She swims towards the mainland, keeping far away from the shoal so the current wont pull her onto the rocks. She keeps her arms around the cooler and kicks her feet, and when shes tired she stops and floats and keeps an eye on the mainland to see which way the current is taking her. Theres a breeze that sweeps over the surface of the water, and it makes goosebumps on her wet skin, but its still better than trying to make the swim at midday when the sun is directly overhead and parching you up like a lizard.

She has no way to tell time, shes no fast swimmer and it feels like an hour before she reaches the mainland and pulls the cooler up onto the beach. She sits on a rock wringing the saltwater out of her hair and drying her skin in the morning breeze.

The beach is deserted. She opens the cooler and takes out a miniature spyglass and climbs a set of broken concrete steps to a gravel turnout overlooking the shore to get the lay of the land. There are two cars parked down the road and some shacks in the distance. Against the horizon she can see a few slugs. They havent caught her scent, and theyre limping around in their random jerky way. She keeps her head low and focuses the spyglass again on the two cars. One of them is a jeep, and the other is a squat red car with two doors. All the wheels seem intact from what she can tell.

Back down on the beach, she combs out her hair with her fingers and from under the screen of her hair she can see a figure on the shore in the distance. She doesnt need the spyglass she can tell by the way it lumbers. Slug. She finishes tugging the knots out and ties it up into a ponytail.

Then she takes her clothes from the cooler and dresses.

The slug has spotted her and is headed in her direction, but its feet keep getting tripped up in the sand.

She pulls out the spyglass and looks through it.

The dead woman is dressed in a nurses uniform. Her top is medical green, but her bottoms are brightly coloured, like pyjama pants. Temple cant tell what the pattern is, but it looks like it could be lollipops.

She closes the spyglass and stows it in her pocket. Then she goes back to the cooler, takes out the pistol, checking the rounds to make sure they havent got wet, and puts on the sheathed gurkha knife, which hangs from her belt and straps it to her thigh with two leather ties.

By the time shes finished, the nurse is twenty yards away, her hands reaching out before her. Instinctual desire. Hunger, thirst, lust, all the vestigial drives knotted up in one churning, ambling stomach.