’d found them in the basement — the thought went through my mind: ‘That’s what I prayed for. There is a God!’

But then I figured ‘If there is a God, why did he put them through that in the first place? And in particular, why did he put Shannon through what she suffered?’ It’s like, if one survivor gets pulled out of a coalmine three days after it’s collapsed, trapping a hundred blokes, everyone shouts, ‘God be praised,’ but you’ve got to ask, ‘What was God thinking to have buried the other ninety-nine?’

Homer had called the ambos and the cops already. His mobile had been pretty useful, all things considered.

Once I knew they were on their way, I headed for the open air.

Open air feels good sometimes. I sat gazing at the big machinery shed, wondering who’d called Homer on his mobile at the critical moment. Maybe that was God, using the Royal Telephone.