Page 118 of Hit Me With Your Best Shot

Lights coming toward her.

The space station?

A UFO.

No. Shit. A car.

Back to Earth like an incoming V-2. She dived off the road and flattened herself in the grass.

A Land Rover speeding along. Music blaring from the vehicle. Music Dopplering in her eardrums.

All we are saying is…

All we are saying…

All…

She buried her face in the grass as the headlights swept across the blackness.

She sat up and watched the taillights barrel down the road.

It was going to the farm but she didn’t care where it was going or what it was doing.

It was gone.

It had fallen into the past with yesterday and Tom and George Washington and Jesus and the painters of Lascaux and the dinosaurs and the dead stars that made the iron and nickel at the center of the Earth.

All gone.

She got to her feet and continued down the road.

In fifteen minutes, the old prison loomed out of the night. She slowed her pace and grew cautious but there was no real reason for caution.

All was dead here.

Rectangular pitch-black buildings. Silhouettes of abandoned farm machinery. She explored the equipment for a few minutes but there was nothing she could break off and use as a weapon.

She got down into a crouch and approached the nearest of the structures.

Most of the prison had been demolished, but a cellblock had been left standing: a long concrete-and-iron-bar building exposed to the elements. That little house on the rise must be the old guardhouse.

There were no lights on anywhere. She walked into the courtyard between the prison and the house and listened.

Nothing. In the far distance, she could hear surf breaking on the shore of the island.

The house was a two-story job with a balcony on the upper floor that went all the way around. She walked to the front door and examined it. A heavy wooden door with a keyhole. She tried the handle and then put her shoulder against it and shoved, but it didn’t move.

Heather took a few steps back and examined the building with a more clinical eye. She shook her head to try to get her brain working better.

Two floors. Brick construction. Corrugated-iron roof. There were large windows on the ground floor with bars over them. She did a circuit of the structure looking for any points of entry but couldn’t see any obvious ones.

Heather tugged at the metal bars covering the windows. Although they appeared rusty and very old, none of them seemed loose. She tried every metal bar on every window on the ground floor and then shoved her shoulder against the door again.

Sighing, she tried to figure out what to do.

There was no guarantee that the house would have water. Maybe this whole thing was a fool’s errand.

She walked back to the old cellblock and looked inside the individual cells. Cobwebs hung from all the doorways and the building stank of urine. Watching out for venomous spiders, she examined each cell for anything she could possibly use.