Getting back

by William Dietrich

  There was another metallic squeal, the complaint of corroded metal, and then a sudden bang. One of the spillway gates snapped open and a plume of water shot out from the crest of the spillway, carrying two women with it. Screaming, they hit the river below. The catwalk shuddered and, with a creak of its own and a snapping of timbers, it followed the two women off the top of the dam, toppling into the river with a titanic splash. The wood went under for a moment and then floated in a boil of foam, rocking away downstream. Shrieking with a combination of triumph and fear, more women jumped into the growing waterfall and slid down the face of the dam to follow their makeshift raft.

  Behind them there were more snaps of metal, a chain reaction of failure, and the spillway gates pried open wider, pushed by the force of the reservoir behind them. The roar of the unleashed flood was growing. Men boiled out of the gearhouse, shouting and waving their arms at their comrades behind the shields. Abruptly the gratings clanged down and the two defenders behind each one ran to the lip of the spillway. "Jump, jump!" Daniel cried. One by one, they obeyed him.

  Wrench and Gallo started to lead their men across the top of the dam.

  Raven hesitated at the edge of the spillway, eyes wide with excitement at the growing flood, the transmitter strapped to her belly.

  "These are your people, now," Daniel shouted to her above the growing roar of the water. "They've decided to put their trust in you. Don't let them down!"

  She looked at the heads bobbing downstream, thrashing after the makeshift raft. "I won't." Then she leaped.

  "Ayyyyyy!" Daniel glanced around. Wrench was charging at him with a wild cry, sword swinging over his head.

  It cut empty air where Daniel had been. He'd jumped too.

  There was the terrifying irruption of foam below, the endless seconds of free fall, and then the plunge into cold water and the buffeting of current until he could force his way back upward, gasping for air. All he could see was water. He began swimming downstream.

  Gallo and Wrench wavered to a stop at the two edges of the spillway, separated from each other by ninety feet of roaring flood. "Fire, fire!" the two squad leaders screamed. The convicts hurled spears and sticks but the fusillade was a pointless mistake: they were simply throwing away their best weapons. All they had to aim at was mist, and white water, and beyond it a series of heads swirling downstream like corks. One by one the fugitives were reaching the floating catwalk, accelerated by the growing flood.

  "Jump in after them!" Wrench roared in frustration. But his companions hesitated. The pounding of the unleashed water was getting more violent as the corroded gates were pried aside, the reservoir swirling toward the dam's open mouth with an ominous suck. And how would they fight in the water? Rugard's scouts began backing warily away from the spillway lip.

  The fugitives were already out of sight.

  Wrench and Gallo looked at each other across the gap, as impassable as an ocean. The lake behind was big and might take hours, even days, to drain itself back down to the level of the new opening. They howled in frustration. And then turned to try to follow as best they could along the steep, brushy banks on either side of the river, falling farther and farther behind.

  The energy that swept Daniel's party downstream was frightening in its power, and a narrower river canyon with more rocks might have resulted in serious injury to the members of his party. The reservoir water was cold, deep, and turbulent. But the valley below the dam was wide enough so that the pouring water had room to spread and run smoothly as it rushed downstream. The fugitives were mostly young, immensely fit after months in the wilderness, and good swimmers: none had come to Australia without that skill. So instead of being caught in a white-water death trap, Daniel's group was instead sped by a brownish current that was tidelike in its steady power. The wreckage of the catwalk became a life raft that supported most of the fugitives, though a few clung to random logs that had been picked up and carried downstream as well. The water moved so fast that the frustrated cries of Rugard's men were soon left behind. Then the pulse of the current began to slow, and by concerted effort the group clinging to the catwalk eventually managed to kick the structure to the eastern side of the stream so that it grounded on a sandbar. By that time they'd been washed down several miles.

  The shaken trekkers staggered ashore to collapse and steam in the sun, panting, and then roused themselves to unlash their belongings and sort themselves out. Surprisingly, few of their supplies had been lost: Raven's plan had worked. And besides cuts and bruises, there were no serious injuries. Even Ned had decided his shoulder was only hurt, not broken, by the slung rock.

  "Well, we crossed the river," Ethan spat. "Not quite the way we intended."

  The other fugitives were looking at Daniel with a mixture of triumph and stunned uncertainty. What now? He stood stiffly, took a deep breath, and faced them. Everyone was a bit dazed by the sudden confrontation but also exhilarated to have escaped: thrilled to have beaten this sudden foe, thrilled to still be alive. Come alive! Outback Adventure had promised. They had this day.

  Now they had a choice to make, and a hard one. If they were going to help him, he had to play to their desire for escape.

  "We've told you all that we think we have a way to get a couple of us back to where we came from," he began quietly. "And if the transmitter works they might just be able to expose this scandal for what it is and get the rest of us back as well. But to use the transmitter we were forced to flee with it from a convict community hundreds of miles to the west of here. After so much distance and time, we thought the convicts had given up any hope of pursuit, but obviously we were wrong."

  The others were watching him grimly. His vague promises of journeying to a point to seek help had seemed like deliverance, and now his admission that a rival group was still on their heels smacked of betrayal. It was like the misleading half-truths of Outback Adventure all over again, he knew. By now, they trusted no one.

  "We can't let this destroy us," he continued. "One of my original friends betrayed us in his desperation to escape. We can't let that happen again."

  "So what do we do?" Peter asked.

  "We've escaped for now. But they may find us again soon. That leaves all of you with a choice. You can stick with us in hopes we can elude our pursuers and try to call in some kind of rescue craft, once we get out from under this electronic cloud of jamming. That's always been a long shot, but it's our only shot. But if you come with us, we may end up in a bad fight- a desperate fight- trying to do it. Or, you can bail out now. If we split up you don't have any chance of getting back, but the group that is chasing us will probably leave you alone. Maybe." He stopped.

  "Risk death with you or stay marooned by ourselves," Peter summed up. "That's it, isn't it?"

  He nodded. "A bad choice, but we've never had very good ones, have we? I wasn't trying to keep anything from you, Peter. I just didn't want to worry you needlessly. If we can just signal for rescue, the convict pursuit becomes pointless. I hope."

  There was a gloomy silence.

  "And the only one guaranteed to have a ride out of here is her?" Iris clarified, pointing to Raven. "Why her?"

  He took a breath. "Because she's the one who told us about this chance. We're going to send her and Ethan to try to bring help. That was our original plan and we're not changing it now. Any fight over who gets to go would be fruitless."

  His followers digested all this. "Wish you were here- and I wasn't," Ned tried to joke.

  Jessica stepped forward to stand next to Peter. "Well, I'm not giving up my only chance of getting out of here to a bunch of damned convicts," she announced. "I'm sticking with Daniel."

  "Me too." Peter sighed. "If I'm going to die in Australia, it might as well be for a reason. At least with you guys there's a hope."

  "Be realistic, everybody," Daniel warned. "If it comes down to a fight it will be with people United Corporations deemed beyond rehabilitation."

  "In that case, we'd better start thinking
about some serious weapons," Ethan said. "Amaya, could you work on a flamethrower, please?"

  The others laughed, breaking the tension. Her ingenuity had become well known. There was a new fierceness to them since the dam, Daniel realized, a new confidence and resolve. They had a goal, and now they had the unity from sharing danger. One by one they began to stand. Unity like… United Corporations. No! Not like that!

  "Which way, mate?" Oliver asked, a little unsteady now.

  "Ollie, this really isn't your fight," Daniel said. "Or Angus's. I'll understand if you Australians want to bug out and leave it to us immigrants. Really."

  Angus shook his head. "You said we're all Australians now."

  Daniel glanced away, trying to hide the surge of emotion welling up in him. They were following! For desperate reasons, perhaps, but behind him, of all people. What would harridan Lundeen think?

  "This river eventually leads to the sea, of course, but because of that it's a little too obvious," Daniel judged. "They'll expect us to go that way." He pointed east, over a range of mountains. "So we'll climb. Do it the hard way."

  "Sounds like a bloody Outback Adventure!" Ned quipped, shouldering a pack.

  "I'd pay a year's salary for this experience any day!" Ethan chirped.

  "For people who ask why they do!" Jessica warbled.

  "And need their bleedin' heads examined," Peter amended.

  They headed east again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Australia had changed. The taut harshness of the Outback had given way to the soft contours of rounded hills and thick forest, cut by streams and interspersed by meadows and abandoned pasture. Old farmsteads had become frequent, the rotting and rusting houses half swallowed by eruptions of brambles. Wild cows, horses, pigs, and goats were frequently encountered. Sheep had disappeared, destroyed perhaps by roving packs of wild dogs. And now the first city was glinting on the horizon.

  Ethan sat next to Daniel as they rested in the grass of an east-facing slope, studying the abandoned towers. Ragged remnants of the building windows still caught the light of the sun. Somewhere, not too far beyond, must be the sea.

  "Daniel, I've decided not to go back," Ethan announced quietly as they let their eyes skip across the overgrown cityscape, searching for any sign of life in the distant ruins.

  "What?"

  "I've decided it would be better if you returned with Raven. Not me."

  "Why?"

  "I think you make a better fit."

  "It's your seat, Ethan. Your crash, your transmitter, yours by length of exile. We already decided this."

  "I don't want to go back." He shook his head, as if puzzled himself. "Not yet, anyway. I miss things, sure, but not enough that I need to get back right now. There's things I'd miss even more here."

  "Amaya."

  "Yes. And another thing."

  "What?"

  "This country. I'm falling in love with it too."

  They looked out across the rolling hills, blue with haze. Even in the underpopulated areas of the United Corporations world, roads curved, power lines strutted across the contours, and the invisible matrix of property lines and survey markers reminded how the planet had been parceled out. Here, everything was at the beginning again. No one owned anything. Everything still seemed possible.

  Daniel sighed. "I'd rather have you go and want to come back. Amaya would be a pretty good guarantee you wouldn't forget us here."

  "No, I'm beginning to think I could make a better life here, once we get past the convicts. Not out in the desert, no. But here we have wood and water and livestock and the remnants of a lot of technology. Not to mention land, and room, and freedom. It's beautiful here. In fact, it's the most beautiful place I've ever seen. The new Australians, like Raven said."

  "I've been thinking the same thing."

  "There you go then."

  "So now we're going to argue about who has to go instead of who has to stay?"

  He laughed. "We'd get plenty of volunteers, still. I'm just saying you make the most sense of any of us."

  "I can't go back, Ethan. I can't lead this group in a race to the coast and then abandon them."

  "You wouldn't be abandoning them, you'd be saving them, or at least giving them a choice of which world they want to live in. And you'd have far more influence over Raven than I would: you two together could get to people in power, maybe. She'd listen to you."

  "No she wouldn't. She doesn't want anything to do with me."

  "Nonsense. She's haunted by you. You haunt each other."

  "Now you sound like Amaya."

  "Amaya is smarter than any of us. You know, she'd take you over me, if she could."

  "That's crazy."

  "No it isn't. And it doesn't worry me. Because this connection between you and Raven is as obvious as gravity and as weird as… love. Not simple attraction so much as entwined destiny, I think. Everyone can see it. And somebody has to go, Daniel. Somebody has to take the story back. If Raven has to be one of them, the next most obvious choice is you. Start thinking about it, please."

  "She keeps defending United Corporations."

  "She keeps defending herself. Trying to live with herself. She'd love you for accepting her for what she is. And helping her to become what she wants to be."

  The city was called Gleneden, and it was one of the New Towns that United Corporations had erected around the globe to rationalize the distribution of its workforce and maximize the efficiency of resource extraction: in this case, minerals in the foothills of the Great Dividing Range. They approached the town on the raised deck of an expressway, the pavement littered and cracked but the underlying structure sturdy enough to last for centuries. A few abandoned vehicles sat on the roadway shoulder, their shells rusting through and their glass imploded, the fragments clustered on rotting seats like drifts of diamonds. Trees had grown up to embrace the causeway railings so the bridge deck seemed to float on the forest canopy, and birds sounded an alarm and glided ahead of them in a startled weave, announcing this unexpected reappearance of humans. More flocks exploded off the derelict towers, wheeling in consternation. Then the avian inhabitants settled down and Gleneden was quiet again. In the distance down an empty avenue, a wild dog loped away.

  "What if we see bodies?" Iris worried. "I don't want to see bodies."

  "I don't think there'll be anything left by this time," Daniel reassured. In truth he was unsure, and uneasy at the thought himself. He didn't want to find buildings of bones.

  "I don't think we should go in at all," Raven said.

  They ignored her. It was curiosity more than need. They were in too much of a hurry to thoroughly explore or salvage anything in Gleneden, but the roads they were using to get ahead of Rugard led them to the New Town and they'd all quietly wondered how much remained. Or how much had been lost.

  As they entered they saw that many stores had been looted and a few buildings had been torched. Yet taken as a whole, very little had been destroyed in the panic that accompanied the plague, and it was only the obvious hollowness of the towers and emptiness of the streets that proved disquieting. Everyone was subdued, morbidly wondering what it must have been like to have a civilization- in all its complexity and anxious energy and optimistic enthusiasm- suddenly snuffed out. Careers, romances, dreams, and regrets: all suddenly gone, rendered insignificant, by the breath of bioengineered plague.

  The planned and hastily erected community was a snapshot of early twenty-first-century architecture, its retro style tempered by cost-conscious design and its warmth compromised by the demands of transportation. Human-scale pedestrian malls were backed by car-dictated parking lots, and tower villages were separated from each other by a moat of expressways and empty, overgrown lawns. Faded and streaked billboards and powerless neon announced sales of products that no longer existed. Directional signs pointed with names that were now obsolete. The architecture and layout were as precise as the geometrical design of a computer chip, and just as inhuman. Without p
eople, it was just a collection of boxes. Instead of human skeletons they found automotive ones, the metallic carcasses of cars scattered now like corroding bones. The pavement had cracked and plants had rooted, spreading across the detritus of leaf litter and dust that had accumulated atop the impervious layer. There were vines and scrubby weeds and the buzz of insects, all announcing that the inhabitants of Gleneden were dead.

  Daniel realized the desolation was slowly making him angry. "These people were abandoned just like we were," he said. The group had stopped at an intersection, instinctively huddling together.

  "Left with no hope at all," Amaya added.

  The quiet was gloomy.

  Raven looked irritated, as if this journey through a dead city was designed as an affront. "They weren't abandoned, they were quarantined," she corrected. "There was no cure, so it was imperative the plague not jump to another land mass. It wasn't ruthless, it was… necessary." She looked around grimly at the empty office and condominium towers.

  The trekkers regarded her with distaste. "And that pragmatism is what you worked to protect," Daniel said.

  She bit her lip. "It's cruel to individuals. I don't deny that."

  "And now you're one of those individuals. Outcast like we are."

  "Yes."

  "Think of the souls that were lost here, Raven. The individuals. How long would it take you to write down their names? This place is a sin. A crime."

  "Don't you think I see that! But think of the souls that were saved elsewhere by this abandonment, or are saved every day by an economic and political system you think is so heartless." She wasn't going to back down. "Think of the billions that have tolerable lives because of the United Corporations order you call stultifying. This tragedy is an embarrassment, but it doesn't discredit that system, Daniel. It underlines its necessity. This shows how fragile all of human society is, how thin the civilized and technological veneer is that keeps out the darkness. That's what I've worked to protect."

  "This wasn't caused by a breakdown of civilization! It was caused by its culmination! How can you defend the scientific arrogance that led to all these deaths?"