Page 125 of The Island

She headed east around the farm, giving the dogs a wide berth. They wouldn’t smell her but they were smart and they might hear her. Not many other big mammals out here on Dutch Island tonight.

Heather approached the old steamroller, took the rifle off her shoulder, and waited in the long grass. With the binoculars, she carefully scanned the roof. No one up there this windy night. She scanned the farmyard and that was empty too. She turned on the walkie-talkie and listened. Nothing on any channel. The lights were on at the main farmhouse but there wasn’t much activity anywhere else.

She remembered what Rory had said about the anthills behind the steamroller. About what they were going to do with Hans.

Maybe she should…

Yes, she should.

She crawled toward the anthill.

A few pathfinder ants began biting her ankles. She tucked the bottoms of her jeans into her socks.

She had to know.

Creeping forward, she soon found both of them.

They were both dead.

Petra had been shot in the back and dumped naked on top of the ant mound. She was a moving sea of red bodies. Hans was just beyond her on a smaller mound.

A steady breeze was blowing from the southwest and it was rocking the arc light hanging on a wire in the middle of the farmyard. Hans’s and Petra’s bodies were swinging in and out of chiaroscuro like some insane video-art installation.

The ants had eaten Petra’s face and were pouring into her bony white eye sockets to consume her brain.

The perfect horror of it made her catch her breath.

She began to cry. She sobbed and hugged herself and sobbed some more.

She wiped her cheeks.

“I got the kids to a cave! I found a cave,” she told Petra. “It was worth it, what you did. It worked. Thank you.”

Ants began biting at her elbows.

She slid backward from the anthill and rubbed at her arms.

She was about to slip back into the darkness when something horrifying happened.

Hans moved.

37

She fought the urge to run and scream.

She crawled past Petra to the smaller anthill, where Hans had been staked to the ground.

The ants were seething through his hair. His eyes were tightly closed and he had rolled his lips inward and was shaking his head from side to side puffing down his nostrils in an attempt to keep the ants out of his throat. The stench was appalling. He’d soiled himself, and the O’Neills had beaten him. She looked at him in horror and then quickly crawled to him. She took her canteen and poured water over his head and brushed the ants from his face. She dug the ants out of his ears and killed them and flung them off. She cleared his mouth and poured water down his throat.

The ants immediately began biting her. Their pincers were sharp and incredibly painful. Hans had to be in agony.

“Hans, it’s me, Heather,” she said.

“Heather?”

“Don’t try to speak. I’m going to get you out of here,” she said, giving him more water, wiping his face and neck.

“The children?”

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