Thunderbolt by Wilbur Smith (reading strategies book .txt) 📕

him, followed one by one. I was last. I’d put myself at the back for two reasons. First, if my limping was obvious, people would be less likely to see it. And second, if I couldn’t keep up, I’d slip off the back without harming the rest of the group’s chances. Mo was their best hope of making it out of here and I didn’t want to be responsible for our failure.

We made slower progress anyway, presumably because of Addie’s ankle. The numbness of my leg didn’t get to me as much as the uncertainty of the injury. What would happen next? Would the poison – if that’s what it was – spread through me, shutting the rest of me down?

My back was slick with sweat. I didn’t know if that was a symptom of something worse to come, or just plain fear. I was overheating but the night itself was cooled by the slicing wind.

In a way it was a mercy that I had to concentrate so hard on keeping up without stumbling and falling. Placing my right foot down safely was as tricky as threading a needle in the dark.

I forced myself to keep behind the little lad in his baseball boots, ignore the weight of Addie’s pack as best I could, and shut out all my thoughts before they got going. It was impossible to do that entirely: nagging doubts kept sprouting into full-blown pangs of panic as we forged on through the dark.

On we walked, on and on. I was in a complete daze. The numbness of my leg grew into itself, stiffening into a warm, pulsing pain. Was that a good sign or bad? A mile or so further on the pain was sharper still. But I was able to keep up, forcing myself through it.

Amelia was ahead of the kid in the boots. She’d taken hold of the remaining dog’s rope. It drifted along beside her as contentedly as it had walked next to me. At one point the scrub we were picking our way through erupted with shrieking birds and the dog barked at them as they blew away. Would the other one have made it back to camp by now? Even if it had, General Sir should still be asleep, surely. We had until morning, and that was hours away.

Except that, astonishingly, as soon as I’d had that thought, the rushing black sky to my left seemed to be turning indigo. Left was east. Within minutes the bruise above the horizon was an umber stripe. We’d walked right through the night and dawn was about to break.

I’d seen the contours of low hills against the night sky, but as it grew lighter the full extent of our exposure became clear: the scrubland was an endless gentle undulation stabbed with the occasional thorny bush or stunted acacia tree. There seemed to be more trees in the distance to our right, but they were a way away.

The pain in my leg had become an occasional hot spasm angling into my hip joint. I rubbed at it as we walked on, the landscape coming into focus. We were tracking a dry stream bed. It formed a rough path of sorts. The dirt, grey-black all night, had an orangey tinge to it in the morning sun. The kid in front’s trainers were covered in it. Detail crowded in. Everything was soon pin sharp. As the boy kicked up dust the wind tore it away.

Ahead, Mo stopped. The group concertinaed together as we all caught up. He’d paused us in a culvert. There was a lip of rock running alongside the stream bed here, no more than a metre high. Nevertheless, it was cover of sorts. We’d agreed that we would keep out of sight during the day, but I’d imagined we’d be able to hide away somewhere better than this. Amelia, thinking the same thing, said so.

‘The sun is up. Every minute we are in the open is a risk,’ said Mo.

‘Also, we’re exhausted,’ Xander agreed.

Amelia looked sceptical.

‘We’ve made progress,’ said Mo. ‘We’re on course to meet the river.’

‘I hope it has more water in it than this tributary,’ said Amelia doubtfully.

‘We could push on just a little further, see if there’s somewhere a bit better to lay up,’ I suggested. ‘Those trees in the distance, for example.’

‘They’re quite a way.’

As Mo spoke, I spotted something moving over his shoulder. Too fast and smoothly for an animal, a pickup was coming steadily towards us, a great plume of dust shearing into the sky behind it.

‘Down!’ I shouted. Mo dropped to the ground and everyone else followed suit. We hunched there as the noise of the truck reached us. It was approaching at an angle, and at a constant speed. Since it wasn’t picking its way through scrub it had to be travelling along a track of some sort. In all this expanse, how had we wound up next to a road?

We were below the horizon line here but still, the truck was coming in roughly our direction. Were they making a beeline for us? I held my breath. We all did, I’m sure. Nobody moved a muscle as the truck rumbled our way.

51.

I have to admit the thought occurred to me, as we crouched there with bated breath, hoping the truck would pass us by, that the coincidence of us being so close to a track in all that vast emptiness almost seemed too much. I didn’t actually think Mo had led us here deliberately, and yet …

The engine got louder and louder. It seemed the truck was about to stop right alongside us. But it didn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to look up, just accepted the blissfully welcome realisation that it wasn’t stopping, that instead its engine noise was fading away.

‘Thank God for that,’ I said under my breath.

‘There’d be more point in thanking this ridge of rock,’ said Amelia, tapping the embankment with a finger. ‘Mo’s right. It does in fact