She pulled on shortie pyjamas and climbed into bed. Twenty minutes later, she was snoring through a magazine on her face.
A hand over her mouth. The blood blasted from her toes to her crown in the split-second before she recognised Joss's face above her own. His eyes hard, unrelenting. Telling her: they are here. No fucking around. It's fight or die.
All without words.
Our baby, his eyes said next. I'm going to get her.
He took his hand from her mouth. Gave her the bat. Remember the lessons.
With the thought of her baby in that man's hands, the strength that ran through Isobel's body left her wanting to bite, tear flesh with her teeth. She positioned herself behind the door. The bat felt spongy in her hands; she felt she could snap it in two. Already furious with the fuckers for taking so long to get to her, she practised seeing the blood spray from a head, wiping it quickly from her eyes to swing again. When the massacre had first started, Joss had been careful to step around the bodies. Even when the mounds at Kibeho had grown so wide that there was nowhere else to walk than over the dead and dying, he would try to avoid treading on a hand or a leg on his way to pull another breathing person out of the pile. By the end of the third day, however, he marched over dead faces, strode through brains, stepped straight onto balls. There was no other way to get around.
Now, Joss moved silently through the darkness of his home, ignoring the hands grappling at his ankles, moving through the body parts. His own hand was finally whole again, holding his knife. He heard it laughing and he smiled back at it, his teeth flashing in the dark.
I'm coming, Cutter.
Leaning against a counter in Joss's kitchen, Cutter stared at his diluted reflection in the glass of a cabinet. While he listened to the quiet movements above him, he allowed himself some time to think about what he was going to do to Mouse. He couldn't believe the fucker wouldn't come tonight, that he didn't know his fate for turning Cutter down.
He selected a toothpick from a tiny bowl on the counter next to him, and worked at some food caught in his teeth. As usual, when using a toothpick, he couldn't resist the urge to press the sharp thing deep into the softest crevice of the gum, the agony mushrooming a feeling he equated to what love must feel like. He sucked happily at the metallic tang of his blood.
Studying the now slimy wooden splinter in his hand, it occurred to him that he should use the needles on Mouse. Perfect. He sucked the toothpick dry before placing it on the bench. Lately, he couldn't get enough of that taste.
He needed to hurry now. He walked into the loungeroom carrying the twelve-litre container in one hand and the machete in the other. He slashed a few times at the couch in the centre of the room and began sloshing the accelerant over the furniture.
Esterhase could see no way out of it. He felt sick, his limbs rubbery. He'd been pissing his shit out for over a week. Everything he ate turned to water. And his gut ached. He rubbed it unconsciously as he stood silently in the upstairs hallway of the house in Balmain.
Cutter had explained about Joss. Esterhase still felt disbelief. He hadn't even recognised him when they'd done over that house in Green Valley. But Joss was only part of the problem. Man, the whole thing was so fucked up. If he killed Cutter, this prick Joss still knew too much. And if he didn't do this job with Cutter, the cunt would completely schiz and he'd be next. Mouse had better be packing for Vietnam right now, he thought. Cutter had just smiled when he told him Huynh wouldn't be coming. Esterhase had nearly shit his pants just looking at him.
He breathed in the dark, his heart hammering. Too many things could go wrong. Who knew when Mouse would break, or when Cutter would get them all caught. He had to do this job tonight, and then he was getting the fuck out of the state. Shit, maybe he'd even go to New Zealand.
Esterhase stood in the dark thinking about what he had to do tonight. He bent forward slightly as the fist in his gut squeezed at his innards.
Isobel had thought it impossible for her heart rate to increase further until she heard the furtive footsteps stop outside the room. She'd spent a few moments agonising over the possibility that Joss could return quietly to the bedroom and she might hit him by mistake, but she knew now as certainly as if there were no door between them that the person standing out there was not her husband.
The corridor outside the double doors was black; the light in the bedroom with her, slightly brighter. She stared so hard at the rind of darkness that she thought she was imagining it when the door finally began to move. Terror wrestled with rage; her senses focused, and she squeezed the bat harder. Ready.
The scream of a siren split the air and Isobel recognised their fire alarm a heartbeat before the door flew open and her nightmare barged in. While the siren shrieked, the dance between her and the masked man seemed silent, slow.
I'm sorry Joss, she said internally. I let him get closer than a metre.
Somehow, the man had got hold of the end of the bat. He raised the knife above his head. Isobel could almost feel the pain in her shoulder where she imagined it would slice into her. Her daughter's blue eyes danced in her vision and she sobbed goodbye. Then, with the strength of a grief beyond anything she had ever experienced, she drove the bat forward into the chest of the man in front of her, propelling him three feet across the room. She felt the movement of his weapon as it fell past her ear. She considered picking it up, but, bent double, he was already preparing to move forward again.
Instead, she went to meet him.
Isobel lifted the bat above her shoulder and kept her eye on the ball, just as her brothers had taught her. She swung, the bat slamming into his temple, the thud shuddering up her arms and into her neck, causing her to bite her tongue.
With the fire alarm sobbing in her ears and blood from her tongue on her lips, Isobel spoke quietly to the man unconscious in her bedroom. She ignored the smoke swirling around her feet and his body.
'You leave my family alone,' she told him. 'You leave us alone.'
He didn't move, but she kept the bat close, and bent down to him. The fire alarms bawled for attention: it seemed as though there had never been silence. She was aware of a heat somewhere behind the doors, but she had to know. Carefully at first, and then scratching, clawing, she ripped at the balaclava covering the face in front of her.
The skin at his temple was already beginning to bulge. Somehow, she knew that his brains were leaking out of a fracture in his skull. The long dark hair curled into the hollows of his neck, like snakes nesting comfortably with the spider tattoos.
He had carried the other children through the carnage, crying, just like this, crooked in his right arm. Joss couldn't hear his daughter's sobs over the sirens, but he felt them, wet, against his shoulder. The alarms deafened him, just as the mortars had, but he was well practised at relying on his other senses. He stayed close to the wall, moving slowly, ignoring the bodies at his feet – back from Charlie's room to the bedroom, to Isobel.
The balaclava walked out of the smoke.
And they faced each other.
He manoeuvred Charlie a little higher. Her legs clung to him, terrified. Inconsolable at being woken from her sleep by this noise, she buried her face deeper into his neck. She didn't see the shock in the masked man's eyes when he saw that his opponent carried a little girl.