Read Watcher's Web for Free Online

And a rope. Now to
pack it.
    She turned her
backpack upside-down. An avalanche of school things fell out.
Homework, reading assignments, diary and library books.
    Now, what was
in this odd assortment of personal belongings that she could use?
The rope, her spare shirt and pairs of underwear. A small saw, a
hammer and a box of nails, a roll of string.
    She added the
water bottle, a plastic bag and the pilot’s empty thermos.
    No food—she
had no food.
    On the other
hand, wherever she had landed, she wouldn’t be more than half a day
away from some sort of civilisation. People would be looking for
the plane. If she could get clear of this ridiculous forest, they
would find her. Uncomfortable words were there in the back of her
mind.
    This
isn’t the Australian bush.
    She
heaved her backpack onto her shoulders. In her mind, she could hear
her father’s voice. If you have a breakdown in the middle of nowhere, don’t
leave the vehicle. A
memory: an abandoned and bogged four-wheel-drive. There had been
something on the news about German tourists who got lost in the
desert in Western Australia. Blanket-covered bodies in the red
dust.
    Stupid people, her father had said. Never do that, Jess. Stay with the vehicle.
    “Sorry, Dad,”
she whispered and her voice sounded unnaturally loud.
    She turned
away from the wreck and trudged down the slope.
    At the stream,
she stopped to fill the water bottle. The water was crystal clear
and probably fine to drink. The city girls at school always wanted
to muck around with water purification tablets, but if they were
camping in the mountains, she never used any.
    As she
straightened to screw the cap back on, someone touched her shoulder
from behind.

Chapter
5
     
    J ESSICA WHIRLED
around and faced . . . Brian.
    “What the fuck
are you doing here, sneaking up on me like that!”
    He took a step
back, wide-eyed. His jacket was dirty and torn, his face smudged
with mud. His hair was a tangle of sticks and branches, and one of
his hands was bleeding.
    Shit. “I’m
sorry. Did you see the others?” Why the fuck hadn’t he responded
when she called?
    He nodded,
wordless. There was a hardness to his face that chilled her. What
had he seen last night? How they were killed? Had he been in hiding
until now?
    “Are you OK?”
Her heart was still beating like crazy.
    He
nodded, again wordless. He didn’t look OK to her. Had he thought she was abandoning
him?
    “I
. . . I thought everyone was dead.” Stupid. She had seen
a third body on the forest floor, but she should have checked to
see if it was him.
    “It’s OK.” His
voice was a lot more subdued than it was yesterday.
    She shook her
head. It wasn’t OK. “I’m sorry.”
    A wordless
silence hung between them. She studied his face: haggard, dirty,
younger than she had initially thought
    She continued,
uneasily, “I was about to leave. I think we need to get out of here
in case those idiots come back.”
    He nodded
again. “Do you have any water?”
    She gave
the bottle to him, and he took it, screwed the cap off and drank.
All of a sudden, her world had changed. She wasn’t alone, and
someone had survived. Not the person she would have chosen, but someone
else nevertheless, and she was glad of that.
    He handed her
back the bottle. While she bent down to re-fill it, her stomach
rumbled uncomfortably, acid burning in the back of her throat. She
was hungry, but thinking of the food they didn’t have would only
make it worse. She had to hang on. A day or two at the most and
they would surely find their way back to civilisation. She stuffed
the bottle in her backpack’s side pocket and swung the pack onto
her shoulder.
    “Let’s
go.”
    “Where
to?”
    “Up there. See
if we can find a way out of this bloody jungle.”
    She expected
him to argue. Maybe she hoped he would argue, say he had picked up
some sound and a rescue crew was coming. But he said nothing.
    And that was
weird, too. Certainly people would be out there looking