THE WRECK WAS close to inaccessible for the number of roos encircling it. At first Manolis tried to shoo them away, but he was then forced to draw his weapon, raise it above his head and fire into the air like some traffic cop during a riot. The gun blew a hole in the sky, the shot resounding for several seconds. Startled, the animals bounded in every direction at once, some of them slamming into each other before finding an eventual path to freedom.

His gun still drawn, Manolis stepped cautiously towards the car with a great sense of unease. Sweat rained from his forehead; his fingers went numb. Not watching his footsteps and dragging his right foot, he rolled his left ankle on the uneven ground. Wincing, cursing, he staggered on. From the rear, the vehicle looked undamaged. The impact appeared to be front on, something as yet unknown, something beyond wildlife, which had left the occupants slumped in their seats. Or could it have been the mother of all roos? Manolis recalled Kerr’s story about the local man kicked to death after a roo smashed through his windscreen and panicked in the unfamiliar, claustrophobic space.

Anticipating the passenger to be more likely armed than the driver, he approached the car’s left side, finger on the trigger, watching for movement. Unperturbed by gunfire, outback crows circled overhead, raucous at full volume.

It was Vera in the passenger seat, her short, stocky frame only barely visible above the window line. She was at a sad, awkward angle, her head against the door, a punched hole in the windscreen the width of her broad, flat forehead. Coming closer, Manolis felt vomit rise in his throat. Blood was flowing profusely from a ragged, gaping wound that revealed her chalky-white skull and fleshy-pink brain. Her eyelids were closed. A grist of blowflies had already gathered, buzzing in and out of her open wound.

To her right, slouched across a bent steering wheel, was her husband of forty years. He was also unmoving, broken fragments of glass littering the dashboard onto which his arms now lay like two lumps of cut meat. The slivers caught the light, sparkled like diamonds. Manolis circled the front of the car watchfully, paying careful attention to the position of Rex’s hands, cut and bleeding.

Facing the crumpled bonnet and concertinaed engine, hissing, leaking, Manolis finally saw what had stopped the station wagon’s forward momentum: a boulder lying in wait amid a clump of long, concealing grass. Jagged and irregular in shape, it had likely been in that spot for thousands of years, being continually and microscopically sculpted by scouring hot winds and rare drops of rain. The car had impacted head on, barely making a dent in the rock’s surface but sending its occupants hurtling into the windscreen at deadly speed.

Christ, thought Manolis. They got away. I’ve failed.