Anywhere but Here

27

Arrow trees were tough. The wood was fibrous, and the saw kept binding. Worse, every time they jarred it, it dropped arrows. Donna kept an eye trained upward and called out a warning when one cut loose, but Trent was getting tired of jumping back every time he bound the saw blade. Plus he was starting to sweat under his raincoat.

“There’s got to be a better way,” he said, pausing for breath.

“We could throw rocks at the branches and knock down all the ones that are ready to come loose,” said Donna.

He looked up at the tuft of greenery at the top of the tree. It was forty feet up, at least. He could pitch a few rocks that far, but not many, and not accurately. He could shoot any individual branch he wanted with the rifle, but the bullet would go right through it. Donna was on the right track, though. What they needed to do was jar the whole tree with a good, solid jolt, and shake down all the loose branches at once.

There were a couple of big logs in the stream bed. They were from the leafy kind of tree, all twisty and not much use for suspending a motor over the stream, but one of them might work as a crude battering ram. Trent had to slosh out into the water to reach them, but it didn’t matter; his boots were already soaked from walking around in the rain and from fording the stream anyway. He cut off the small end of the closest log, leaving about eight feet of log about the size of his thigh, which he and Donna dragged up the bank to the arrow tree.

“Okay,” Trent said when they had gotten into position about ten feet from the tree. “We run toward it, hit it with the log, let go, and keep running. I’m going to go straight through, but I think you should swing wide and go to the side. You’ll get out from under the tree faster that way. And watch you don’t drop the log on your feet.”

“Right,” said Donna.

Trent took the front end, and Donna lifted the back. “Hit, drop, and run,” Trent said. “Ready?” “Yeah.”

“On the count of three. One… two… three.” He started toward the tree, wobbling a little under the weight, then caught his stride and rammed the log hard into the trunk. It rebounded and he let it go, continuing on past and shouting “Run! Run!”

He heard a patter of arrows hitting the ground behind him, and one clanked off his helmet, but then he was out of range. He turned to make sure Donna was okay, too, and saw her still running.

“You’re clear!” he shouted. She slowed to a stop and turned around.

It looked like a miniature forest under the tree. At least two dozen arrows had come down, all but two or three sticking point-first in the ground. Trent pulled them up and tossed them in a pile off to the side, then picked up Donna’s end of the big branch and dragged it out into the open again. “One more time?” he asked.

Donna said, “Sure,” and picked up her end. He lifted his, and on the count of three they did it again.

Three more arrows came down. Trent tossed them aside with the others and was trying to decide whether or not to give it one more whack when he heard a snort off to the side and looked up to see the buffaloceros lumbering straight toward him.

“Jesus, get in the camper!” he yelled to Donna. She turned and ran, but she had to cross the stream to get there, and it was too wide to leap. The buffaloceros saw her movement and started toward her while she was picking her way across the slick stones, but Trent stepped out in front of it and waved his arms, shouting “Hey! Hey you! Over here.”

The buffaloceros turned toward him, lowered its head, and charged. He backpedaled as fast as he could, putting the trunk of the arrow tree between it and him, but the creature didn’t seem to see the tree. It crashed headlong into the trunk, shaking it way harder than Trent and Donna had with their log. It staggered back a step just as a hail of arrows glanced off its armored back. A couple whacked into Trent’s helmet and shoulder guards, too, and one tore a hot streak down the side of his left leg.

“Ow!” he yelled, dancing back out of the way, but the buffaloceros came after him, sidestepping the tree this time. Trent knew he would never make it across the stream before it caught him, and he didn’t want this thing ramming the camper anyway, so he picked another arrow tree and sprinted for it, his helmet tilting askew and his shoulder guards flapping up and down as he ran. He heard Donna screaming from the other side of the stream and heard hoof-beats thundering just behind him, and he poured everything he had into the last few steps between him and the tree. He didn’t even slow down; just dodged past and prayed that the buffaloceros wouldn’t see this one, either.

It didn’t. Apparently it only saw things when they moved. It smacked this tree at full-tilt, too, bringing down another rain of arrows. Trent was already out from under it and halfway to the next tree beyond; he ran to it and skidded to a stop behind the trunk while the beast was still shaking its head from the impact.

It looked around, stupefied, obviously wondering where Trent had gone. It didn’t seem any worse for wear. That armored forehead was apparently good for more than just arrows.

Trent held perfectly still while it turned its head from side to side. Donna was across the stream now and running for the pickup, and her footsteps drew its attention, but the moment it looked away from Trent he picked up two rocks and tossed one at the thing’s side.

It bellowed loudly and whirled around, just as Trent tossed his other rock into the bushes to his left. Either the motion or the sound of the rock hitting branches was enough to set it off, and it charged into the brush, scattering twigs and leaves everywhere. Trent picked up another couple of rocks and tossed them out ahead of it, beyond the bushes, and it continued onward, chasing the sound.

It kept running even after it passed the last rock. Trent listened to its hoofbeats receding into the forest, and when he was sure the creature could no longer see or hear him, he walked back to the tree he and Donna had been working on.

She came back from the pickup carrying the rifle. “Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah. It didn’t get me.”

“Something did.”

“Where?”

“Your leg.”

Oh yeah. He hadn’t even felt it after the initial sting, but he looked down at his left calf and saw a rip a couple inches long in his pants, and blood welling up from a cut beneath that. Now it hurt.

He sopped up the blood with his pantleg and had a look at the cut. Not very deep. It was more of a scratch than a cut, probably from the rough sides of the arrow. “It’ll be all right,” he said. He looked back toward where the buffaloceros had gone. “I guess now we know how to call one of those guys if we ever want to. They must like to butt heads like bighorn sheep.”

“It’s probably mating season,” Donna said.

Trent nodded. “I hope one of ’em doesn’t mistake the pickup for a female.”

He reached for his camp saw, then swore when he noticed what had happened to it. He’d laid it next to the pile of arrows while he and Donna had been using the log for a battering ram, but the buffaloceros had run right across it in its charge, and the last three inches of it were bent. It was the bow, not the blade, that had taken the brunt of the weight, so at least the blade hadn’t snapped, but Trent had to go back to the pickup and pound the bow into shape again. He did it inside the camper with the door closed, setting the flashlight on the counter so he could see and hammering against a chunk of firewood with a towel between it and the floor so he wouldn’t attract another buffaloceros.

When he got back to the tree, Donna had cleaned up all the arrows that had fallen around its base. They made quite a stack. Trent would have to build a longbow and see how they worked for hunting.

That was a project for later. He had a waterwheel to build today. He bent down to the cut he’d started and took a few light strokes with the saw, testing his repairs before he put his weight into it. It seemed strong enough, so he started sawing in earnest, and Donna didn’t call out a warning even when the blade bound a few strokes later.

“I think every branch that’s loose enough to come down this year probably did it already,” he said as he continued to saw. “That thing really smacked this tree.”

“It must have a head like a rock,” Donna said.

“Well, that’s about how smart it seemed.”

Trent finished the wedge, then went around to the other side and started in on the back-cut. He planned to drop the tree uphill parallel to the stream so he could cut off the top and pull it downhill when he swung it out over the waterfall. He kept his eye on both sides of his cut, making sure he was leaving an even amount of wood to act as a hinge when it started to fall. He had to cut to within a half inch or so before it teetered, then he removed the saw and gave the tree a good push. It held for a second, then let go with a groan and a pop, tipping right toward where he’d intended it to land. The top made a loud swoosh as it fanned down through the air, then the trunk thumped to the ground with a deep, bass boom. Arrows flew every which way when the tuft at the top slapped down, rattling down like pick-up sticks.

“Let’s get under cover for a few minutes in case that guy comes back to investigate,” Trent said, leading the way to one of the leafy trees, where they could climb up in its branches if they had to get out of the way. They leaned up against its trunk in the relative dryness beneath its canopy and watched the rain come down.

“Thanks,” Donna said after a minute or so.

“For what?”

“For gettin’ me away from that damned computer for a while.”

He nodded. “It was definitely eatin’ on you.” He put his arm around her and pulled her up against him. “Tell you the truth, right now I don’t care if we ever do get home. We’ve got food and water and shelter, and in a week or two we’ll have power enough to drive around if we need to, and the fridge will work again and we can cook on the stove if we want. A person can’t really ask for much more than that.”

“Not for the moment, anyway,” Donna admitted.

“Not ever,” Trent said. “Anything more is just luxury. Hell, the pickup and the stove and the refrigerator are luxury. We could probably get by with a tent and a pocket knife if we really had to.”

“And a condom and a wedding ring,” Donna said playfully.

“Don’t need that with all these arrows layin’ around.” He tilted his head back and looked up into the leaves overhead. They made a kaleidoscope of green and gray against the sky. “Life is real here. It’s all so… immediate. Rain and rocks and trees and streams. We go home and we’re going to be right back in the middle of all the crap we were tryin’ to get away from, only worse because we can’t just go on livin’ the way we were now that we know what our government is really doing to people.”

Donna shifted uncomfortably. “What can we do, though? We’d make pathetic revolutionaries. You could probably assassinate the president if you put your mind to it, but that wouldn’t stop anything. You’d have to knock off everyone down to the White House janitor before you got a replacement president who wouldn’t just keep the same system in place.”

“Killing people ain’t the way to make the world a better place,” Trent said. “That’s the kind of thinkin’ that got the country in the mess it’s in.”

“What, then?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m kind of happy just to hang out here for a while.”

Neither one of them had much to say after that. They waited a few more minutes, and when the buffaloceros still hadn’t returned they went back out to the downed tree and lopped its top off. They moved over to the second tree that the buffaloceros had head-butted, dropped that one uphill, too, and cut it to the same length as the first one. Then they shoved them both out over the pool below the waterfall, making sure they stuck out just far enough to mount the motor on. There was enough length left on the bank to hold them in place while they hauled rocks up from the stream bed to weigh them down.

That was an all-day job right there. It took a lot of rocks to hold the logs down under the kind of weight the motor and a tire would put on the free ends. Trent tested their progress from time to time by walking out on the span over the water, edging out a few inches at a time until the logs started to overbalance.

“Don’t you go falling in,” Donna told him. “It’s too damned cold today to get wet.”

Trent was already pretty well soaked from rain and sweat, but he didn’t want to fall into the pool either. Fortunately the logs were as non-skid as sandpaper from the little pockets where arrow-branches had broken free. He couldn’t have slipped if he’d wanted to.

They broke for lunch, hauling an armload of arrows down to the camper on their way, then after they’d eaten the last of the ham sandwiches and chased them with a beer, Donna sat down at the table with the computer again while Trent went outside and piled more rocks on the logs. He didn’t give her any trouble about it this time. She did have to spend some time at it if she was going to make any progress.

It took another couple hours of rock-hauling to make the counterweight heavy enough to support the motor. It would have been easier if the stream wasn’t running high, but Trent had to scrounge his rocks from the upper bank, and his supply grew steadily farther away as he worked. At last he called it good, and went back to the pickup to remove the motor.

The ground was soaking wet, even beneath the tree. He considered waiting for the rainstorm to blow over, but this felt like the kind of rain that could go on for days, and he knew he would go nuts with anticipation if he couldn’t test his idea before the day was out. So he took the tarp off the woodpile and laid it on the ground in front of the left rear wheel and slid under the pickup with his tools to begin removing the wheel, motor and all.

It wasn’t all that difficult. The motor was mounted to a couple of swing arms that kept it horizontal throughout the suspension’s range of travel, and the disk brake and the tire were both mounted to the same hub at the end of the axle that stuck out of the motor. He jacked up the truck to take the weight off it, supporting the jack on a flat rock scrounged from an outcrop at the head of the meadow and backing it up with a length of firewood wedged in next to it, then he simply loosened the bolts on the swing arms until the motor came free.

He left the tire mounted so it would support part of the motor’s weight. That way he could move it by just lifting the other end of the motor and rolling the whole works along, but he didn’t put it out on the logs yet. He still needed to figure out what to do for paddles, so the water would actually turn the wheel.

He had plenty of arrows. He supposed he could tie a bunch of them to the sides of the tire so the ends stuck out past the tread, and then tie beer cans with the tops cut off to the ends of the arrows. They wouldn’t hold much water, though, and when the motor was in braking mode, it would resist turning pretty hard. He would probably need something that held more water, like hollowed-out chunks of log. That would probably provide enough resistance, but it would be a lot of work to hollow them out. He needed something that was hollow already, and would hold some serious water.

A dozen slo-mo shells would do it, but the rising water had washed all the debris off the gravel bar where he’d gotten his helmet, and there weren’t any more dead ones in the meadow. There weren’t any live ones there today, either. They must not like flopping through mud. He would have to go out hunting for them to find any at all, live or dead.

The idea of killing a dozen animals just to provide scoops for his waterwheel wasn’t all that appealing, either. He decided he would rather walk down the valley a ways, following the stream and checking out any open ground he found along the way. It might even be easier to find what he needed today than on a dry day. Any slo-mos he found out in the open today were most likely going to be dead already, so at least he wouldn’t have to keep flipping them over like he had done yesterday.

He had taken off his armor while he was under the truck. Now he put it on again and stuck his head inside the camper. “I’m going for a walk downstream to look for empty slo-mo shells. Back in an hour or two.”

Donna had wrapped herself up in a blanket, but with the blue light from the screen on her face, she looked cold even so. She looked up and said, “Okay. Take the rifle.”

“It’s too rainy to be carryin’ that around. I’ve got the pistol; that’ll do.”

“All right. Be careful.”

He needed something to carry the empty shells in, assuming he found any. He tried to think what would work, but the only big container they had in the camper was a five-gallon water bucket, and that would only carry three or four slo-mo shells. They had some plastic garbage bags, but those probably wouldn’t hold up to the weight. They didn’t have a duffel bag or a laundry bag or anything like that. It was starting to sink in just how little equipment they did have, way out here in the ass end of nowhere.

They had a tarp. He could throw whatever he found in the middle of that and gather the ends to make a sack. That would have to do. He pulled it out from under the pickup, folded it as small as it would go, and set off to see what he could find downstream.