Getting back

by William Dietrich

  Otherwise, it was hard to think. The Warden's ears were ringing and his head ached. There was a fuzziness to his vision he suspected would take hours to go away. And in front of him was a wall of unstable rock, sealing the fugitives' exit route. Men could climb over it or dig through it, he knew, but none had the stomach for it at the moment. Least of all him. The bastards were gone, escaped into the desert, and to follow them he'd have to organize a party with proper food and water to hunt them down. It was maddening.

  Despite this fiasco, Rugard knew the others would look to him for answers. People were dung, expendable and cheap, and they'd follow a strong man as far as he'd lead them. The Warden felt not a thing for the men who had just been blown to bits by the explosion. They were fools to be in the front rank.

  He limped back down the canyon past his groaning, stunned men. Explosives! How? Had that bitch Raven brought them with her? There was something odd about her, some lack of ordinary fear and confusion. He hadn't liked her arrogance from the start. She'd scorned his advances, was condescending to his authority, and was probably laughing at him right now. Clearly she knew too much. And she'd go on laughing until he hunted her down and had her in a different way. And then turned her whole being into a bloody locus of pain.

  "We can't let them go."

  Rugard turned. It was the weasel. He held men like that in contempt, but they were necessary. This little pissant might know where the others were going.

  "We've got to get it back, so we can get back," Ico mumbled, as dazed by the explosion as the others. "The activator is useless until we get the transmitter to hook it to."

  "Obviously," Rugard growled. "And you're going to help get it for me. You're going to help me hunt them down in the desert by telling me which way they'll go. They can't get back either, not without us. Right?"

  Ico winced. "Not exactly." He looked down in wonder at his bloody arm. Welcome to real life, he thought drolly. It ached like hell. "I know where they're going, I think."

  "Where?"

  "The coast. Raven thinks the transmitter alone will work there."

  "What!"

  "If we don't catch them before they reach it, she'll be gone." Ico looked around morosely. He'd thought he'd be leaving these cretins in hours, or days. Now he might be stuck with them for weeks or months.

  "We'll catch them then." They'd follow the thieves to wherever they might run, Rugard thought. Use them to assuage his own humiliation. Get the transmitter to unite with its activator. And then take proper vengeance on the whole damnable world.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The fugitives strode toward the rising sun with a grim, anxious pace, always looking backward: for a miraculous reappearance of Tucker, for pursuit, for a last glimpse of human settlement and community. They saw none of these. Just burnished domes of rock beginning to slip down the horizon as they hurried, and ahead shrub-shrouded desert and the undulating swell of red sand dunes.

  There was no conversation. Their narrow escape, continued peril, and Daniel's loss of the activator had shocked them all into a tense silence. Raven's fury and fear at being trapped in Australia had left her speechless. Ethan looked at the pair with an accusatory stare, as if their tangled emotions had doomed him as well as themselves. Amaya was morose at the loss of Tucker and Ico and the continued presence of Raven. Their little family had become dysfunctional.

  "We need to talk," Amaya ventured once.

  There was no answer.

  The fugitives would be easy enough to track if pursued immediately, Daniel knew. Their feet left a scuffed trail in the sand like the frozen wake of a passing boat. The question was whether Rugard would bother to follow and, if he did, how quickly he could organize a posse. Given time, wind or rain would eventually erase their footsteps, and then surely the fugitives could elude pursuit in the immensity of the continent. They would pick their way slowly east to the sea, signal for a rescue craft… and after that? The possibility was so impossibly distant that it wasn't worth thinking about.

  It was more important, Daniel knew, to think about the here and now. To stop focusing on the world of United Corporations and start focusing on Australia. It was this obsession about getting back that was causing so much trouble.

  By weary agreement they didn't take a midday break but pushed on, the sand giving way to hardpan and dry, dead-looking vegetation. The land was ugly but easier to walk across. The day grew hot but not as oppressive as the punishing furnace of their first arrival. The desert winter was slowly approaching. Daniel also noticed the group's steady endurance after a sleepless night. His own body had acquired a wiry stamina far different from the calculated strengths of his health club regimen. He could push on with a dogged tirelessness that allowed him to keep going even when reason called for collapse and sleep.

  They were close enough to Erehwon that Raven and Ethan knew of a dependable seep. It was a risk making for it because any pursuers could guess at their decision, but it was a greater risk to push into the unknown without as much water as possible. They threw themselves down at the puddle at mid-afternoon to drink to satiation, and then slowly, impatient at the delay, topped off every container they had.

  "I still don't see him," Amaya said quietly, looking back the way they had come.

  "No," Daniel said. "We won't."

  And then they pushed on.

  The sun set behind their backs, the monoliths black stubs in the distance now, and they marched on into dusk. There was no question of stopping. They walked as the moon came up, the desert lit like an old black-and-white movie, and held their direction by keeping the Southern Cross on their right hand. It was so quiet they could hear the squeak of sand under their feet. At midnight they came to the bank of a dry wash where ghost gums overhung the sandy channel like adults leaning over a cradle.

  And there they collapsed and slept, fallen carelessly to the ground like leaves. The four of them slept in a cluster, huddling instinctively for warmth and reassurance, and were unconscious from exhaustion before anyone had a chance to comment on their geometry.

  Ethan roused them shortly before dawn. They wordlessly wolfed down a few mouthfuls of cold food, drank, and pushed on. They didn't dare light a fire yet. A rhythm came into their flight. They walked hard for about an hour, rested five minutes, and then pushed hard again. They began to cross a series of flat pans of featureless clay. "Dry lakes," Raven guessed. "They probably flood in the rains." White salt glittered on the cracked mud.

  At midday they crawled wordlessly into the shade of a cluster of ironwood trees to nap restlessly for two hours. Then they hiked on, walking again until midnight, their conversation mostly monosyllabic. The rocks of Erehwon had slipped permanently below the horizon. They saw no one, heard nothing. They were alone again, four adventurers in a desert wilderness, with no idea where they were or precisely where they were going, except east. It didn't matter. Walking was a substitute for talk.

  When they stopped that night their weariness was so complete that it kept them from immediately falling asleep. They were brittle with tension. Ethan refused to sit after he dropped his pack and simply looked out over the dark desert, his shoulders hunched, his face gloomy, his body shivering slightly from the long hours of exertion. Raven sat slumped forward and pressed into the pack on her lap, her hair falling around her face like a cowl. Daniel's muscles were so tired that he watched his thighs tremble, tendons jumping under his skin like snakes.

  It was Amaya who again broke the traumatized silence. "I think we should talk about Tucker," she said.

  No one answered again.

  "If we don't, we aren't going to make it."

  Ethan turned, his arms around himself. "What about Tucker?"

  "Our guilt."

  "What guilt?"

  "That we're alive and he's dead."

  "We don't know for sure that he's dead. And it was his decision to be the rear guard."

  "Not guilt," Raven interrupted. "Fear." She hadn't looked
up and the voice seemed to come from deep inside her, as if issuing from a cave. "That we'll all end up like him."

  "You mean dead," Ethan said.

  She didn't reply.

  "We know we shouldn't have let him stay behind alone," Amaya persisted. "We shouldn't…" She stopped, sighing hopelessly.

  "Have built a bomb?" Daniel guessed.

  Amaya looked away.

  "If you hadn't we'd all be dead or worse," he said. "You didn't take Tucker's life, you saved ours. We were in a pretty desperate situation. We still are."

  "Because we threw away our means of escape," Raven amended hollowly, still not looking up, her voice exhausted. "Used it like a rock, to hit someone."

  The rebuke irritated him. "Your means of escape." He said it bitterly. "After you let me be lowered into a trap you knew was about to be sprung."

  "That's not fair," Ethan told Daniel sullenly. "She didn't know what this little irate friend of yours would do until it was too late. We'd met as a group and agreed as a group that she and I would go. And it's no secret why you might prefer to leave the activator behind. You threw it all away because…" He stopped in frustration.

  "Because we've never been a group and never truly agreed. Raven has been setting us up from the beginning and so have you, never telling us our true situation until the last minute and using us like game pieces to get you back home. You turned us against each other. You turned Ico. Tucker's almost certainly dead. You've made a goddamned mess of the whole situation and now you can just sit in the middle of it like we have to. We walk to the coast, or stay in Australia, together."

  "That's unfair!" Ethan shouted. "You'd already be dead without us!"

  "Daniel, I was trying to help you," Raven added with a groan. "Help you get back, where you could do some good."

  "Why?" he challenged her.

  "Why what?" Her reply was weary.

  "Why get back? Why are you trying to achieve what United Corporations obviously doesn't encourage: our return? What if your bosses are right, Raven? What if I really belong here? What if you belong here?"

  "Don't be absurd. Rugard belongs here. Not me. Not… us."

  "Why are you even here, Raven?"

  "I had a mission. I wanted to see."

  "No you didn't."

  "It's for the best, Daniel. It's always for the best: I believe in them. It's all I have to believe in. I was going soft and getting confused, and so by checking the pilot's fate and getting the electronics I'd prove myself and either be confirmed in my mission or abandon it. I'm being tested, just like you. The problem is, you've turned a test into torture. We're more than a thousand miles from where we need to be."

  "Are we?"

  Raven looked at him with exasperation. "Yes. It's a long walk to the beach."

  "What if this is where we need to be?"

  "What do you mean?" Amaya asked.

  "What if we don't get back, ever? Could we make a life here? Find meaning here?"

  "In that lunatic's prison?" Raven scoffed.

  "No, not there. Not even here, exactly. But in Australia. There have to be more habitable places than this on the continent, if people truly lived here. What if we could find one of them and start over?"

  "Haven't you had enough privation and savagery yet?"

  "There have to be ruins we could use for salvage. New adventurers arriving with needed skills. Maybe we could turn the tables on United Corporations and stay by choice, creating a new colony as radical as America was, or the old Australia. It could be the utopia they pretended they were sending us to. We'd start over, but we wouldn't make the mistakes they made. Lives would have more meaning. We'd always be asking why, instead of how much."

  "Stay in this wilderness?"

  "Stay for what I came for. To truly live life."

  She looked at him in wonder. "You've gone insane, haven't you? You didn't throw the activator away, you thrust it away. You've burned our ships so we can't turn back, like Cortes in Mexico. You haven't learned a thing by coming here."

  "I've learned to keep asking why. You're the one who taught me that."

  Raven looked hopelessly out across the desert. "I don't think I see what you seem to see out here."

  "Now you'll have time to."

  She took that as a challenge. "No I won't. And by the time we get to the coast you'll be begging to come back with me."

  "Great," Ethan muttered, watching the two of them.

  "I said he'll be begging, Ethan. I didn't say I'd take him." For the first time she allowed a slight smile. "He's unreliable."

  "Unpredictable." He looked at her wryly. He was mad as hell, but he still wanted her. The talking had helped, somehow.

  "Co-dependent," Amaya corrected.

  It was true. As frustrated as they were with each other, they were forcibly linked and shared a simple goal: to get to the coast. Everything else could be set aside, perhaps.

  "Beg you to take me back?" Now Daniel grinned. "And give up this?" He gestured toward their bed of sand. "I don't think so."

  They slept.

  At the end of the third day they came to the road.

  It was a ribbon of broken asphalt, vegetation erupting from its cracked surface like green pimples. Its course was broken entirely in places by washouts or drifting dunes. Such disrepair meant the highway was impassable to any vehicle short of a tractor, but it was still a startling piece of linear regularity, running north and south as far as they could see. The Australians had come this way! In roaring trailer trucks or whispering solar cars. There would be towns on such a road- empty and ghostly, yes, but still the ruins of communitiesand maybe water. There might be faded signs, rusted wrecks, fallen ropes of copper wire and fiber optic cable sheathed in rubber: a junkyard of delights. It was funny how fabulous and yet foreign such detritus sounded after weeks in the wilderness. The technological litter of a lost world! The fugitives paused a minute, dazed by the familiar paved firmness beneath their boots, a goanna lizard lazily sunning itself on the radiant macadam a hundred yards away. Here was a path to somewhere.

  "We'd better not use it," Raven said.

  "Why not?" Ethan asked. After stone and sand, the highway looked marvelously easy. And the idea of looking for useful scraps of technology appealed to him.

  "Because if they come after the transmitter this road would be the most obvious place to look."

  "We'd make better time on the road."

  "They'd make better time too."

  "Besides, it goes the wrong way," Amaya said. "North and south. If an edge to the Cone exists, it should be east. The country is supposed to get better that way."

  "It's gotten worse," Ethan said.

  "Maybe that's because we haven't really come that far," she countered. "A few hundred miles, at best. It takes a while to see a difference on foot."

  Ethan looked morosely out at the desert. "I hope you're right."

  "At least we can use the road like a river to throw off pursuit," said Daniel. "Water erases scents a bloodhound can follow and pavement erases footprints. Let's follow it a ways until we find a rocky area and then strike east. That should discourage anyone from following."

  They did as he suggested, walking north two miles until they came to a stony ridge that led east. They left the road there, taking care not to make any mark. After three miles on the ridge they dropped into an adjacent gully and dug successfully for water, then pushed on. Within hours the road had faded in memory like a mirage.

  The gully petered out so they kept walking east across undulating sand. Their pace was less anxious now. Reaching the road had become some kind of psychological milestone, relaxing their fear of recapture by confirming they were getting someplace. The highway seemed likely to confuse Rugard if he ever bothered to come this far, and it was clear they'd outpaced him. It also promised that there were more remnants of civilized Australia somewhere ahead. Still, they walked into the night again to put as many miles behind them as possible before finally camping. Measurement agai
n! Daniel thought. Because they'd met other humans. Their camp was dark and cheerless. There were no tents and no stoves now. They had no wood for a fire and dared not light one anyway. Instead they ate a few more mouthfuls of cold food and collapsed into sleep.

  Daniel woke to find himself cuddled tightly against Raven. Instinctively, they'd crept together in the chill of the night. His chin was on her hair, and his cock embarrassingly hard against the small of her back. The instinct startled him. Gently, he sidled his hips away from her and she shifted, blinked, and slowly came awake.

  If she'd noticed his unconscious state, she gave no sign. She glanced sleepily over her shoulder at him, as if bemused, and then got up quickly and moved away to prepare for the day's journey.

  Amaya had cuddled into Ethan.

  They ate quickly, chattering a bit more now, their mood still tense but improved by their distance from Erehwon. At least they were alive, and the transmitter that remained gave them purpose. Maybe the worst was behind them. Everyone was still tired, but the exhaustion of the first day of their escape had slowly been pushed back. In a few more days they would look for an oasis to stop for complete recuperation. Meanwhile they were still pushing hard due east, as near as they could judge it.

  Their higher spirits didn't last long. The walking became progressively tougher. The domination of sand was mounting, and they realized they were entering utter desert: not just arid scrubland, but the edge of a sea of sandy dunes, red and sinuous. Each dune ran north and south as far as the eye could see and crest followed crest in a succession to the eastern horizon. It was like looking across an ocher ocean. Walking became increasingly laborious because level ground had disappeared. They trudged up the face of dunes that seemed twice as high as they really were because of the tendency to slip backward, gained the crest, and then slid awkwardly down the other side. Any breeze was absent in the hot hollows. Vegetation had disappeared and water seemed never to have fallen. Their boots, clothes, nostrils, and mouths were all irritated by sand.