Watcher's Web (3 page)

“Help me,
girl. We need to get them out.” The hippie flung aside a black bag
and a newspaper. The businessman leant against the window, his eyes
half-open, blood seeping into the collar of his shirt.

Something
clicked in her mind. What was she doing? Forgetting everything
she’d learned about first aid? “You’re . . . you’re not
supposed to move injured people. You might make their injuries
worse.” Her voice sounded high, awfully childish.

He shot her an
irritated look. “Yes, if the victim is in a safe place—which we are
not. You know how flammable Avgas is? Even a mobile phone signal
can set it off. Here—get a move on. Take that somewhere safe.” He
shoved the first aid kit into her hands.

She had no
energy to argue with him, tell him that mobile phone story was an
urban myth. Besides, the sparks she gave off might do the trick and
she didn’t want to argue about them either.

Jessica
clutched the first aid box to her chest and pushed up the slope
through the tangle of branches. Pain spiked through her feet with
every step, as if she were walking on knives. On her arms the
sparks swirled, forming patterns, as if schools of tiny fish swam
under her skin.

“Hurry up,
girl,” came his voice from behind her; the staccato accent
heightening the unfriendliness.

Damn it. Who
did he think she was? She would hurry if she could, if only she had
some time to get rid of these sparks. Jessica plonked down the
first aid kit and retraced her steps.

He had pulled
the pilot out of the wreck and placed him against a rock. The man’s
chest moved in shallow breaths, and he clutched a bloodied hand in
his lap.

“Girl. Help
him to wherever you’ve put the first aid kit. Do something about
his hand.”

Irritation
boiled. “I have a name. It’s Jessica.”

Again, she met
those weird eyes in a moment of silence.

Like
this, he didn’t look like an ageing hippie at all. Much too
uptight, no
Peace,
Man
attitude. Maybe
he belonged to a bikie gang, and was used to bullying his minions
around. Not the best character to get into a fight with when you
were stuck in an isolated valley.

She glanced at
the silhouette of the businessman in the plane. A trail of blood
ran down the window.

“Don’t you
want help getting him out?”

“I’ll get him.
You worry about the pilot.”

Jessica bent
down, looped her arms under the pilot’s shoulders and heaved,
clamping her jaws against the pain. When she lifted him to about
knee-height, he became too heavy and she had to put him back
down.

“You feel
hot,” the pilot whispered.

Jessica
pressed her lips together.
Tell me something I don’t know.
At least she no longer sparkled like a
Christmas tree.

“Can you get
up?”

Of
course, she should have asked that first.
Girls,
her father had mocked often enough,
always do things before they
think.

With a groan,
the pilot turned over and managed to push himself to his hands and
knees. Jessica draped his arm over her shoulder, and pulled him up
until he stood on his feet. Apart from his hand, he had no obvious
injuries.

By the time
she eased him down against the trunk of the tree where she had left
the first aid box, the sparks under her skin had gone completely,
although she still felt as tense as hell.

He groped
behind his back. “Ouch, what’s this? It’s all prickly.”

He was right
and she only started noticing the strange trees now. The trunks of
all the trees were strange, all prickly with fronds and leaves as
if a piece of lawn had wrapped itself around it. Weird. Very
weird.

She flipped
open the first aid kit, a comprehensive affair that folded out,
with bottles and syringes on the top shelf inside the lid. The
pilot gave her a suspicious look.

“I’m just
going to bandage your hand,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’ve done this
before.”

Lots of times,
save that she had been working as assistant vet nurse, and her
patients had been horses, breeding cattle and working dogs.

He relaxed a
bit. Looked away. “Sorry. My name is Martin.”

“Jessica.”

“You don’t
look . . .”

Didn’t look
what? Old enough to have this kind of experience? “I’m studying to
be a vet.” Slight exaggeration—she needed to make the entrance
score first.

“Oh. I’m
sorry.”

She found
bandages and disinfectant—the pilot cursed when she put it on his
hand—and affixed thin strips over the cuts. Then she bandaged up
his hand.

A cracking of
branches announced the hippie’s arrival, stumbling backwards as he
dragged the limp form of the businessman on a picnic blanket. He
came to a halt next to the pilot, let go of the blanket and
straightened, panting. His sweat-slicked face looked white. For all
his bravado and bluster, she didn’t think he had much experience in
emergencies.

As he stood
there, digging in the pocket of his jacket, it occurred to her that
he was as tall as her. Few people were.

The skin on
the businessman’s face had faded to pasty grey, the cheekbone
pushed in, the ear filled up with blood, which ran down his face,
his neck and shoulder. His chest moved in slow, shallow breaths.
Jessica couldn’t keep her eyes from his injury. Last year, when
working for the vet, she had attended a horse that was hit by a
car. It had a broken leg, and internal injuries, but there was much
less blood than had seeped into the man’s jacket. The vet had seen
no option but to put the animal to sleep.

She knew: this
man was going to die.

Jessica took a
wad of bandage from the first aid kit, intending to wipe blood out
of his nose to make breathing easier.

“What the
bloody hell . . .” The hippie’s voice sounded loud
in the silence. He held his mobile phone in front of him. “The
battery has died.”

“Try mine,”
said the pilot, holding out his phone.

The hippie
took it, but it had the same problem. Jessica could see it in his
face before he spoke. “Nothing. Not a bloody thing.”

Both men faced
her. She took her phone out of her pocket, but the screen was dead,
too. Strange.

Jessica turned
back to the businessman, but her face tingled. Nausea washed over
her, black spots floated before her eyes, she swayed
. . . Long-fingered hands stopped her falling into the
leaf litter and propped her up against a tree. A bottle was pressed
to her mouth. She gulped, stale water soothing her throat, running
down her chin, onto her shirt.

“You’re sure
you’re not injured?”

The hippie’s
face floated in and out of focus, his weird eyes fixed on hers;
Jessica shook her head. Shit. Now he was going to think she fainted
because of the blood.

He sank down
to his knees, wiping her face. “Your skin feels hot . . .
what’s that?” Frowning, his finger traced the erratic pattern of
small reddish spots on her upper arm. “Old injury?”

She pulled her
arm back. It was as if he picked on all her peculiarities. The
spots were not that clearly visible, and there were many odd things
about her that most people would comment on before mentioning them.
The words “creepy” or Dracula featured commonly in those
descriptions.

“It’s nothing.
A birth mark. I’ve always had that.”

Always. Not
even her mother knew how those spots came to be on her skin, or the
burn on her leg, now hidden under her jeans, and she had been only
three weeks old when she stopped being anonymous, abandoned “baby
J” and started being Jessica Moore.

She tried to
soothe her nerves and convince herself that he knew nothing of the
web of light she used to control animals. He knew nothing of her
feelings just before the crash. He knew nothing of the sparks.

But she wasn’t
entirely successful.

He smiled,
uneasily. “Just take it easy, girl. None of us are made of
steel.”

“My name is
Jessica!”

He flicked up
eyebrows of white hair. “Jessica.” In a tone as if he didn’t
believe her. His gaze turned to the businessman. “You’re OK to
clean him up a bit? You need help?”

“
No!”
Spoken more angrily than she intended, but who the
hell
did he think he was, bossing her about?
She was
not
a
softie. She unwrapped a clean wad of bandage and drenched it with
disinfectant.

The hippie
turned away and spoke to the pilot. “Did air traffic control reply
to your distress signal?”

The pilot gave
a helpless shrug. “It was all so fast I never got a chance to talk
to anyone. As soon as the lightning struck us, the radio went dead.
I’m not even sure anyone heard my call.”

“You’re sure
it was lightning, mate? Couldn’t have been flying too close to
power lines or anything?”

“Not at that
height. Yeah, I think it was lightning. No idea where it came from,
but the weather does weird things at times.”

“You’re not
wrong there, but that would have been the strangest lightning I’ve
ever seen.”

Jessica
shivered. It wasn’t lightning, she was sure of that. Anyone else
would know that, too, having noticed the distinct lack of clouds in
the sky. What sort of brain did this man have in his head? A brain
that was avoiding the obvious conclusion: that the crash had
something to do with
her.

Things had
started to go wrong the moment that . . . whoever it was
. . . started tugging at the web she had cast at Angus.
Something had happened. She had felt the prickling sensation of a
current through the plane, so there was no reason the hippie
couldn’t have felt it. She saw the sparks under her skin, so he
might have seen them, too.

He had
definitely seen the sparks leap off her skin.

He sank down
on a knotted root next to the pilot, not looking at her, or
avoiding her gaze.

“Any idea
where we are?” he asked.

The pilot
shrugged. “Not the faintest fucking clue, mate. I mean, according
to the map we’d be somewhere on the western slopes, about fifteen
minutes out of Lithgow, but I don’t know of any country like this
on the western slopes. It’s like we’ve landed in some kind of
fucking hidden valley. Like the one where they discovered this
. . . this . . . flaming tree . . .
oh, what’s it called?”

“The Wollemi
Pine?” Jessica said.

“Yeah, that’s
the one. A prehistoric kind of valley. I mean, aren’t there
supposed to be gum trees in this country? You got any idea where we
are?”

Soft thuds of
drops of water falling from trees were the only reply to his
question.

“How long
before the airline discovers we’re missing?”

“Not too long.
What’s the time?” Eyes wide, the pilot stared at his wrist. “Would
you believe it? My fucking watch has given up the ghost, too. It
says it’s just past four, but it must be later than that. It’s
getting dark.”

Jessica’s
watch too, said five minutes past four, but the seconds were still
ticking over.

The pilot
looked up where tree trunks disappeared into the mist. “They’d be
searching for us right now. I don’t know how long it’d take.” He
groaned. “Shit, my head hurts.”

The hippie got
to his feet. “Well, it looks like we’re stuck here for the night
unless the mist lifts. Do we have any food?”

Silence.

He shrugged.
“Suppose that would be asking a bit much. Let’s see what we do
have. A tent of some sort? It looks like it might rain.”

“There’s a
tarp in the plane,” the pilot said.

“Come on,
girl, you look big and strong; I could use some help.”

Jessica very
much wanted to tell him where he could stick his patronising
comments and orders, but there was nothing else to do, so she
pushed herself up and followed him back to the wrecked plane,
thinking that even though she and the pilot had introduced
themselves, he had not. When he stopped to hold a branch aside for
her, she looked into his sweat-slicked face.

“Forgive me
asking, but do we know each other?”

A closed look
came over his face. “Should we?”

“I didn’t
think we did, so I don’t know your name.”

“Uh, sorry. My
name is Brian.”

A slight
hesitation. Not his real name, no way, not with that accent.
Someone on the run? She forced a smile. “Nice to meet you,
Brian.”

He didn’t
reply.

They reached
the plane wreck, where he crawled into the luggage compartment and
extracted the tarpaulin, which he handed to her without meeting her
eyes. The uncomfortable silence lingered.

By the time
Jessica had helped Brian string the tarpaulin between the branches
of two trees, it was almost dark. Since he had told her his name,
Brian had spoken only the most necessary words. Silence hung
between them like heavy syrup. He glanced at her, and she glanced
at him, trying to do so when he wasn’t watching, and being
unsuccessful at least half the time. Those light blue eyes chilled
her. He was sizing her up or something. Not quite a pervert, since
he’d made no move to touch her when they were alone. But something
was odd and creepy about the way he looked at her.

To get away
from his stare, Jessica collected pieces of dead wood and put them
in a pile, but however much Brian tried, the pilot’s cigarette
lighter would not cooperate. He went back down the hill to the
plane wreckage and came back with a container. The look on his face
spelled thunder, so Jessica was happy to get out of his way and
watched from a distance as he sprinkled Avgas over the wood. The
smell of fuel drifted on the air. He flicked the cigarette
lighter.