Free The Dead Path by Stephen M. Irwin Page A

grinning. “What?”
    “Let’s check it out.”
    Nicholas knew what he meant. The bird. A sudden fear galloped through his stomach, but he swallowed it down and grinned back. “Tommy guns?”
    “Of course.”
    They quickly drained their drinks and flew.
      T hey moved like shadows, quiet and slow, hunched to stay below the grass line. The dry fronds chattered around them in the warm air, hissing a constant warning to beware . They gripped the stocks of their submachine guns. Tristram led; there was never a question about that—he was bigger and tougher, and if he had to go down to a Jap bullet, goddammit, he would. Nicholas saw him raise his left hand and they both dropped like stones. Nicholas crawled up.
    “What is it?”
    “Got any grenades?” hissed Tristram.
    Nicholas looked around him. His fingers fell on a lumpy rock peppered with pink quartz. “Only one.”
    “Well, hell,” whispered Tristram, and he looked at Nicholas with narrowed eyes. He cocked his head and grinned crookedly. “You better make it count then.” He pointed.
    Nicholas carefully raised his eyes above the grass line. About four meters ahead was the pillbox (disguised cleverly as a council garbage bin). He lowered again and pulled an imaginary pin from the rock.
    “Cover me,” he said, then counted silently: three, two, one …
    They both leaped to their feet. Tristram aimed his tommy gun (a wooden chair leg with a nail for a trigger and a crosspiece screwed below for a magazine) and fired: “Ach-ach-ach-ach-ach!!,” while Nicholas drew back the rock and hurled it in an overarm cricket bowl. Then they both hit the ground.
    Clang-rattle-rattle-clunk. The sound of rock falling inside the metal drum.
    Tristram grinned. “Good throw!”
    Nicholas beamed. The sun was high and hot, they were dusty and dirty and totally happy. Life was grand. “We got ’em that time,” he agreed.
    “That, my friend, calls for a Lucky,” said Tristram, and he pulled out a packet of white candy cigarettes. He shucked the box at Nicholas, who drew one and put it in the corner of his mouth. Tristram drew another. Nicholas thumbed an invisible Zippo and lit them. They puffed and sucked, stood and walked.
    They were on the gravel path, wood guns slung around their thin shoulders. To their right, Carmichael Road ran like a lazy, bitumen canal. To their left was the crowding mass of the woods. You can just feel them , thought Nicholas. Even with your eyes shut, you’d know they were there. Alive. Shadowed and watching. Waiting to breathe you in and in, to draw you deep inside, warm and moist and dark and smelling of secrets, where strange hands would lift you and take you  …
    “…  around here?” asked Tristram.
    Nicholas shook his head, clearing it. “What?”
    “I beg your pardon,” said Tristram.
    “Fuck off,” said Nicholas.
    Tristram looked at him, shocked for a moment—then he burst out laughing at the bold use of the King of Swear Words. “You fuck off!”
    Nicholas joined in giggling, and Tristram’s laughter redoubled.
    Tears rolled down their faces, an innocent baptismal to mark the last time the F-word would offend either of them. Nicholas stood and wiped his face. He saw a car pull up on the far side of Carmichael Road: an unremarkable olive green sedan.
    “So, guttersnipe,” said Tristram, pointing, “here’s about where I found the dead cat.” The last two words stole the humor from the air. “Where’d you find the bird?”
    Nicholas looked around, getting his bearings, and pointed. They moved up the path twenty paces or so.
    “Here somewhere …” He stopped on the track. “Jeez.”
    It was still there. Tucked into the grass, invisible to a casual glance, the bird’s little body had swollen in the heat, its feathered skin now a round balloon. Legs snipped off clean exposed matchstick sections of bone. The death-tightened claws for horns. The sharply dangerous lines painted in rust-brown blood. There was nothing