came. I dread to think what they were going to do to me.’
But the boy wasn’t stupid and he couldn’t reconcile Rosie’s story with the obvious theft of the tools.
‘You’ll come back to the house with me and we’ll fetch the police,’ the boy said firmly. Then he looked down at Alice. ‘Let go of my leg and go back to the house like Daddy told you.’
But Alice was scared and had no intention of going anywhere on her own. While the boy was distracted, Rosie bent down and picked up a long spanner that Marc had discarded while packing the three sacks.
‘Put that down,’ the boy said. ‘You might be a girl, but I’ll slap you if I have to.’
Alice squealed as Rosie charged forwards with the spanner. Rosie had done hundreds of hours’ combat training, but this was the first time she’d used it outside of the hall on campus.
She felt foolish, attacking a boy who was older and stronger. The initial results weren’t good. The spanner swished past the boy’s head. He grabbed Rosie and she squealed as he grabbed her wrist and bent back her fingers.
Rosie screamed as the pain increased, but as she looked backwards she realised that the boy had taken no steps to defend himself. At last she felt confident and her vicious back-kick sunk into the farm boy’s stomach. As he stumbled backwards, Rosie knocked him down with a double-fisted punch to the back of his head.
Rosie felt like she was back on the training mats on campus as her mind calculated several ways to finish the boy off. But unlike in training, there was a distraught little girl standing in the background who couldn’t bear seeing her brother get hurt.
Instead of delivering a knockout blow, Rosie brandished the spanner in the boy’s face.
‘Stay down or you’ll be sorry.’
The shower had eased slightly as Rosie bolted out of the barn. There was no sign of the boys, but she was sure they’d have dealt with the farmer between the three of them.
Rosie made it less than ten metres across the sodden ground before she heard a huge bang from behind her. She looked back and saw the farmer’s wife with a shotgun. Pellets of hot metal hissed with steam as they sprayed the wet ground on either side, but Rosie ignored a powerful stinging sensation in her back and splashed on until she reached the hedgerow at the field’s edge.
The woman with the shotgun had given up the chase, but Rosie was badly shaken as she scrambled over the hedge. She smiled with relief when PT and Joel reached up to help her over.
‘Are you OK to keep running?’ PT asked. ‘We need to get as far away as possible.’
Rosie raised the back of her coat and touched the stinging area at the base of her spine. ‘Got hit by a pellet or two,’ she explained. ‘But I think it’s OK.’
CHAPTER THIRTY
The storm hit as Luc rode away from the target. The wheels of his bike dug into the mud. Water dripped off his fringe into his eyes, blinding him as he turned on to the steep hill that led out of the valley.
He swung the handlebars and veered off-road as one of the giant lorries thundered past. The front tyres ploughed through standing water, showering Luc in mud and rock salt as he clattered into thick undergrowth.
A gritty taste filled his mouth and salt burned his eyes. The truck’s second axle gave him a smaller shower, but as he shielded his face he lost his grip on the bike. The first wheel of the trailer caught the back of his bike, bursting the tyre and flipping it into the air. If Luc hadn’t been falling in the opposite direction he would have gone under the truck with his bike.
Luc crashed into bushes, getting stabbed by the ends of branches. His ear flooded as the last wheels ploughed through the puddle. The bike landed with a crash several metres away and its buckled frame pirouetted.
Luc trembled as he sat up, fearing – in some ways almost hoping – that the truck driver would stop and pick him up. But the driver knew of nothing except a satisfying bow wave as he roared through the puddle.
The salt in Luc’s eyes was excruciating. He sat still for several minutes, trembling and blinking as he tried to get his sight back. Once he could keep his eyes open for more than a couple of seconds