Page 23 of Fearless
“Feel better?” Noah asked, as she came staggering out of bed. For the first time in a long time, she ate an entire hamburger in one sitting. She even ate the chips that came with it. The only thing she didn’t eat was the pregnancy test he set on the table by her plate.
“I’m not pregnant.” She pushed the kit away from her and refused to touch it again. So there it sat, for several days like a silent accusation during each new bout of nausea, all of which struck in the afternoon, no matter what she did, only to magically end in the evening, leaving her ribs sore from heaving and her belly cramping with hunger… right up until Australia tried to kill her for the fourth time.
It happened at the end of her first week. It was hot for late fall, or so Noah mentioned over breakfast. But to Kitty, it had been hot pretty much every day since she’d arrived. Not that Kitty felt much discomfort in the house. Noah’s air-conditioning was fantastic. The unnerving part came when she cooked and cleaned her way through both the kitchen and the day to accompanying scuttles of clawed feet on the porch outside. The koalas were coming down out of the trees to drink from the tub set out for them on the north side. It was such an unsettling sound, but so long as she didn’t look out the windows, she could pretend she was hearing nothing more threatening than farm dogs or barn cats moving about. If only she’d stuck to that—that non-window-peeping resolve—then she never would have been tempted to go outside.
Except she did look. Especially when the fighting broke out. She’d never heard such squalling in her life—high-pitched baby-ish shrieks punctuated by deep, baritone belching, following by a lot of clattering and thumping as two or more beasts wrestled each other around the watering trough. It took a lot of neck craning to even catch a glimpse when they were banging into the side of the house, but the wrestling matches tended to end only when one finally knocked the other off the porch and into compliance. Victory was announced via the winner’s donkey-like burping, while the loser sat in a heap in the dust, crying like a thoroughly bitten human child. It was horrible and disconcerting and, as it turned out, all for naught, because the first time she noticed a winning koala dip its muzzle into the watering trough, she realized there was no water in it. The trough was bone dry.
Filling that trough was Noah’s job and she knew for a fact that he’d already done it that day. She’d seen him on his way around the house while she was making the coffee. But then, it was hot. The koalas must have drunk it all already, which she supposed wasn’t entirely unbelievable. The trough was more of a metal pan. Not huge, only big enough to bathe a pug—or a koala—but not deep enough to drown one. Had Noah been up at the house, Kitty had no doubt he would have gone out and promptly filled the pan again. But he wasn’t. Like the last two days before, he’d gone down to the barn to do whatever it was that occupied him there, leaving Kitty alone in the cool comfort of the house. Cleaning, and listening to the awful burping of winning koalas, and the cries of losers.
Kitty tried to ignore them, but within ten minutes, another grey beast with a beaked face crawled up onto the porch and the braying, shrieking, belching, baby-cry squalling escalated into wrestling all over again.
Hiding in the house, Kitty listened with growing guilt. She knew what it was like to be thirsty. Being deprived of food and water was part of the punishment every time Ethen locked her in the box beneath his bed. He hadn’t let her out even to go to the bathroom, preferring instead to punish her for the inevitable mess she’d had no choice but to make and then lie in. As horrible as that had been, the thirst had been worse. It had been consuming. By the end, she’d been so desperate and so barren of any moisture in her mouth, nose and throat that her lips had split open and it hurt to breathe.
Oh yes, she knew exactly what those koalas were going through. If she hadn’t, she never would have gone outside.
Stepping out into the sunlit heat of the Australian outdoors was easily one of the most terrifying things she’d yet done in her life. It didn’t quite rank as high as the night she’d runaway, but it did deserve an honorable mention.
The white-washed porch wrapped all the way around the house, giving her options on how best to attempt this. She crept to her right as far as the corner, but that was where the fighting marsupials were, wrestling and belching at one another, both on and off the porch, up on the railing and out in the yard.
To her left, around the back corner and all down the west side of the house, things were much calmer until she reached the far north corner. Peeking around that, she saw her end destination: the watering trough. The problem was, there were koalas all over the place. Mostly in the trees, and some sitting in the yard. One very small one was sitting not three feet from the empty trough, idly scratching its leg. Its back was to her, its attention focused on a bigger male now belching his victory over the scuffle that had ended. If she could get to the faucet, she could turn the water on now while their attentions were mostly diverted and then she could run before she got bit, burped at, or attacked.
Kitty’s heart was in her throat. Her legs were shaking, but she eased around the corner, sneaking as quiet as she could until she was close enough to bend down, stretch out her arm and tickle at the faucet handle with her fingertips. The little koala didn’t notice her. The big one, however, did. Its head turned, the beady black eyes locking on her. It might have been her imagination, but she could have sworn the ferocity of his donkey-braying belches intensified as he crawled towards her.
Snagging the faucet, Kitty scrambled to turn it, but it was stuck. Shit! She stretched harder, grabbing it with her whole hand and twisting with all her panic and strength. A gush of water erupted into the dry metal pan, startling the little koala, who let out a baby-cry squeal and fell over. But that gush of water was like a dinner bell to a bunch of starving inmates, and to Kitty’s eye these weren’t cute, cuddly koala bears crawling straight at her from literally every direction. They were just plain mean.
She would have run, but she never got the chance. As she tried to make her escape, the most straggly, beat-up, grey and brown animal with a vaguely koala-ish face crawled up onto the porch and put itself directly in her escape path.
It came right at her at a pace reserved for sloths and snails, something that should in no way have been half as terrifying as it was. But it did it with beady-eyed malice and claws that scraped the weathered floorboards in ways that sent ice shocks stabbing up her spine. It screamed—that high-pitch baby-cry. So did she, for that matter, and it promptly charged straight past her to the water spewing from the faucet, as if Kitty weren’t even there.
She barely escaped with her life, but she did escape. Racing back around the house, she flung herself through the front door and slammed it shut behind her. Collapsing against it, she sagged all the way to the floor, holding her panicking heart in her chest with both hands and fighting to catch her breath without bursting into tears.
It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds later, but the door suddenly bumped her back.
“Kitty?”
She crawled far enough out of the way to let Noah into his own house. She hadn’t noticed the time, but he had to have been coming up from the barn while she’d been running for her life, screaming like a crazy woman. Judging by his look of concern, he’d seen her just fine.
“Are you all right?” He came in, looking her over while she, panting and gasping and still battling back tears, dragged herself up off her hands and knees. She stood before him on badly shaking legs. “What happened?”
She couldn’t even talk. She pointed back through the house toward the north, where the whisper of running water said everything it needed to about what she’d been doing. As far as she was concerned, it could run forever. She wasn’t going back out there. Not ever.
Noah tipped his hat to listen, then looked at her again. Turning, he walked back out the front door. The steady tromp of his footsteps followed the veranda around to the back of the house. The friendly timbre of his voice greeted the thirsty koalas once he got there, and then the telltale squeak of the turning faucet stopped the running water.
Knees wobbling, Kitty dropped back down to the floor. On all fours, she pushed between two chairs to hide under the dining table. Her head on her hands, she stared at a knot in the floorboards, absolutely hating herself for the coward she had become. Not that she’d ever stared with fearless bravado into the straggly face of a malicious koala before, but really… had the situation warranted being this afraid?
Absolutely, her gut instinct cried.
She felt awful, and that only got worse as Noah’s heavy footsteps made the journey back around the house to the front door. When he came inside, she felt the even heavier weight of his presence. The table cut her view of him from the thighs up, but nothing obstructed her sight of his lower legs taking two steps into the house, then stopping. She cowered when his feet turned toward the dining room. Giving his pants a tug, he hunkered down so he could look right at her. Flinching, Kitty avoided his stare. She buried her face in backs of her hands instead and wished she were somewhere—anywhere else in the world.
“All right,” Noah said, in almost the exact same tone he’d used with the koalas. He came to the table, pulled out both chairs so she couldn’t hide behind them anymore, and sat down in one facing her.
Kitty kept her face buried and dared not look at him.
“Are you all right?” he asked again, a peculiar note underlying his tone, suggesting he might not be as calm as he sounded.
Cringing, she nodded.
“Did you get bit?” Noah asked.
