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.