Better Angels

by Howard V. Hendrix

  The three of them ran from window to window until it was clear that all Paul had promised was inside—tools, paddles, life vests, deflated rafts.

  “I don’t see an air compressor in there,” Kal said.

  “Got to be one,” Paul said, hoping assertion would make it so.

  “What about getting inside?” Al said. “We could break out these windows, but I don’t think they’re big enough to pull one of those rafts through, deflated or not—much less an air compressor of any size.”

  “We’ll have to try the front door, then,” Paul said. “We’re in the middle of nowhere here, but they probably at least locked the building, during the off season at least.”

  They found that the roll-up door in front was secured by a padlock and hasp.

  “I knew there had to be some good reason why I dragged this heavy-ass pry bar along,” Paul said as he set about prying the hasp and lock free of the doorframe.

  In a moment the door was rolling up before them. Almost immediately, Kal spotted the compressed air unit and hauled it out. It was a solar powered device, so Paul and Al had to rummage around through storage until they found a solar charger and batteries.

  “I’ll bet this can be hooked up to the panels on the roof,” Al said, before disappearing from the interior of the building. Paul and Kal continued to haul paddles, life vests, and battered Farmer John wet suits out the door and around to the far side of the building. After that they dragged a deflated raft out as well.

  “Pump’s hooked up,” Al said as he helped them drag the raft some last few yards. “Start it up anytime.”

  Paul and Kal did so. The pump whirred into life and they began to inflate the big, blue and red six-person raft. Al went into the shed to find a cold chisel and mallet. Paul and Kal put the wetsuits on under their orange coveralls, which concealed the suits nicely. The raft was at a little more than half pressure by the time Al returned

  “This should work,” Al said, holding up the mallet and chisel. “The electronic hand and foot leashes they have us locked into are cheap mass production models. Dumb fail-safe circuitry. Just punch holes in the right spots on them and stick them in the water. That should short them out and open them up.”

  “What about the alarm?” Paul asked. He remembered that Al Brewster, before becoming a Camp penitent, had been an information tech or electrical engineer of some sort. Brewster and Kal had hit it off because in both their cases the deeper cause of their arrests had been conspiracy theorizing about how the infosphere crash had been fabricated in order to bring the theocrats to power. Paul gathered that Al had come to that conclusion from a different angle—looking at what had happened in the infosphere itself rather than up in the stratosphere or troposphere or wherever it was EMP propagated—but Al’s and Kal’s theories were close enough to support each other, and that was apparently all that mattered.

  “The alarm will sound and the locater will continue to function,” Al said, thoughtfully. “Unavoidable, I’m afraid. but if the locater is attached to a bracelet sitting on shore here while we’re zipping off downriver, what’s the difference?”

  As if in unexpected sympathetic answer, their electronic hand and foot leashes began to ring and vibrate.

  “We’re being buzzed,” Kal said. “Our fifteen minutes must be up. What now?”

  “We stow all the life-vests and paddles here with the raft,” he said, shutting off the pump, “then we roll the front door down into place and haul our butts back to the work gang.”

  “What?” Al asked, stupefied.

  “What are you doing shutting off that pump?” Kal asked, reaching over. “It’s not maxed out—”

  Paul grabbed his wrist.

  “But we could be out of here right now!” Al said.

  “That’s not the plan,” Paul said stonily.

  “What plan?” Kal asked. “I thought the plan was to go ride that river until we get away—or it drowns us, whichever comes first.”

  “No,” Paul said, stowing gear against the wall of the shed and leaning the raft on top of the lot of it. “The plan is to work until they have us double-time march back to the transport buses at sunset as usual. The three of us take our usual marching ranks near the end of the line, only tonight we break off from the ranks and run down this road, put the raft in and light out downriver.”

  “Wait a minute,” Al said. “You mean we’re going to run this river, as high as it is, at night?”

  “As much as possible, yes,” Paul said, pulling the roll-up door of the storage building back into place and starting to jog back down the jeep road, toward the main road and the work gang. Kal and Al reluctantly jogged along after him. “If we try to make our break now, during the middle of the day, they’ll just call out the chopper from camp, or wait on the bridges downriver to pick us off, or both. After sunset we at least have a chance. We’re going to be soaked enough by the cold water of that river that our infrared profile will be way down. Night vision scopes will have a tough time picking us up in all that mist and wave action too.”

  “Great,” Kal said. “Either we go now and get shot for sure, or we go later and drown without a doubt.”

  In two moments more, they practically ran down Officer Strom, who stood before them, machine gun at the ready, safety off.

  “I thought I told you not to make me have to come looking for you!” Strom shouted at them. Kal and Paul and Al “sorry! sorry!”ed all around.

  “Don’t tell me you’re sorry!” Strom said, double-time marching them back toward the main road. “I already know what a sorry bunch you are. What do you think were you up to back there?”

  “Just enjoying the beauty of nature, sir,” Kal said.

  Strom frowned, then rolled his eyes slightly and shook his head.

  “I’m going to see you really put your back into it this afternoon,” Strom said. “I’m going to see to it that you sweat!”

  During the rest of the afternoon, Strom did in fact see them sweat—although, since Paul and Kal were wearing wetsuits under their coveralls, raising a sweat didn’t require much special effort. Paul found the hidden wetsuit uncomfortably chafing and gritty as well, but he could hardly complain to the guards about it.

  At last the guards whistled for quitting time. The penitents had covered ten miles of road, but as they began their draggy jog back to the buses they were heartened by the news that their transportation had been mercifully moved to the five-mile halfway point.

  Paul and his companions had jogged more than halfway back to the buses, and the sun was nearly at the horizon, when he saw the jeep road that led away to the putting-in point. Glancing around quickly to make sure the guards were setting their usual example by bounding along well ahead of them, Paul nodded to Kal and Al and the three of them disappeared down the jeep road, running with astonishing speed for three middle-aged men who had labored too hard and survived too long on too few calories per day.

  Paul and Kal carried the inflated raft toward the rocky riverbank as Al brought up the rear, carrying three yellow-bladed paddles, three blue and red life-vests, and his mallet and chisel.

  “You two should paddle from the bow,” Al said. “Your weight up front will help us punch through the waves better. I’ll steer from the stern.”

  “Who made you captain?” Paul asked with a quizzical look.

  “I used to do some rafting when I lived in Montana,” Al said with a shrug. With a deft blow to each of their six hand and foot electronic monitors, Al broke the watertight structure of each of their radio leashes. Annoying alarms began to yelp and squeal immediately.

  “Plunge wrist and ankle into the water—now,” Al said. Paul did as he was told. To his surprise and relief the electronic leashes snapped open like handcuffs sprung by a jailer’s key. He didn’t leave his hand and foot in the rushing water long, though.

  “Damn!” Kal said from the other side of the raft. “This water’s cold! You got that wetsuit on, Al?”

  “I’m not going to s
crew around with putting on a wetsuit!” Al said as he began to climb into the raft. “We’re running out of time!”

  “No,” said a voice out of the growing twilight. “You’re out of time.”

  Officer Strom stepped out of the brush beside the river bank, gun at the ready.

  “You really think you’re going to shoot the rapids at night?” Strom said, shaking his head, then stroking his mustache. “I should shoot you and that raft right now—and save you all from drowning.”

  The guard lowered his gun. Paul, Kal, and Al stared at him, the cold of the water momentarily forgotten.

  “I’m tired of watching men work themselves into an early grave,” Strom said at last, looking away from them, over the evening river. “Tired of watching men starve. I didn’t sign on for work at a death camp.”

  The three would-be escapees glanced quickly at each other.

  “I’m not seeing this,” Strom said. “I’ll give you three minutes to get out of here, then I’m going to start shooting. Calling for reinforcements. Search parties. Air support.”

  The escapees stood stunned. Strom looked directly at them.

  “Get on with you. Now.”

  Paul, Kal and Al needed no further prodding, but quickly jumped aboard the blue and red raft and began paddling for their lives. Paul thought he heard Strom say something like “¡Vaya con Dios!” but he was too busy paddling—and too busy listening for Al’s hissed “Dig! Dig! Dig!” setting their pace—to know for sure.

  In a moment they were in the river’s main channel, skimming swiftly away. In a moment more the chop in the current began to increase.

  “We stay in the middle sixty per cent of the river,” Al said. “That way we avoid piling onto a tree trunk or getting hung up on tree roots. Even in the main channel we have to watch for big eddies. For whirlpools and suck-downs on the upstream sides of large boulders. When I say ‘Dig!’, you dig in with those paddles like you’ve been doing, so we can get the right position for the chutes and punch through the swells when we can’t go around them. When I say stop, you stop paddling immediately. It won’t be so bad while we still have a little daylight left. After that, we listen carefully—and pray.”

  Paul and Kal became quickly more proficient at paddling in unison to Al’s commands—just in time for their raft to start into the first heavy rapids. Faintly, they heard gunshots coming from Strom’s direction, behind them. Soon the spray around the raft, golden and silvered and rainbowed in the fading light, was becoming full-fledged white waves crashing over the blue and red raft as they plowed through wall after wall of water, Al’s hissed “Dig! Dig!” sounding behind them like an angry metronome.

  When the first wave broke over him, Paul was so stunned for an instant by the water’s frigid temperature that he almost dropped his paddle. He quickly recovered, though. After several minutes of being hit with successive walls of frigid water every thirty seconds or so, he found he was too busy staying focused on his paddling and his breathing to take more than cursory notice of the cold and white floods breaking over them.

  As they punched through yet more rapids, Paul gradually found that, beneath his hotwire fear of drowning in white water, he was perversely beginning to enjoy this experience of (so far) successfully running a roaring river far beyond his rafting experience and abilities. Now, if they could just keep this run going, without bad luck taking them down.

  After a time the river broadened out once more into a swift-flowing but whitewater-free expanse. Slackening their furious paddling and catching their breath for a moment, they saw that the evening had grown dark enough around them that they now had difficulty making out the shoreline. As they paddled and drifted down a long stretch of river mercifully free of strong rapids, the night grew steadily darker around them. The evening star, already visible, was soon joined by many others.

  Slowly, however, the river’s mercy began to turn again to mercilessness. The rate of their drop downriver increased and the chop of the water intensified and made itself known again. The ridgelines above the river gorge—still faintly visible against the horizon in the last afterglow of sunset—began to narrow from gorge to canyon. As the walls of stone rose nearer to the river and higher above it, so did the waves in the river itself rise nearer and higher about their raft.

  By the faint glint of whitewater in the deep twilight, but mostly by sound, they made their way through and around another broken staircase of rapids. They had a brief moment of respite as they rounded a bend in the river, but then another series of rapids began.

  They had punched through the first two river waves in the newest set before it happened. Maybe, with only three people in the raft, they were just too light. Maybe in the darkness they didn’t position themselves right. Maybe they didn’t start paddling hard enough or soon enough to punch through the third wave.

  Whatever the explanations that might occur to them after it happened, the fact was that one moment they were paddling madly trying to punch through a wave in the river and the next they were in the frigid water itself, scrambling madly in the cold and dark to grab hold of one of the lines on the side of the overturned raft they were hurtling along beside—their paddles lost or abandoned, the raft having swamped and flipped.

  The frightening thing was not the speed with which the raft had overturned. The frightening thing wasn’t the breakneck speed with which the rapids bore them onward as they hung to the upside-down raft, legs dangling as they smashed helplessly along, too thoroughly in the river’s overpowering grip to even struggle against it. No, the really frightening thing was how quickly the icy water sapped the energy from their bodies, the will from their minds. In the first moments they weakened, finding it harder and harder for them to move their arms and legs. In a moment more it grew hard to think clearly. A moment after that, hard to think at all. Soon they would be unable to do anything beyond hanging on, trying to keep a death grip on life.

  Paul called out Kal’s name, then Al’s. Both answered to both names. Over the wet whitenoise of the river, Kal’s voice sounded okay to Paul’s ears, but Al didn’t sound so good.

  They passed through another drenching, near-drowning chute of whitewater, almost invisible in the dark for all its pummeling force. When they were through the chute, Kal called out, and Paul answered. When Paul called out, Al did not answer at first. When Al Brewster did speak again, he said only one word: “Cold.”

  In a moment more they were hurtling helplessly through another series of tight rapids and steep chutes. One after another the drenching, drowning surges battered and overwhelmed them, until Paul thought the pummeling flood would never cease, or that he would cease before it did.

  At last, more drowned and frozen than alive, Paul gazed up from the river of darkness in which he helplessly hurtled along, stared up to the river of starlight shining placidly over his head. In that moment he yearned inconsolably for a quick end to his suffering on the dark river in which he drifted here below.

  The river slowed around him until at last the only sound was its lapping against the raft. Kal called out, three times. Paul at last answered. They both called out weakly for Al, again and again.

  To no avail. They had lost Al. He had lost them.

  Far upstream, in the direction from which they had come, they saw now in the distance a single spotlight shining from a point above the gorge, down into the river and along its banks.

  “A chopper,” Kal said in a weak voice. “Looking for us.”

  They were too weak to do anything about that, or about the light they now drifted toward, much closer to them, very near the river. As they came closer, they saw that it actually shone out onto the river, from a tall deck and great, barn-like boathouse at the riverside. In a moment more they saw a stir of activity from the deck, heard voices—one male, one female, calling to them. They tried to call back. Paul wondered how far his weak, constricted voice would carry.

  Just before they passed out of the boathouse floodlight’s reach and into st
arlit darkness again, Al saw a pair of river kayaks cutting through the water toward him, then only one, as the pair of kayakers split up and the further one went around to the other side for Kal.

  “Grab on here—right behind the seat,” said the woman who had paddled up beside him. “Hurry now—there are more rapids below.”

  In his exhaustion, Paul’s hands had become so tightly clenched on the raft’s rigging that he had trouble working himself free. The sound of rapids growing closer rose in his ears. The woman shrugged her double-bladed paddle up under her left arm and forcibly pried Paul’s hands free of the raft and hooked them firmly onto a strap behind her seat. Dazedly, Paul held on as the kayaker paddled back toward the boathouse.

  In a moment more the woman and her male partner were dragging him onto the boat dock, where Paul saw Kal already sitting, slumped over. One at a time, the man and woman helped Kal and Paul into a rustic family room on the second floor of the boathouse, where they began stripping the dazed escapees out of their sodden clothes. The woman said something about hypothermia and the man quickly started a fire while she went to gather towels and blankets and quilts. Soon both Kal and Paul were wrapped in blankets and seated in front of a quietly flaring woodstove, shedding waves of heat before them. In a few moments more they were both sipping hot herbal tea, Paul sneezing fiercely as he slowly came back to life.

  Their rescuers were both older than Paul had first thought—gray-haired, lean, wiry people in their sixties at least. They introduced themselves as John and Ann Rusk.

  “Sorry we couldn’t save your raft,” Ann said.

  “Not to worry,” Kal said over his tea. “It wasn’t ours.”

  John and Ann glanced at each other, the bespectacled John stroking his white, Mennonite-style beard.

  “We’re spirit camp penitents,” Paul said, thinking the couple probably figured that out from the coveralls and the pale, chafed areas on wrist and ankle from where the electrical monitors had been. “We made a break from a road gang this evening. About two hours ago now, by the clock on your wall. One of our buddies, Al Brewster—he didn’t make it. We lost him in the last set of rapids, upstream.”