When the River Ran Dry

by Robert Davies

  There was no point in looking back as he trotted across the last level field, keeping a steady pace even as his heart raced from fear and exertion; if they saw him and drew a better aim, he would never know it until he fell. After ten minutes, the ground sloped upward, slowing him to a walk, but soon, he crested the first rise. Veering toward a second hill and pushed by fear and terror, Ricky trotted downward into a gulley where a dry creek bed meandered on a ragged, east-west line, bracketed on both sides by anemic willows swaying in the gentle breeze. Except for weeds and an occasional boulder, the path was sandy, level and nicely suited to his purpose.

  Had the Zorich signal betrayed his position to them, he wondered? It was supposed to send out its beacon at irregular intervals, only to make a Walk more exciting for viewers looking on from their vid screens. He looked at the camera harness, imagining the scene in living rooms and bars across Novum as millions were taken with him on his desperate journey. Had water from the pump house manifold damaged them? In an absurd moment, Ricky wondered if the array still functioned; could his misadventure be declared void, merely for broken equipment? There was no way to tell.

  For two hours, Ricky picked his way north, avoiding a sprawling apartment community for unskilled laborers at Tipton Downe they called the ‘Labyrinth,’ staying with his plan of reaching the Canyons before midnight. Another two hours at a steady pace, he figured, would get him safely through the mountains of cast-off rubbish. Once there, it would be nearly impossible for his Zorich device to send out a clean signal through a million tons of scrap metal and garbage, masking his position as he moved ever west toward the Industrial Zone.

  Though it stung with each footfall, the wound on his head had stopped bleeding. The cut was superficial, but Ricky worried infection might become a worse enemy in time without any hope of treatment. It couldn’t be helped, he knew, but the thought troubled him just the same. After an hour, interrupted once or twice by brief stops to rest, Ricky noticed the air easing past his temples was cooler. He stopped and scanned the fields, hoping to catch his first glimpse of the Canyons. Standing toward the south, only to reassure himself the Chasers hadn’t found him again, Ricky paused a while, looking across the eerie, moonlit expanse.

  Kilometers out from the urban core of the Novum metroplex, the landscape had become a haunting wasteland of destroyed buildings—gaunt, steel skeletons rising from the burned-out remains of their own foundations. Inside the more intact examples, squatters and outcast streeties no doubt slumbered in small groups and Ricky could see the flickering light from more than a few campfires as he moved, each reminding him to stay on the periphery to lessen his risk of discovery. But the land was mostly even and his pace became steady when finally, to his left, the jagged tops of refuse piles showed him the way; the Canyons were only minutes distant.

  For fifty years, Novum’s scrap and refuse had been transported to the separators at recycling plants on the approaches to what was once the Industrial Zone’s thriving northern sector. Islands of debris had grown into mountains so that a wandering path between them took on the look of a deep chasm, earning the place its misapplied nickname. When he walked slowly into the complex, Ricky smiled, knowing the Chasers’ scanning instruments would be hard-pressed to find him there.

  For half an hour he crept deliberately and slowly around each mountain of junk and garbage, emerging at last onto a field where a sparse thicket of longleaf pines formed a wandering line toward the west. Ricky made his way easily through the trees for a while until he saw the slim, uniform towers of the electrical distribution grid in the distance. At once, he recognized his place on the bleak landscape, remembering early adventures with Vinnie when the lure of exploration in their youth made accompanying risk irrelevant.

  He smiled and nodded at the transfer station near Bell Town where high-tension lines zig-zagged suddenly south. It would be an hour to the Industrial Zone but beyond it, the transmission complex at Broadridge. Once more on the lowlands, the suffocating heat returned and Ricky quickened his pace, determined to make the old canals long before dawn.

  Although he couldn’t know without a wrist comm, it was nearing 2:30 when the black shapes of the Zone emerged at last through the haze and Ricky stopped to survey his most likely way across the first canal. Several cantilever bridges, some wide enough for a land car, once carried heavy pipelines and conduit bundles over the canal. Others were merely remnants of open steel framework, but he knew better than to try for one without regard; the Chasers had surely seen his movement on their locator maps at the pump house, plotting the blip his Zorich device no doubt made for them. They would surely see what he intended and a simple matter of zeroing in on the small bridges with their gun scopes, waiting for him to make an attempt. There had to be a better way.

  His head ached and the painful wound on his scalp burned, but Ricky waited a while in nerve-racking silence, searching for a safer path to the other side when suddenly, he saw it. Fifty yards distant, from the underside of a narrow bridge built to carry electrical conduits, a single beam lay hidden beneath the span it supported. V-shaped stays rose upward on opposing angles to meet the bridge’s upper surface and if carefully negotiated, the structure would conceal him from view as he made his way across.

  With no way of knowing if Chaser units hid in the darkness, Ricky decided the risk of sitting a while longer was worth the effort; if one of them moved or made an inadvertent sound, he’d know better than to make for the conduit bridge. Settling between the last in a line of trees and thick brush, he knelt slowly, allowing his senses to seek out a telltale sign that might betray the Chasers’ position.

  For fifteen minutes he waited and watched. Sweating in the heat, Ricky listened with every nerve alert and ranging, ready at any moment to slip quietly into the cover of the trees and a renewed search for another way to cross. Nothing moved; if the Chasers were out there, he decided, they couldn’t see him.

  It was hardly surprising, but in the sweltering silence, his thoughts drifted suddenly to Neferure. Did she wait near the reeds that lined the river near Ma’at Palace? Perhaps General Nekhbet would’ve sent word that a malady had taken Apheru; a sickness without treatment. There was no way to tell her; no explanation he could make to explain his terrifying journey across a wilderness on the fringes of a city that could only exist in her distant future. Could she wait, or had Senenmut’s plans to install Thutmose already come to fruition? The desperate loneliness and worry swirled around him, unrelenting and never-ending; if the Chasers ran him down, he thought in grim silence, she would never know. At last, he shook off the daydream. Was he merely waiting out the last seconds of his life before blundering into their nightscopes, he wondered? Could he make it over the canal and find in the deserted buildings of the Zone a safe passage to survival? Either way, he knew staying in the tree line would ultimately be his undoing. He had to move—he had to try.

  Slowly and with great care, Ricky crept forward, looking left and right with the same, barely controlled dread that accompanied him as he traversed the apartment blocks. Out in the open, he felt naked and the sniper’s bullets that nearly ended his life only hours before were evidence enough his caution was warranted. Before, as he hustled on the crowded streets of Novum, he knew his way around; he was the Slider. But here, on the edge of the Zone and forced to an unavoidable dash for freedom, he was only a terrified, lonely target for a Chaser’s rifle.

  Edging ever closer to the borders of the canal, Ricky crossed the sloping ground to the conduit bridge. It was smaller than it seemed from a distance, but the lone support beam beneath was intact. Waiting a last few seconds, he fought back the urge to run, knowing sudden movement could give him away. At last, he reached the ancient, corroded structure and clambered downward, careful not to allow a misstep that would send him to a certain death below on the barren, concrete floor of the dry canal. It had been years since water flowed through its sheer walls and now, only weeds gathered in the sand and sediment left behind. Some of the m
an-made waterways had been maintained and used to shift flat-bottom barges laden with scrap metal to the foundries, but most had been drained and abandoned. A fall would be fatal, Ricky knew, and he moved with deliberate caution until finally, he crouched upon the beam, steadying himself by a cross-hatched structure that formed the bridge’s lower supports.

  A hot, steady breeze ran through the empty canal and Ricky was grateful for any small relief it brought as he wiped the sweat from his brow, now pouring from his skin with a vengeance. His hands stunk of rust as he began the crossing, carefully placing one foot before the other, negotiating the narrow steel beam like a tightrope walker. Bent awkwardly in the low, cramped space, his progress was frustratingly slow, yet he pressed on. Fear had become his constant companion and it pushed him with little concern for the tight quarters.

  On he went, finding at last a rhythm to his work. Nearly heel to toe, his steps quickened as he became accustomed to the process until finally, he drew within reach of the far side of the canal. The bridge supports had been lowered into a two-meter notch formed on each of the canal’s walls, but there was ample room to climb up and onto the surface without difficulty. When he found rough, dry grass on the fringe of the canal’s far side at last, he lay instinctively prone to reduce his profile, crawling painfully on elbows through the brush until he reached the cover of gathered scrub brush. Ricky was panting and near breathless, but still he waited. More sweat poured from his face, now covered in dust and the broken stems or seed pods of dead weeds. After a time, he stood slowly, looking for the closest break in a long, high wall that defined the physical border of the Industrial Zone.

  Years beyond the days when activity was non-stop, the Zone had become a no-man’s land of huge, cavernous structures, abandoned and silent. Others farther to the south still clanked and hummed with life, but most were deserted in favor of automated systems that cranked out the bits and pieces in raw form, destined for finishing shops deep beneath the city. The wall, built to contain the noise of production, had crumbled over time and much of it victim to the devastating quake of ’74. Wide sections lay in ruin, affording a relatively easy transit into the complex and Ricky took his time clambering over a jumble of concrete and twisted steel, making his way slowly in the dim moonlight.

  At last, he stood on level ground; against steep odds, he reached the Zone alive. As he paused to catch his breath, an odd clinking noise to his right followed another and another until he realized the sniper a thousand yards to the east was trying to zero on his position, walking each successive round ever closer until one found the edge of an opening, spraying Ricky’s arm and leg with stinging fragments as the bullet disintegrated.

  Again, there was no report from their guns; each successive round whizzed through the air to impact against the massive wall only meters away. As he knew they would, the Chasers found him once more.

  Ricky rolled into a tangle of woody brush along the wall, keeping low and squirming on his belly until at last, he sprang to his feet and dashed flat-out for the gaping space where the slabs of concrete had fallen years before. The Chasers were close, he knew, but crossing the canal would delay them before they could reach his position where he huddled, panting in adrenaline-fueled terror. After a moment, there were no other sounds of ricocheting bullets, confirming the snipers were indeed on the move. Though he couldn’t hear it directly, there was little doubt the hidden killers had already transmitted his location to other ground units, surely closing as he trotted across a narrow divide between the wall and a vacant metal-stamping shop.

  Ricky stood for a moment, looking at an alien world. He’d been inside the Zone’s northern compounds only once, but his memories looked nothing like the scene that lay silent and menacing in the darkness before him. Eerie shadows made worse his apprehension, but he knew his best chance could be found within the hulking structure if he hoped to elude the Chasers. Time had once again become his enemy and he slipped quickly through a maze of old presses and shaping machines, grateful for their heavy, iron construction; no bullet would penetrate so sturdy an object.

  Small mountains of a raw material he couldn’t identify piled high like dark pyramids beneath huge conveyors, long silent in the years since the Zone became an afterthought when the surface industries finally died. Weeds grew from every corner and tangles of bent, rusting metal that had once been important tools inside the factories now lay in haphazard groups across the whole of the complex; forgotten and irrelevant like the Zone itself.

  So far to the north, Ricky knew the buildings were dormant. With few lights to guide his path, he decided to move through anyway, hoping to use the cover of an empty production line’s massive building to frustrate the Chasers’ instruments. But as he cleared the wall, aiming for a vast doorway built to admit enormous trucks and material movers, he saw it. In a gap beyond two adjacent buildings, a soaring communications tower at the Broadridge transmission complex reached into the sky like an enormous, solitary spire, rising above the horizon. There, he thought, and only an hour distant, his salvation bathed in the glow of its winking red lights warning air traffic of the tower’s position. Ricky smiled and nodded; the final stage was about to begin.

  An imposing building three stories tall, the vacant assembly house had been abandoned for years, yet the skeletons of its glory days—massive forges and bending jigs—remained as testament to a bygone age, idle perhaps since a time before the Fall. A hive of thunderous activity no more, the huge structure lay silent and useless. Moonlight streamed through openings where its high walls met a slanted, angular roof, long void of the glass that once made spacious skylights. But the glow from above showed him a course down the length of the giant building and he set off at once for the far end.

  The smooth concrete floor was a welcome relief to the tangled weeds and bushes he fought through since he began the Walk; here, movement would be quick and quiet. After minutes picking his way along the cast-off equipment and stacks of empty pallets, Ricky had only begun his transit before a sound stopped him in his tracks. From the darkness ahead and to his left, a yowling cry sent chills down his spine; the chase units, alerted by following sniper teams, had closed on the old compound. Like serfs ordered to disturb with whistling whips and sticks hiding game before a hunter and flush them into the open on fear alone, they went on with terrifying, mocking screams that echoed between the building’s high walls. It was clear they used the Zorich device’s intermittent beeps to generalize his position at last, Ricky thought, but perhaps the tiny machine’s effectiveness fell off as a precise locator.

  Ricky stood motionless for seconds, straining in the dark to see movement inside the empty, cavernous building, yet there was nothing. He looked at once to the camera harness, knowing millions must surely be on the edges of their seats in anticipation of the kill. He had to do something to interrupt the clean signal and mask his escape, but how? If he took the bait and reversed course to avoid the chilling screams reaching out from the darkness, he would surely blunder into a trap. Instead, Ricky veered right, aiming for a narrow pedestrian entryway; if he could make it outside unseen, the massive walls of the structure might blind the Zorich signal and give him a chance to get away. Were they cheering for him in the living rooms and noisy clubs across Novum, he wondered, or would their interest only be satisfied when his head exploded from the impact of a sniper’s bullet? Was Litzi watching in horror from Ganny’s vid screen, deep beneath the surface?

  In the fading moonlight, Ricky turned left quickly and started for the far end of the giant building, hoping desperately the Chasers lost contact. As he ran through the weeds that grew tall around the old building, something caught his eye. Far above, a flash through the spaces where skylights once lay told him what he already knew; the Chasers had indeed lost the signal, desperate enough to give away their own position. Careless for the effect it would make, they played beams of their search lamps across the abandoned machinery, hoping to reacquire their target visually.

  He
knew his opportunity would be brief; once slowed by the sudden signal loss, the Chasers would realize and dash from the building. He had to reach the far end before they understood their mistake, and then a streak across the compound to an old warehouse might give him enough cover to frustrate the signal again until he was in the clear. Dorval Road was less than a kilometer ahead, and a steady jog for twenty minutes would bring him at last within reach of the transmission complex and freedom.

  Their shrieks had stopped, but before him, more discarded scrap metal frustrated his pace as he neared the corner of the structure. A quick glance behind showed no movement and he pressed on, slashing nimbly left and right through abandoned machines discarded long before to rust away in the open air. As he slipped deftly through a tangle of junk, another fervent look behind brought a sudden sensation of excitement he may yet elude them. But as he drew closer to the end of the building, another flash of light from around the corner stopped him at once. There, only meters beyond, a Chaser’s helmet lamp panned slowly across the gravel surface of the compound. Without a thought, Ricky moved against the building’s towering wall, nearly hugging it as he eased slowly forward, seized by the sudden rush of adrenaline and a lifetime of fear that would no longer be ignored.

  Ricky peered with one eye cautiously around the building to find a single Chaser, seemingly distracted by the brightly lit instrumentation fixed to a sleeve of his tactical uniform. Ricky waited and watched with breathless, terrified anticipation, expecting at any minute to see the Chaser’s companions following close behind, but there were none; his tormentor was alone—and isolated.