Bob and Terry were exhausted
with the heat and the job they had just completed. They packed up some of the
smaller things to take back with them and completed an inventory of the rest.
It was likely that another family would be placed in the house once a decision
had been made in relation to the boy’s relocation. He might be established with
the new family in the old house, with a surrogate in another area, or remain
feral to see if something new could be turned up that way. Any final decision would
be a matter for later consideration around the compound table.
The two men partook
of some food and drink, and a longer rest than was warranted. They could have been
heading back sooner, but were reluctant to leave the place and face up to the discomforts
of the route ahead. They sat in silence and gazed through the window at the
small mound of earth that covered the woman and the cat in the pillowcase. They
would later reflect on the old adage that timing is everything, but the
circumstances that led to that reflection would not come for some time yet. In
its absence they delayed their departure until the light had decided the matter
for them.
When they saw
that there were no more than two hours of light remaining in the day, they mounted
their motor-assisted bicycles and headed off on the familiar route that for two
years had taken them backwards and forwards between the road and the house of the
woman Jenna, and the boy Dalyon. This was
the track that led to somewhere; not the one that Ma took, the one that ended
in a clearing before burrowing deeper and deeper into a tangle of heavy bush. The
track Bob and Terry were taking was narrow and uneven, but it had been kept
reasonably clear by their weekly visits. It would take about an hour and a half
of assisted riding with a tailwind before they reached the road where their
vehicle waited.
They were just half an hour from the road when they saw
tracks indicating that a small family of Listers had recently passed this way.
These creatures, the result of a failed experiment with dynamic genomics in the
days of the call for innovations for the war effort, had been all but
eradicated. Listers always suffered from breeding difficulties, and the
likelihood was that the remaining population posed no real threat, but Bob,
with the cat’s struggles still exciting his imagination, convinced Terry to
make the detour. They followed, only to find that the trail faded away to
nothing. Bob and Terry looked around for a while, but could find no new tracks
and were just about to turn back when Terry spotted the juveniles, a male and a
female. They were playing just a short distance away by a small grove of trees.
Bob signaled to Terry to stay put, and crept back to where they had left the
bikes. He lifted the flaps of the saddle bags, taking care not to make any
sudden movement or sound, and extracted two short-nosed rifles from the saddle-packs.
These were super-light
mid twenty-first Century models, originally discovered in a cache hidden in a bunker deep underground. The two men had argued
the case for self-defence on these trips, and were granted special permission by
the committee to keep them. The weapons had been stored well, and were still in
excellent working condition when they were brought into the compound. Bob, with
too many hours of spare time on his hands these days, made sure they were kept
that way.
He handed one
to Terry, gesturing to him to go for the female juvenile. Terry took a clean
shot, dropping it where it had been playing, and Bob got the young male, as it
is moved to attack. They had sauntered up to check that they had finished the
animals when the mother leapt at them from behind a tree. Terry fired again,
grazing its side, and it bolted back into the bush. By then the light was
starting to fade and they needed to get on, or risk having to spend the night.
They decided to keep going rather than to follow. The animal would die soon
enough, a slow-suffering death, but it couldn’t be helped.
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