Wake Read Free

over the fallen box as if it were downed prey. He braced his shoulders and continued to push. The sides of the letterbox creaked and bulged, the man’s ears doubled over, and—that resistance overcome—his whole head plunged into the distorted box, passage lubricated by blood.
    Theresa saw that the man was wearing a postie’s bright red and yellow uniform, and mail harness, though he’d lost his mail sacks.
    He was a postie. A postie posting himself head first into a letterbox.
    Theresa’s face went numb. Her ears stopped working. And the two men who’d peeled off the rampaging group were nearly on her by the time she noticed them.
    She raised her gun, but wasn’t able to bring it level before the first man reached her. She didn’t remember pulling the trigger, but the gun went off. She didn’t hear the shot, only felt its kick. The bullet went into the attacker’s leg and smashed his thigh bone. She didn’t hear that either, but glimpsed powder burns, parted flesh, wet bone.
    The man’s momentum carried him along the road, head over heels. Both he and the recoil knocked Theresa off-balance, and, because of that, the second attacker overshot his mark. He swiped at her in passing, then slowed and doubled back. The maimed man was struggling up, dragging his smashed leg.
    Theresa regained her balance and bolted. She’d spotted an avenue of escape, a high boundary fence—one of those double-thickness ones with a flat top. She saw how close to the eaves of its house it came. Theresa scaled the fence, planted her heavy soled boots on its top, and sprinted along it. She made the leap from the fence to the roof, and her free hand caught hold of the ventilation pipe of a toilet cistern. She grappled with her other hand, the gun scoring the coating on the steel roof tiles. Showers of volcanic grit fell past her as she swung a knee up onto the roof. The PVC guttering shattered.
    Theresa clambered up to the spine of the roof, straddled it, and pointed her gun back the way she’d come.
    Her pursuers had lost interest. They didn’t even linger looking up at her, like dogs that have treed a cat. They just departed, one at the same breakneck pace, though not in pursuit of his group. The other dragged himself across the road to join the postie, who had finally torn the letterbox from its stand and, blinded by it, had blundered into a front garden rockery. The maimed man took the postie’s hand. He did it gently, and for a moment Theresa thought he might lead the postie out of the shrubs, and onto more even ground. But instead the man brought the postie’s hand to his mouth, as if about to kiss it gallantly. He pressed the postie’s fingers to his lips, then commenced to savage them.
    Theresa’s spread her knees and dropped her head, shaken by a bout of retching. Everything went black. She was going to tumble off the roof. She clapped her free hand onto the ridge, and her fingernails prised more grit from the tiles. She put her gun down and planted her foot on top of it. Then she held on for dear life, fighting her own plummeting blood pressure. She tried to slow her breathing. ‘I’m hyperventilating,’ she thought. Then she made herself say it out loud. She might not be a police officer armoured with procedure anymore, but she was still a human being, with language.
    There were no cries for help. That was the thing. Theresa had seen injuries, aggression, atrocities, self-mutilation, but had heard nothing from any of the victims or perpetrators. Nothing articulate or expressive. No matter how hard she strained her ears, Theresa couldn’t hear anything human.
    After a while she gingerly lifted her head. From her vantage point she could see over the rooftops of the houses on Beach Road. She couldn’t see the beach, but further out was a trawler, coming into the bay, trailing a wedding veil of hungry gulls. It was such an everyday sight.