he gunfire didn’t make Ben panic, though it did challenge his plan of clearing Taronga and leaving the rival gangs to fight it out on the deserted hillside. Now, with his present escape route blocked, he was faced with the task of leading the herd across the park to one of the other cut sections of fence. He was not sure he could do that successfully, not with the constant noise of shooting in the background. And if the animals scattered, there was no knowing how long it would take to Call them together. Also, there was the delay involved, with Raja and the other predators still trapped in the cages. What would happen to them if Molly or Chas gained the upper hand and began to investigate? On finding the park almost empty, they might out of sheer malice decide to . . .

He cut short such thoughts, preferring not to consider them unless he had to; already planning the best route across the hillside. But he had reckoned without the will of the animals themselves.

The first shot had thrown them into a state of alarm, subsequent reports only increasing their terror. In the few seconds Ben needed to plan his next move, they had already passed beyond his control. Without the confining structure of a cage to protect them, threatened as much by the surrounding space as by the noise, they began crowding against each other, deaf to Ben’s entreaties. In vain he Called to them, pushing at the bodies pressing in upon him, his hands and then his fists beating at the tough furry hides. But his efforts had the reverse of the effect he intended. One huge, shaggy-coated bison, startled by the unexpected touch of his hand, whirled and lunged, the blunt forehead sending him crashing into the ivy-covered mesh. A young steer lurched into the space he had just occupied; its place in turn being taken by other animals; that initial movement creating a wave-like effect, the whole herd crowding in towards the fence.

Ben, pinned against the ivy-covered mesh, could hardly breathe, the weight of heavy bodies placing almost unbearable pressure on his stomach and chest. Helpless, unable even to cry out in protest, he had a fleeting vision of being crushed to death. But all at once there was a tearing noise as the thick strands of ivy gave way before the combined onslaught, and Ben was pitched backwards into open space, the herd surging through the gap after him. Shadowy legs and bodies filled his vision, blotting out the starlit sky. Then, eyes tightly closed, he rolled over and curled himself into a ball, his head buried in his arms as the herd swept over him.

They seemed to take an unbearable time to pass, the drum of their hoofbeats becoming confused in his mind with the distant gunshots, so that he remained curled up and still long after they had gone. When at last he sat up there was no sign of them, the whole herd having bolted into the cover of the National Park bordering that side of Taronga.

Cut and bruised, his body aching from the pummelling it had just taken, he rose shakily to his feet. He barely knew where he was – the fence, the outline of the bushes, the glimmer of stars, all strangely blurred. In the background he could hear shooting, he even understood vaguely what it signified, but it failed to convey any sense of urgency to him. There was another sound too, low and booming, which he had difficulty in placing. Only as his head slowly cleared did he recognise it: the roar of the cats, amplified by the tunnel.

Staggering slightly, he ran to the building housing their cages. The cats, incensed by the nearby conflict, were in a frenzy of activity, leaping frantically around their cages, some of them crashing wildly into the bars. Even in his dazed condition he realised that if he let them leave the building ahead of him, he would lose them. Pulling the double doors closed, he ran the length of the tunnel and slid Raja’s door up first – holding the animals at bay as he worked his way back towards the entrance. With the tunnel closed off, they made no attempt to rush him. Only towards the end was he in real danger, a line of snarling cats edging forward as he struggled to reopen the heavy doors. Had Raja chosen to challenge him at that instant, he would have had little chance; but the tiger, still as fascinated and confused by Ben as he had been all week, held back; and his restraint had a dampening effect on the others.

Much the same happened when Ben drew them outside. Aroused by the sputter of gunfire, they struggled to break free, eager to join the conflict where, as experience had taught them, there would be food in plenty. But again Raja showed little readiness to oppose Ben. With Ranee beside him and the others following close behind, he allowed himself to be led across the hillside. Their progress was slow until they scented the herd; then it was all Ben could do to hold them back. One after another, they overtook him, bounding through the screen of bushes and out into the darkness beyond the fence.

Only Raja stopped at the opening. Like the others, he was attracted by the scent of game; and more than that, by the salt-laden breeze which conveyed to him a tangible sense of that freedom he yearned for. He had only to step beyond the wire and his long confinement would be over – the land, the long curving line of the shore, his to roam at will. Yet still he lingered there at the edge of Taronga, as if loath to leave it; his mind, previously so single in its purpose, now divided against itself; his eyes, dark with bewilderment, turned towards the enigmatic figure of Ben.

Ben was tempted to Call him back, to draw him just once more, in the hope that the last barrier separating them would come crashing down and he would perceive in those amber eyes what he had taken so much for granted in the eyes of the dog. It was a vain hope, as he soon acknowledged – such dreams belonging to the past, not to the strident urgency of the present. And instead of luring the tiger, he Called softly, ‘Go . . .go,’ impelling him out into the vastness of the night.

That selfless action only increased Raja’s bewilderment, clashing as it did with his former image of Ben as the hated jailer. Letting out a roar of pain and anger, he swatted ferociously at the empty air, venting his resentment not of Ben, but of a situation he could no longer comprehend, his simple, vigorous intelligence thwarted beyond endurance.

‘For God’s sake get out of here!’ Ben yelled, equally pained at seeing him so troubled.

He scrabbled blindly in the shadows, picking up sticks and tufts of grass and hurling them at the broad, striped face which had haunted him throughout his months in Taronga. And slowly Raja backed away, edging reluctantly out through the opening. There, once again, he paused and looked towards Ben, sidling off into the bush only when Ranee growled to him from the darkness.

With Raja gone, Taronga felt peculiarly empty, a meaningless stretch of hillside, the continued noise of gunfire making it seem more desolate. Ben would have liked to walk out through the opening just as Raja had done, and leave it for ever; but there was still Ellie to be considered, as well as the final, most distasteful part of his plan.

It was the closing episode which he dreaded most of all and had been trying hard until now not to think about. Reluctantly, he faced up to the necessity of the moment. Whether he liked it or not, the time had come for him to betray the people in the entrance building, much as Ellie would already be betraying those left in the house – his task, and hers, to lure the rest of Molly’s supporters to the desperate and probably fatal struggle taking place around the restaurant. He flinched away from the idea, yet knew that if the animals were to make good their escape, without fear of recapture, then it had to be carried through; everything Taronga now stood for smashed completely. The final betrayal – that was how he thought of it, this last part of his plan: a betrayal designed to wipe out all previous treacheries in a last convulsive re-creation of Last Days.

His attention was attracted by a faint glow just above the line of the trees. Firelight! The restaurant already burning! Once again he had very little time in which to act. Putting his doubts forcibly aside, he began running uphill, choosing a path that would take him around the fighting and up towards the entrance building. But the further he went, the more he was racked by misgivings. He could see the blaze of the restaurant clearly now, over to his right: one whole wing burning fiercely; armed figures silhouetted against the leaping flames; some of them still firing; others, obviously wounded, staggering away.

Ben slithered to a stop, his mind grappling with his own earlier resolve. How could he lead people towards that inferno? Cut short their lives in cold blood? It was too deliberate, too calculating. Far from wiping out past acts of betrayal, it would merely add to them.

‘No!’ he groaned aloud, knowing that he could not go through with it, whatever the risk to the animals. To set the safety of so many animals against the lives of so many human beings was an impossibility. An absurd equation that could never be solved, by him or anyone.

Almost guiltily, he turned back – and was startled by someone flitting silently across his path. It was Ellie, combing the hillside in search of him.

‘Ben?’ she called hesitantly.

She came slowly towards him, clearly shocked by his appearance: his shirt ripped to shreds, his arms and body cut and bruised from where the herd had stampeded over him.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

‘I can’t go through with it, Ellie,’ he broke out, ignoring her show of concern. ‘I know we agreed – that we’d finish them off, the way they’d finish us given the chance. But I’m not leading them into that! I don’t care what . . .’

She placed her fingers gently on his mouth, silencing him. ‘You don’t have to,’ she said, her voice alone telling him plainly that she had reached the same conclusion. ‘When I saw what it was like here, I tried to turn them back – the ones from the house – but they wouldn’t listen. And a few minutes ago I saw the rest, from up in the entrance building, creeping down towards the fire.’

‘Shouldn’t we try and warn them?’ he asked half-heartedly.

‘It’s too late. And anyway it wouldn’t do any good. This is what they want. Last Days. They’d have come to this whether we’d been here or not.’

The flames were leaping towards the sky now, figures rushing out through burning doorways, the explosive crackle of gunfire rising to a crescendo.

With his weirdly divided face brilliantly lit by the fire, Ben turned desperately towards her. ‘Couldn’t we have stopped it?’ he asked in agonised tones. ‘Couldn’t we . . .?’

‘No,’ she cut in. And then more loudly, her voice shrill with defiance, ‘No! They didn’t leave us any other choice! They never have done! Never, since the first ships sailed into that harbour down there. Just this once, though, we’ve answered them. We’ve rescued something from the mess they left us. Well haven’t we?’

He looked towards the fire – the red and yellow flames etched against the black sky reminding him of Raja: the long powerful body, beautifully striped, poised in the jagged opening in the fence, with not just the chaotic remains of Sydney, but the whole of Australia beyond.

‘Yes, we’ve rescued something,’ he assented. And as a sudden afterthought: ‘But we haven’t finished yet. There are still the rhinos.’

Ellie turned resolutely away from the battle which had now reached a fever pitch, curses and yells accompanying the regular stutter of shots, the whole scene like a vision of hell, with the warring figures prancing grotesquely before the roaring flames.

‘Everything’s gone from my side,’ she answered. ‘The rhinos are the last. I’ll come and help.’

Together, as on the night Ben had entered Taronga, they ran rapidly along the winding paths, making for the near, lower corner where the rhinos were housed. The animals were outside in the concrete courtyard when they arrived – a big male, a female, and a young calf of four or five months – all of them trotting restlessly to and fro, disturbed by the distant noise. Unlatching the metal gate, Ellie swung it open, while Ben Called coaxingly to the nervous animals. They emerged with a kind of cautious belligerence, their tails stiff and straight behind them, their heads held high, scenting the night air, small piggy eyes peering into the darkness.

‘Come,’ Ben signalled gently, and led the way back up the hill, Ellie jogging along beside him.

By then, the last desperate struggle around the restaurant had nearly reached its bloody conclusion. Only a few random shots broke the silence, and in the more peaceful atmosphere the rhinos were easy to handle. But although the fight was almost over, the restaurant was still blazing fiercely, and as they neared the hole in the fence the breeze carried the smell of burning down towards them. The effect on the rhinos was to make them veer away, letting out sharp coughing grunts of protest.

‘Maybe we should take them to the other side of the park,’ Ellie suggested.

‘It’s all right,’ Ben said. ‘I think I can hold them. And we’re nearly there.’

Using all his skill, he lured them up the last stretch of hillside. A thick clump of bushes was all that separated them from the gaping hole in the fence. With the male in the lead, they pushed into the bushes and stopped, the glare from the fire plain enough even to their poor vision.

‘Sneak round behind them,’ Ben murmured. ‘Try and drive them forward. Once they see the hole, they’ll make a run for it.’

She crept away, leaving Ben out in the open, his back to the fence, the gaping hole to his right – the rhinos’ path to freedom totally unobstructed.

‘Come,’ he repeated, and was relieved to see the bushes shake violently, the great pointed horn on the male rhino’s snout appearing briefly above the dense foliage.

With just a little more effort he was sure he could make them emerge: his mind so intent on the task that he didn’t hear the approaching footsteps. Not at first. Only when they stopped, replaced by laboured breathing, did he spin around. Molly was standing a few paces away, an automatic rifle gripped in both hands. Her hair and clothes had been singed by the flames, her face smudged with soot, a dark splotch of blood staining her side. She was looking not at Ben, but at the damaged fence, a bitter expression on her face. She staggered to the opening and turned towards him.

‘You little bastard!’ she said, spitting the words out. ‘So this is what it was all about!’

The harsh lines on her face twisted into a snarling grimace as she slowly raised the gun. Before she could pull the trigger there was a frantic rustling in the bushes near by, Distracted, she whirled around, searching the darkness; and Ben, making the most of the opportunity, began sidling away, his foot striking something hard and cold in the tangle of grass. He knew what it was without looking, his hands groping downwards as the bushes were again shaken, the long prehistoric head of the male rhino thrusting through the thick veil of leaves. Ben’s fingers closed around the handles of the bolt-cutters at exactly the instant that Molly snapped the rifle up to her shoulder. Even from his position, crouched slightly to one side, he could tell that she was aiming directly at the broad, vulnerable space beneath the thrusting head; and swinging his whole body forward with the effort, he flung the heavy bolt-cutters straight at her. They failed to hit their mark, flying harmlessly past her shoulder, but they startled her enough to make the barrel of the rifle ride up, the burst of automatic fire tearing through the sparse foliage above the rhino’s head.

It was the one and only chance she had. There was an explosive, coughing grunt and the rhino came crashing stiff-legged through the screen of bushes. Whether he was intent upon charging Molly was never clear. Possibly his near-sighted vision picked up Molly and the hole in the fence at the same time, the two objects blurring into one; because he made straight for the opening, never for a second slackening his pace; his huge head jerking down and then up, the vicious horn catching Molly in the side and tossing her effortlessly into the air, her arms and legs flailing like the boneless limbs of a child’s soft toy.

She didn’t simply fall. Crashing against the upper, barbed-wire section of the fence, she hung there for several seconds, her clothing tangled in the knotted barbs. Then, with painful slowness, she toppled forward and down, her body bouncing off the broad back of the female rhino who was hurrying in pursuit of her mate, the calf cowering against her side. When at last Molly hit the ground, she lay very still, one arm twisted beneath her, the other stretched out, two fingers still clinging to the trigger guard of the rifle, as though even in the act of dying she could not relinquish her hold upon the destructive symbol by which she had lived.

Ben, too shocked to move, remained crouching in the grass as Ellie came running around the bushes.

‘What’s going . . .?’ she began, and stopped as she saw Molly lying before her. Kneeling down, she reached out and delicately touched the scorched, grimy cheek – Molly’s eyes flickering open and closed, her mouth forming words Ellie could not make out. ‘She’s alive,’ she said to Ben. ‘She’s trying to tell us something.’

Ellie bent closer, and this time the words, a mere breath of sound, just reached her: ‘Last Days . . .’

Molly took a shuddering breath, as if intending to add something more. But like so many of her own victims, ambushed within the confines of Taronga, she was denied the opportunity either to plead or to explain. There was a further sound of footsteps, heavier, more halting, and Chas limped into the clearing. He had been wounded in the leg, and as with Molly his clothes and skin were singed and blackened. At some stage in the fight he must have lost his rifle or run out of ammunition, because he was armed only with a long-bladed knife.

‘Where is she?’ he shouted hoarsely. His voice, muffled by the balaclava, was demented with rage.

Ellie leaped back defensively, but he barely noticed her. He was concerned only with the figure lying stretched out in the grass, recognising it as the body of the woman who had thwarted him for so long, finally snatching victory from him on the night of his hoped-for triumph. As he gazed angrily at her, her cold green eyes again flickered open, staring back at him through the gloom, briefly hardening into focus.

‘You!’ he burst out, tightening his grip on the knife. ‘You! You’re going to pay . . .pay . . .!’

He lunged forward, his wounded leg almost buckling beneath him, making him lurch unsteadily to one side, so that to an onlooker he could just as easily have been running at the two young people as at Molly. It was that tiny mischance which cost him his life. For with a grating roar, Raja, until then hiding in the bush bordering the fence, held to this hated place by his own baffling uncertainty, charged back through the opening and struck.

‘No, Raja!’ Ben yelled.

His familiar voice, ringing out so unexpectedly, was just sufficient to make the tiger hesitate. The heavy paw, faltering in mid-swing, fanned past its intended target, the raking claws snagging in the greasy wool of the balaclava and tearing it away.

Mesmerised with terror, caught up in a nightmare he had already lived through once before, Chas stood stock still, eyes wide and staring, waiting for the inevitable blow to fall. Except that there never was another blow, Raja rearing back at the sudden appearance of this horribly deformed face. It was the second such bewildering transformation he had witnessed within Taronga: his image of humanity wavering, undergoing a strange process of change that eluded his burning hatred; leaving him free at last, as free as Ben and Ellie could have desired.

Snarling and spitting, he edged backwards, his paws brushing past Molly’s shoulder, briefly recalling her from the slow drift into unconsciousness. Her eyes flickered open yet again, in time to see the terrifying head passing above her. Her reaction was instantaneous, the instincts of a lifetime crowding through the fog of pain. With what little strength she still retained, her outflung arm heaved the rifle upwards, her fingers tightening on the trigger. There was a stutter of fire, the rifle, with nothing to brace it against the recoil, swinging through a shallow arc that narrowly excluded Raja’s head, centring on the thick-set body of Chas.

With a whirl of movement, Raja was gone: leaping back through the gap in the fence even before Molly’s now lifeless fingers relaxed their convulsive grip on the rifle. In the ensuing stillness Chas’s body sank down beside that of his enemy, he and Molly as close to each other in death as they had truly been in life. Only Ellie and Ben remained, clinging to one another in the silvery starlight, surrounded by the silent, empty spaces of  Taronga – the last blush of the dying fire just showing in the sky above the trees.