sounded more like the whimpering of one of Anton’s guinea pigs.
Annie willed herself not to cry. Couldn’t. Shouldn’t. Wouldn’t. Instead she unbuckled her seatbelt and fell forward and the gear stick jammed into her ribs. ‘Fuck!’ Annie knew that she’d never been so precise in her employment of the expletive in her whole life. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’
‘For God’s sake, do you think swearing’s going to help?’ Meredith sniffed. Her reading glasses might have been smashed, but her sense of outrage was still intact.
‘I think I might have broken something,’ moaned Nina. She suddenly had an image of herself as Shelley Winters in the Poseidon Adventure—everyone thinking that she was too fat to make it—but her heart would go on . . . and on. Or was that Titanic? Amazing, she thought, how leading ladies had become younger and slimmer, but more buoyant during the past quarter of a century.
Meredith also unbuckled her seatbelt and extended her palm to brace herself for the drop against the hard dashboard. Nina might be seriously injured. She had to assess the situation.
She clambered between the front seats to the cabin behind. ‘Where does it hurt?’ She gently placed her palm on Nina’s shin, which looked to be bruising already.
‘Everywhere. But I think my ankle copped the worst of it. Ow!’
‘Can you move it?’ Nina obediently wriggled her toes and turned her foot. ‘Well then, I guess that means it’s not broken,’ Meredith diagnosed, drawing on some rudimentary medical knowledge from Girl Guides. ‘Let’s hope it’s just a sprain. My God, it reeks in here!’
‘The first thing we’d better do is try to ring roadside assist.’ Annie reached into the glovebox. ‘I’ll get the number. It’s in the folder. Let’s hope there’s reception out here.’
Annie found her BlackBerry and mumbled a silent prayer to the God of Telecommunications but there was, predictably, no coverage. They were, as Meredith had already helpfully mentioned, precisely in the middle of nowhere and way out of mobile range.
‘My God, what are we going to do now?’ gasped Nina. It was a very good question and no-one had any good answer for it. There was a long silence between them as the rain steadily beat down—and then, instantly, ceased.
Annie located a road map, opened the driver’s door and jumped down to the roadway. The low cloud was clearing fast, and the heat of the afternoon sun was already evaporating the moisture and raising a plume of steam from every broad, thick leaf. The light was refracting through dripping water, creating a shifting mosaic of silver and gold. Annie immediately thought of Lizzie, and the old familiar feeling of loss, on top of everything else, had her blinking back tears. She shielded her eyes from the bright shards of reflection to peer at the map.
The estuary was a jigsaw of channels, lagoons, sand bars and alluvial islands—Oyster Channel, Rabbit Island, Shark Creek, Crystal Waters. Fish, prawns and oysters spawned here. Waterbirds nested. Insects swarmed in the silvery grey, oily mud. It was the sounds Annie was most amazed by. Water was running fast in the channel by the roadway; beyond that, in the thick density of mangrove leaf and root, frogs chorused, birds called and the air hummed with buzzing creatures—every living thing had been invigorated by the fierce tropical storm. Along the road in both directions there was nothing to see but more mangrove trees.
Meredith’s head emerged from the door, but the brutality of the light and steaming humidity sent her reeling back inside. She stood gripping the corner of the kitchen benchtop as one horrifying thought pushed everything else from her mind. Crocodiles! There would be crocodiles submerged in the vile, stinking swamp. Meredith had seen enough Hollywood disaster movies to know what came next. At nightfall a huge monster of a thing would emerge and pull them one by one, screaming, to a gruesome death. Nina, with her swollen ankle, might hold them all back, and so would have to be sacrificed first.
‘Annie! Come back inside,’ Meredith called. ‘There could be anything out there.’
‘I know,’ Annie called back. ‘You should come and have a look. It’s like the mud is moving. It’s incredible.’
‘Crocodiles!’ screeched Meredith, stumbling back and tripping over Nina’s prostrate form.
‘Ow! Careful! My ankle!’
‘There are no crocodiles!’ Annie shook her head in disbelief at Meredith’s amateur theatrics. ‘We’re way too far south for crocodiles. I meant crabs! There’re thousands of ’em, everywhere.’
Meredith slammed the van door with annoyance. Here she was, in the worst predicament she