These were the thoughts I wrestled with as the land changed. We were past the green areas to a sharp downward slope.
“Is that water?” Tina asked hopefully.
“Yep,” I said, and smiled as Opus let out a happy bark and worked his way down.
The ground turned back into the reddish rocky sand and clay, and in spots, it was smooth. It wasn’t far, but about twenty feet down was a small, fast-moving stream.
“This is one of the washes,” I told Tina who let out a whoop and hurried down.
I followed, but not before I looked behind me for the thousandth time. I could see now how much of a rise we’d been walking down. I felt fortunate because the grade had been so gradual that I hadn’t noticed it, and we were walking downhill, which was a lot better than uphill.
I made it to the bottom half a minute after Tina and pulled my pack off. Opus was already drinking from the edge of the water.
“This… This is what I was really worried about,” Tina admitted. “Well, that and a psychotic fan of yours shooting us.”
“I still am drawing a blank on that. I’ve been thinking maybe it was that drunk. Picked up our trail because of Facebook, or maybe he’s been holding back, waiting for the right moment.”
“He could have gotten us when we were sleeping,” Tina pointed out.
“Wait, don’t drink that,” I warned as Tina was cupping water. “Let's fill up our bottles and use the water purification stuff.”
She gave me the stink-eye and splashed the water over her face, then poured it down her arms. I shrugged out of my large pack and did the same, pulling my shirt off.
“Guys are so lucky,” she said to me, “Walk around without your shirt whenever you want.”
“You could do that. I won’t mind,” I snarked back, and ducked as she sent a splash my way, making Opus bark excitedly.
“Shhh, sound carries better over water,” Tina hushed him.
Opus suddenly found the water interesting and then stepped into a shallow spot that had been made when sand and silt had formed against part of a gnarled branch that had come to rest in the water.
“Yeah, you don’t want to hike without a shirt on,” I told her, putting my shirt in the water and then pulling it out, wringing most of the water out of it before putting it back on.
She looked at me a second, then pulled hers off, too.
“You really don’t have to strip for my benefit, in fact, I think—”
“Evaporation,” she said, mimicking my actions. “Works for both guys and girls, and there isn’t anybody out here to see.”
Opus chuffed, and I shot him a dirty look.
“How about we refill our water and find somewhere in the shade for a little while, rest up, eat, and make a plan.”
“You have food?” Tina asked.
“Yeah. I haven’t checked if the bags had any holes in them, but I had food.”
Tina grinned, and I dug into my packs, pulling out two family-sized Mountain House freeze-dried meals on the ground.
“Just add water,” I told her, and caught a face full of water as her second attempt to splash me caught me off guard.
I knew a few ways to sanitize water to fill our containers with.
One way was to use bleach. Eight drops per gallon. Let it swish around and then air out for half an hour. It doesn’t taste great, but it works.
Another way was iodine, though I didn’t have any of that and I couldn’t remember how much to use anyway.
What I did have were the purification tablets that were made from iodine. I kept those in a Ziploc baggie inside a Mento's tin. I made sure every container we had was full of water and then put the tablets in, letting them do their thing while I did the last method of water purification.
“When is it going to boil?” Tina asked as she pulled her wet hair into a bun on the back of her head.
“Soon; you know what they say about a watched pot?”
Opus made a disgusted sound and stood in the shade of the tree. After a second, he shook his coat out for the third time since we dragged him into the stream. I turned my head, so I’d miss the worst of the spray and looked down. I’d used my small alcohol stove. It folded down into itself into a small, compact pack. I’d put it together and set it in a more or less level area and fired it up with a cartridge I’d filled with distilled alcohol.
It was perfect for this sort of use. I’d used it a few times already and had come to love it. The tin cup I’d put in there held roughly four measuring cups full of water, and there was already steam rising off it.
Once the bubbles started, I did a mental countdown as Tina looked at it hungrily and tore into the top of a Mountain House Pouch. It was the Beef Stew packet. Once I’d reached a minute, I took the packet from her and then poured the water in before closing it up and setting it down between us.
Opus whined, making a pitiful sound.
“You hungry, boy?” Tina asked him. His ears pointed almost completely forward, and he barked.
“Shhh,” Tina said, and dragged her pack close.
She pulled out a gallon-sized bag with brown, round objects filling it. It took me a second to realize it was the fancy Blue Buffalo dog food. She opened the bag and then grabbed the tin we’d been using for his water and poured half the bag in. The fuzzy kid drooled the entire time she was doing this, and for a moment I wondered if he was so hungry he envisioned us as pork chops or—
“How long do I have to wait?” Tina interrupted my thoughts.
“Probably ten minutes or so,” I told her as I walked down to the stream, filling the still hot tin mug before turning.
I scanned the area we had fled from. I’d spent a lot of time looking in that direction and had come up empty. We’d decided after getting water and eating that we’d see how hot it was out and then decide if we were going to wait and rest, or if we’re going to figure out how to get out of there. By my best estimate, it was noon or thereabouts, and it was hard to figure out where we were going without the sun and the moon and…
“Took you long enough,” Tina said, as I sat down and put the mug back over the flames.
“Sorry, was looking back there. What do you think, we’ve been resting an hour… hour and a half now?” I asked her.
“Yeah,” Tina said after a moment. “We’ve done your water trick twice now.”
“The sun is right overhead. If we wait a little bit, I can probably figure out which direction is which.”
“You said the Colorado River is to the east of us.”
“Yep,” I told her, and watched as she opened the pouch, using a spoon to start stirring things up.
“So, if we follow the stream here downriver, there’s a good chance it’ll take us east where it empties into the Colorado River.”
“That’s… you’re brilliant,” I told her and flopped down, spilling some of the water from the mug, and then put it back on the camp stove.
Tina was silent for a time, then remembered the food and pulled her pouch to her side and opened it, letting the steam escape. I wanted to point out how funny it was to eat steaming hot food while it was almost 100 degrees outside, but decided to bite my tongue. I was starving, and I knew we’d need the calories after the morning we’d had and the bruises, soreness, and dings we’d gotten.
Oh yeah, and Tina still thought that getting hit by rock chips counted as being shot in the head.
“So,” she said around a mouthful of food, “You want to move out when we’re done here, or wait for the sun to go down a little bit?”
“That’s what I’ve been wondering. Now that we know where the water is, we should be ok to do either. Water was the biggest worry of mine,” I admitted. “Well, except for getting shot and buried out in the desert.”
“You were already shot. Can you imagine the publicity you’re going to get once we get out of this? Famous writer gets shot in the head, leads the family in a trek to survive an insane fan gone wild.”
“Please don’t,” I asked
her quietly as my water started to boil.
I let it bubble, but Tina didn’t wait long.
“What?” she asked me softly.
“I’m just a guy. I just have a job that’s a little different.”
“And you’re good at it. People read your work, and you’re famous.”
“I’m not famous,” I muttered.
Opus sneezed, and I rolled my eyes at him, Tina catching the look I was giving him.
“Okay, so you’re not like Oprah famous, but you’re like what’s his name, the guy who plays the friend of the friend in the TV show Friends.”
“I don’t know who that is,” I told her.
“Exactly! To your fans, you’re famous. To the rest of us, you’re just an adorable husband-to-be - once you meet my daddy, if he approves.”
“If?” I asked her, raising an eyebrow and using a spoon to stir the water as it came to a full boil.
“Well, you know, daddy has funny ideas, but he’ll totally like you,” she said in a hurry.
“Great, something else to worry about,” I muttered, and dropped the spoon in the cup so I could tear open my own meal pouch and pull out the oxygen absorber.
I’d got the hot water in when Opus whined. I looked up and around sharply, but then I noticed he was staring at my food pouch and licking his lips. Since Tina had had her pick, I went with the stroganoff. I looked up at Tina who was watching both of us, and I caught Opus belly crawling in my direction.
“You’ve got your own food,” I said, pouring the hot water in the pouch and then closing it.
He begged again, but I stirred it some, sealed the pouch closed and then went about putting out the fire on the small stove. I had to wait for both of them to cool and the water to do its job in the food, so I looked back at Tina.
“You know, for an introvert, the idea of being famous is a little bit—”
“Terrifying?” she finished.
“Yes, but it’s weird. Almost every writer I know is an introvert. It’s not that we hate people—”
“You just want to do your own thing and not have the massive, confusing mess that everyone else brings to the table, spilling over into your life and—”
I laughed. “You do know me pretty well.”
Opus barked an agreement, and I reached over to pet his head. I was rewarded by him licking the spoon I had just used.
“You got to be kidding me,” I told him, and he just looked at me, and Tina snorted.
We were lost, in the middle of the desert, not too far from help, being hunted by somebody who wanted to kill us for some reason, and we weren’t screaming in blind panic and terror. In fact, we were having a little bit of fun. That said something about our sanity, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what.
I wiped the spoon clean, poured a little water over it to wash off the Opus germs, and then dug into my food.
Tina and I didn’t talk for a long, long time. We just savored the food.
With the hunger and fear combined, it might as well have been a four course gourmet meal, served at the finest restaurant.
“I can’t finish mine,” Tina said, after a small sip of her water.
“If Opus doesn’t want it, I’ll take it,” I told her, still feeling a little hollowed out, but not wanting to run on a full stomach.
Truth be told, I hadn’t eaten much the night before and there was something about running for my life that had made me hungry now that the adrenaline and fear had left me shaky with relief. The worst seemed to be over, for the moment.
“Where’s Opus?” Tina asked.
I looked around. He was nowhere in sight. That anxiety, fear and adrenaline suddenly made what I had eaten not feel so solid in my stomach any more.
22
Opus
Opus was content that his humans were now fed and watered. He’d eaten too, and instinctively knew it was time to move. He’d had a lot of training as a pup before Tina, and hadn’t really thought about what he was doing. He had just done it.
When the goofy Two Leg called Rick had started eating, he’d slipped off to the side, pretending to mark his scent like he’d been doing for the past hour. It wouldn’t be long now until he really did need to do it, but it wasn’t that time yet.
Instead, while they spoke softly, he slunk away into the hot day, slowly at first so as not to draw attention, and was soon reaching a speed that he hadn’t done since before the loud bang and pain in his shoulder had prevented him from running full out.
Now he was running full out, and not away from the loud bangs that kicked up rocks and sand like it had earlier. Instead, he was running toward it. In training, the men with the large cloth arms would use such a device, sometimes one that fit in one hand, sometimes a larger one that fit in both. They used to be toys and targets to him, until one of them stung him, giving him pain that had lasted and ached until this day.
Opus hated the thing that made the loud bang more than anything in the world, anything except for the people who would hurt the humans he owned. It wasn’t just his job, it was his love, his entire reason for getting up with a happy tail wag. Years of taking care of his woman had been repaid with kindness when he was hurt, and he wanted and needed to once again prove to himself and to his humans that he was on the job.
He could smell the four legs. She was with the man who was making the bang sounds, the one who had hurt his man human. He ran toward them, knowing the female four leg was directing the man toward them. She probably had some of the same training he did, but she smelled young. Very young. It was that and the fact she probably hadn’t been training very long that he was banking on, if he knew how to bank.
Running, he had covered a lot of distance and hadn’t heard his humans calling for him yet. He would have ignored them, but it would be difficult to avoid those he took care of. They were his responsibility, but this was also his responsibility.
Stopping to smell the wind, he got a good idea what direction the two were coming from. It was time. Opus left large scent pools around several shrubs, enough that it stung his own nose. Then he took off in a direction that was between his humans and the one who was pursuing them, leaving spots where his scent would linger. He knew the female four leg would have to smell that; he was on top of his game, and she was near her heat.
He spent an hour marking areas in the wrong direction before he started backtracking and ensuring his bladder was emptied before he ran across the rocks, back toward the scent of his humans. He was going to go a different direction, but was hoping that he’d put down enough of a scent distraction to buy his people enough time to get out of the area. He suspected that if they hadn’t already moved on, they would soon.
He picked up the pace, muscles burning.
He felt good, he felt confident. He would lead his people out of this place where there was little water and everything smelled and felt hot and burned, with almost nothing green to break up the landscape.
23
Rick
“I think we lost him,” Tina said, after a while.
“We lost Opus too,” I told her, surprised that she was so flippant about him taking off or getting lost while probably finding a tree to mark.
“I told you, he’ll find us. He’s never taken off like this before, but he’ll be back soon.”
I fumed, not quite angry with her. He’d somehow wormed his way into my heart in a way that I couldn’t have imagined, the same way I’d never set out to find a wife who disarmed me with how easily she loved me, quirks and all.
We’d been walking along the stream, or close to it. Sometimes it would cut deep into the rock and earth, and there wouldn’t be any way for us to stay near the water without being in the water. Still, it was narrowing, and soon it would run out. I think.
“I think we lost whoever’s chasing us,” Tina said, being more specific this time.
“I haven’t seen or heard anything,” I agreed.
“I’m glad we decided to wait, it doesn’t feel as hot now
,” Tina said, walking slightly ahead of me.
I heard a small bark and spun to see Opus running toward us. Tina let out a surprised squeak that sounded like she held back from yelling his name. I was surprised and amazed that he was suddenly back and had caught up with us. He was running hard and I could see that he was getting dehydrated as he slid to a stop in front of us.
“Opus, where have you been?” Tina gushed as he pushed his nose into her hand.
He made a happy grunting sound, and I was already pulling my pack off to get the large tin I used for his water dish.
“What were you thinking, buddy?” I asked him as I put the tin on the rocky ground and filled it.
He jerked his head out of Tina’s hands as soon as he heard the water pouring and lapped it up. I took the opportunity to run my hand through his mane, feeling the heat that was trapped close to his skin. I could see his nose was dry.
“I told you he’d be back,” Tina said with a smile, but she had a tear streak down from her left eye.
“I know, he’s a good boy,” I said, petting him and using my right hand to refill his bowl again.
He drank that down then belched quietly and looked at Tina expectantly.
“You ready to get out of here?” she asked him.
Opus chuffed and walked to her, pushing his head back into her side.
“I think he missed you,” I told her.
“He’s my buddy,” she said, not quite calling him her baby, but if I were asked, I would have no problem calling him a fuzzy kid. “He’s hot. If we find a spot that we can get to the riverside safely, let’s dunk him.”
Opus sneezed and I laughed. He hated his bath but didn’t complain too loudly.
“I think we got lucky and the clouds came out more. It looks like it might rain,” I said, noticing the clouds as the sun hid for a few moments.
Opus Odyssey_A Survival and Preparedness Story Page 15