Getting back

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 again! 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.

By early afternoon, even Amaya was ready to call a halt. They stood on one of the tallest dunes yet, a fifty-foot-high drumlin, and felt like shipwrecked sailors adrift on a sea of sand. The desert looked endless.

"We can't cross this," Amaya admitted. "We don't have enough water."

"Maybe Ico was right," Daniel speculated. "It does seem to get drier, not wetter, the farther east we go. Maybe Outback Adventure lied to us about that too."

"No, it gets better near the coast," Raven said. "They told me."

"Why do you believe anything they say?"

"Because they've made a better world than this one."

"Come on, Raven. Were you really happy there?"

"Happiness is a luxury. I was… useful."

"Well, survival isn't a luxury," Ethan said. "The plain truth is that we really don't know anything. Nothing useful. That's what's going to kill us. The plain truth is that, essentially, we're lost."

"So what do we do?" Daniel asked. "Go back to the road? To go where?" He thumped the transmitter; they'd taken turns carrying it like a baby. "We need to go that way if you want to use this."

Raven was looking back westward uneasily, a growing wind from that direction blowing back the fan of her hair. The horizon was hazy, the place they'd come from losing all distinction. "Maybe our decision has been made for us."

The others turned. "Rugard?" Amaya asked anxiously.

"No." Raven pointed at the dark cloud swelling there. "Where we need to go right now is off this crest to some kind of shelter."

"Shelter? From what?"

"From that." They looked to where she was pointing and realized it was difficult to tell where the land stopped and the sky began. "I think a sandstorm is coming."

The storm rose over them like a rust-colored cliff, its edge a shadowing overhang. The highest tendrils of dust sprinted ahead of the main wall of sand like out-runners, pushed by hot winds up high. The fugitives sprinted over the dunes back the way they'd come, retracing their own footprints until they reached a rocky ledge a half kilometer away that erupted through the dunes like an exposed root. The sandstone had no cave or hollow but did offer a rib of stability among the soughing sands. Something to anchor to! They skidded down to its base, shed their packs, and crouched, waiting.

The sky got darker and darker. "And we paid to come here," Ethan said.

"I didn't," Raven replied.

The tempest curled over them like a breaking wave and then broke with dark fury. Its shriek ended all conversation, filling their ears with a kind of rasping static. The sand stung like needles and blotted out their sight. They hugged the broken rock and each other, wincing at the abrasion and struggling for breath. Their clothes snapped like flags. While their hollow offered some shelter, the fold of ground also confused the wind so that sand blasted at them from all directions, swirling and pricking. More sand sluiced off the crest of the outcrop, raining down on them like a dry shower. Periodically they struggled upward, pulling their packs with them, to avoid being drifted in by the blowing grains. The adventurers gagged for breath through rags hastily tied around their heads like makeshift bandannas. It felt like they were suffocating in an eerie red twilight. No inch of them was free of grit.

Then the worst of the onslaught was over almost as suddenly as it had come. The wind dropped abruptly as the front of the storm blew on. The sand fell out but the air remained filled with lighter dust, a swirling orange fog. Shakily they stood and untangled themselves, heaving off accumulated sand with a twist of their backs. The dark mass of the storm swept eastward, the desert behind it seeming to smoke. They were left looking like clay statues, coated from hair to boot.

Ethan spat, trying to clear his mouth of grit. "I want my money back, Raven."

The others laughed.

"I want every red cent. With interest."

"It's a small price to come alive," Amaya replied for her, shaking herself like a dog. "Though I wish it would buy me a shower."

"Don't say that!" Daniel warned. "You'll bring the damn floods back."

"I'd say we're about due for a forest fire," Ethan corrected, glancing about with mock trepidation. "Not to mention locusts, earthquakes, tornadoes, and a tsunami wave. Let me check the itinerary." He pretended to thumb through a brochure.

"I can't believe people really lived here," Raven said. "Heat, flies, dust. See, this is what I'm talking about, Daniel. This is the alternative. United Corporations is big and impersonal and bureaucratic and routine, but it also saves us from squalor. It's understandable to be romantic about the outdoors, sure, but this is the reality."

"No it isn't," he spat, trying to clear his mouth of dust. "This is no more representative of wilderness than a slum is of civilization. This desert is the reality you sent people to, but Australians didn't live here. They lived… somewhere else. So could we."

"Not comfortably!"

"Spiritually. Contentedly. Earnestly."

"We're redheads, Raven!" Amaya shouted to interrupt the arguing, swirling her hair so a plume of dust shot off it. "Outback chic!"

"Hey!" The others put their arms up against the flying grit. Amaya twirled away from them, dancing along the rock wall and narrowly dodging an unstable dribble of sand that drained downward. It was a relief to get away from those two! She came to a corner, laughing giddily as she rounded it, and then stopped as if she'd hit a glass wall.

"Okay, glamour girl!" Daniel called. "Which way now?"

Slowly, Amaya backed up and lifted her arm to point past the corner of the cliff. Her voice was quiet, but it carried clearly in the dryness of the now-still air. "Let's ask him."

The newcomer was as shrouded in dust as they were. He strode along the base of the outcrop in long, skidding strides that sent his tattered range coat flapping. The stranger had fled to the outcrop for shelter as they had, Daniel realized, and was as surprised as they were at this meeting. But not intimidated. Their huddled manner reassured him and he marched ahead, his cracked lips widening in gritty welcome.

"Now look what the wind blew in!" He looked at them with bright dark eyes from beneath a greasy bush hat. "Some of the good ones, I'd venture. G'day to the mud people, then!"

"Do you recognize him?" Daniel asked Ethan quietly.

"No. I don't think he's with the Warden."

The man squinted at Ethan. "I'm not with anybody, mate! Though I'm wondering where the likes of you are coming from, that always wants to be with me! For a long time, nothing. Then people here, people there. I spies on more than ever spy on me. Christ! Bloody crowded, it's getting. I come out here to get away from them all, and still I meet you!"

"We drop out of the sky," Ethan said dryly.

"Well, you brought a lot of dirt with you this time, didn't you!" the man replied, squinting up at an atmosphere still brown from dust.

"Who are you?" Raven asked.

He considered. "Why Oliver, I think. Who are you?"

"My name is Raven."

"Oliver is what I remember. Though to a pretty lady like yourself, just Ollie, I suppose. I'm the proprietor."

"The what?"

"The owner! The inheritor! This land is mine, by right of first possession! So don't get any ideas, now! I don't care how damn many of you there are!"

Daniel glanced at Ethan. This one had been in the sun too long.

Amaya was looking thoughtful. "You didn't come with Outback Adventure, did you… Ollie?"

"Outback what?"

"And you're not a convict, either. Not a moral-impaired."

He straightened himself up. "As straight as a ruler, missy. I believe in the law."

"So, where did you come from?"

He looked impatient. "Now that's what your kind never understands. I didn't come from nowhere. I'm just here. On walkabout, you see."

"Walkabout?"

"The aborigines did it," Raven said quietly. "Sort of like a native American spirit quest. Go out alone into the wilderness to wander and survive and find a spirit. Magic."

"Like the old prophets," said Daniel.

"Like us," said Ethan.

"No, not like you," Oliver objected. "You're no abo, I can tell. Me, I've got some of the blood. I can hear the old ones when the wind blows. Heard 'em just now."

"How long have you been on walkabout, Oliver?" Raven asked.

He shrugged. "All my life."

"Do you remember the time before the Dying? Before the plague? When there were cars? Buildings? Other people?"

He looked troubled. "I dream it, sometimes. That's what I look for, missy. Not that I've ever found it."

"Great God," Ethan whispered. "He's a damned survivor. Somehow, he's immune."

Raven nodded at Oliver encouragingly. "And have you ever looked to the east? Ever looked where the sun comes up?"

He turned to look in that direction, his eyes bright in dark hollows under the dust like the mask of a raccoon, his stubble beard gritty, his body overclothed in the vagrant manner of someone who had no other way of carrying his belongings. "A bit. No different than here."

Their spirits sank.

"Unless you go to the wet part. Hard walking, some of that. Too many trees."

Raven brightened. "You've been there?"

"Oh yes. I've been everywhere. Have to, when you're the only one."

"Could you take us there?" She pointed.

"What? Across the sand? Are you crazy, missy?"

She looked confused.

"This is the bloody desert, right? No water here. We'd die, we go out there." He looked at them as if they were daft.

"Where then?" she asked in despair.

"Up to the mountains, the way I was going," he said impatiently. "Then east. You can find water up there along the ranges."

Their smiles cracked their dust-covered faces in an eruption of hope. "Ollie, we're lost," Raven said carefully. "Can you show us the way to the mountains? Show us how to get east?"

"East!" He considered a moment, scratching his beard. "Why east? Of course, then again, why not? I could go that way I suppose. What's east, I wonder?" He squinted at them. "Eh? What in the devil makes it so important to go that way?"

"Our home, Ollie. We're lost, and we want to get home."

"Home! Ah, well. That's what I'm looking for too."