Freedom Star

Chapter 16

Between the darkness and the rain Jon couldn't tell what the river was doing. For the first few minutes, he crouched at the back of the depression in the cliff face, catching his breath; but then his imagination got the better of him and he decided if he were going to drown, he at least wanted time to worry about it before it happened. He went to the edge and lay down on his stomach, reaching down the cliff with his arm as far as he could while pillowing his head on his other arm. He couldn't feel anything, and as the adrenalin-rush faded away, an immense tiredness took its place. Despite everything, he slept.

He woke to feel something cold tugging at his hand; it took him a long sleep-fogged moment to realize what it was: the river. It was only an arm's length below him--and still rising, though not as fast as before.

He scrambled back from the edge. So now he knew. He had only won a respite, not a reprieve. When the river finally surged into the depression, it would scour him out and send him spinning helplessly downstream, just like it did when Dar sent him plunging from the bridge-only this time the river was in flood, swirling and muddy and full of who-knew-what debris. He wouldn't last ten minutes.

For the first time in his life, Jon felt complete, total panic rising in him, like a different sort of river. Despite everything he had been through, he had never before felt so helpless, so completely lacking control over his fate. There was literally nothing he could do to help himself. He was naked, alone and trapped, and the enemy coming for him this time wasn't Dar, or even Carlson: it was nature itself: immense, implacable, impersonal. Jon crouched at the back of the cave, clutched his shaking knees to his shivering chest, and waited to die.

An indeterminate time later, as the sky began o lighten, water lapped at his feet, in a gentle, almost friendly fashion. He made no effort to pull back from it; where was there to go? Instead he waited for it to rise to his ankles, to his calves, and beyond. He waited, while the sky turned to gray; waited, until he could see the torrent outside the cave, choked with mud and trees and the occasional animal carcass; waited, panic long faded, with a kind of numb acceptance; and finally felt unbelieving hope as he realized that the water wasn't climbing up his body-in fact, it was receding.

As fast as it had risen, the flood fell. By noon, Jon could stand at the lip of the cave and look down a full metre to the water. By nightfall, the river had sunk to the base of the cliff, and the next morning, when he looked out, stomach growling, the river, though still muddy and swirling, was back in its natural course. But the brush in which he had tried to hide from the returning Soldiers had vanished, the plants ripped away by the water, a thick black layer of mud left behind. A rank, fetid smell rose from it, but Jon didn't have much choice; he couldn't go up, so he had to go down, and he couldn't wait until it dried, because it might never dry. The clouds still hung low overhead and an occasional spatter of light rain made him wonder nervously if the river might start to rise again. He had to get out of the canyon.

Besides, he was starving.

So he felt his way down the cliff backward, trying to find the handholds he had somehow found in the dark on his way up and surprised to find how far apart they were. I must have almost flown up this thing, he thought.

A metre or two above the riverbank his fingers slipped on the wet, slimy stone, and he fell, splatting on his back in the foul muck and floundering helplessly in it for minutes before finally gaining his feet, though the black mud released its hold on his body most reluctantly. He looked down at his naked body, now covered from head to foot in what looked and smelled like the bottom of a cesspit, and for the first time in days, he laughed out loud. "Revolutionary," he choked out. "Carlson scared of me. Boo!" Fresh gales of laughter engulfed him, so much so that he lost his footing and fell rear-end-first into the mud again, which only made him laugh harder.