Gone to Ground by BRONWYN HALL

Author:BRONWYN HALL
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HQ Fiction
Published: 2022-06-25T00:00:00+00:00

13

For the first few minutes, I crouched perfectly still, barely breathing. I clutched Otis’s gun and strained to listen, but the only sound was the wheeze of the barge engine. The image of the little girl crying popped up again behind my eyes and, despite Anton’s warning, suddenly I couldn’t bear not knowing what was happening.

Very carefully, I turned around in my leafy cage so I was facing the river. Even more carefully, I pulled the curtain of vines to one side just enough so I could see out.

The scene looked exactly as before, except now the barge was nearly halfway across. It was pulling itself by winding in the cable attached to the concrete bollard on this side of the river and simultaneously unwinding the cable secured to the side of the river it had come from. It was slow progress, made even slower by the fact the barge wasn’t level and one corner sagged in the water; the flotation tanks in that area had been breached. The children were tiny balls squatting in a huddle on the deck. The three soldiers on this side watched the barge’s approach, looking uninterested as they swatted at the flies. I couldn’t see Anton, Jax or Lucas anywhere.

As the ferry inched its way across the current, my brain finally caught up with what was unfolding. Fear for the children and the three people I now thought of as my soldiers made my mouth dry and a cold perspiration broke out over the back of my neck. What if one of them got hurt?

The ferry ploughed on. When it was only a few metres off the bank, the engine revs slowed and it lurched further into the water. The three soldiers on this side spread themselves out in a loose fan, waiting for the barge to come to a stop. Two of them held their guns in their hands. The other had his looped over a shoulder and looked like he was standing by to lift the children across to dry land. The barge drifted into the opening between the reeds where the road ran to the water’s edge and there was a grating crunch as it came to rest on the gravelly edge.

The soldier tasked with lifting the children barked something in their direction and they came towards him. The guard in charge of the controls stayed in his box and I figured he’d be going back to the other side as soon as the transfer was made and his job done. One by one, the children were lifted off the ramp of the ferry and swung across to stand on the ground. I could only see the tops of their heads above the reeds.

Where were Anton and Lucas?

The three militiamen on the bank turned to herd the children up the road towards the vehicle that would take them on to the village. They’d taken barely three steps before Lucas materialised out of the reeds in front of them, his gun pointed at the soldiers’ faces.

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