Death is Forever (28 page)

“Nobody connected.”

“Who was it?”

“I didn’t get close enough to see. But it was the station helicopter.”

She didn’t ask any more questions as she followed Cole down the baking dry wash to the place where they’d left the Rover. She was relieved to see the vehicle. Its burning interior was better than the unshielded rays of the sun.

Cole looked at the dark stains spreading out from the Rover. Even though he’d been expecting sabotage, the reality of seeing it was no less grim.

“Cole?”

“It’s just what it looks like,” he said roughly. “Radiator fluid.”

Silently she watched while he checked the Rover’s engine compartment, dashboard, and equipment cupboards.

“The son of a bitch was thorough,” he said, slamming the Rover’s door. “Not one bit of hose left, and no water to use in any case.”

“He took our water?”

“No. He took the food. The water he poured on the ground.”

She took a harsh breath. “The radio?”

“Gone. So are the maps.”

Her breath came out in a rush. She looked away, not wanting to show Cole how frightened she was. “I see. Now what?”

He looked at the blazing sky and then at the woman whose skin was pale beneath the flush of tropic heat.

“Drink your fill from the canteen, honey.”

“Shouldn’t I save it?”

“You’d be surprised how many people have been found dead with water in their canteens. Dehydration is like hypothermia. It saps your judgment before it kills you. Drink while you can. Thirst will come soon enough.”

Erin looked at the contents of the rucksack Cole had spread out on top of the thin survival blanket. He took the rock hammer off his belt. Without hesitating he set the hammer beside the steel pan, sample bags, and rock samples he’d collected. The thermal bag she carried film in lay nearby. The compass was beside the canteen he’d carried. So were matches, shovel, three boxes of shotgun shells, the shotgun itself, the knife in its wrist sheath, and several large, folded sheets of plastic.

As she watched, he kept pulling things from the rucksack and sorting them according to their usefulness as basic survival gear.

“How much ice is left in the chest?” he asked without looking up.

“None. It all had melted even before he ripped off the lid. He must have looked in, seen only the rack holding the film, and gone on to more important things.”

Cole grunted. “Is the film all right?”

“It should be fine. The canisters are tight.”

Quickly Erin sorted unexposed from exposed film. When she was finished, she began stuffing rolls of exposed film into a military-surplus hip belt. From the belt hung a variety of pouches made of camouflage cloth.

“Don’t bother with the belt,” Cole said. “It will just be excess weight. We can’t afford an ounce more than is absolutely necessary.”

“How long will it take us to get back here?” she asked, looking at the mound of exposed film.

“We can’t count on getting back at all,” he said evenly. “It’s seventy miles to the Gibb River Road. That’s if we fly. On the ground it will be farther.”

“How far away is Windsor station?”

“Fifty miles, give or take, if we follow the road. Less if we don’t. But there’s nothing between here and the station except two limestone ridges and cracking clay flats that won’t see water between now and the wet.” He began packing the rucksack. “Even if we did make it to the station, the bastard in the chopper would be waiting and we’d be in no shape to outsmart, outshoot, or outrun him. There’s a better chance of finding water between here and the Gibb River Road, and a hell of a lot better chance of finding help once we’re there.”

What Cole didn’t say was that their chance of survival was slim at best. No food, little water, and mile after rugged mile of empty country, the kind of land that would demand everything from them and give back nothing but more demands on their failing strength.

Erin looked at Cole’s bleak expression and knew everything he hadn’t said. Without a word she turned her back on the pile of film that had recorded her first, irreplaceable perceptions of the alien landscape that was the Kimberley Plateau.

“Any water left in the ice chest?” he asked.

“Some.”

“Pour it into the empty canteen that’s under the front seat. If you can’t do it without spilling, I’ll help.”

Before she finished transferring the ice chest’s water to the canteen, he came up to the Rover with the heavy rucksack in one hand and the shotgun in the other. He pulled on a khaki bush shirt and stuffed another into the rucksack. Then he watched while she carefully drained the last drops into the big canteen’s mouth. When she capped the canteen and handed it to him, he hefted its weight with surprise.

“Almost a half gallon,” he said. “Good.”

He didn’t mention how little of their daily requirement that amount of water was. He simply clipped the canteen to his webbing belt opposite the other large canteen he carried. It, too, held about half a gallon of water.

“Take off your canteen and belt,” he said, holding out his hand.

“I can carry it.”

“Take it off.”

“Cole—”

“No,” he cut in. “I have three times your strength. Hand it over.”

She looked into his hard gray eyes and knew arguing would be useless. Worse, it would waste energy. She gave Cole the canteen and dropped the belt in the dirt.

Automatically she turned to the Rover and pulled out her camera bag. The instant she realized what she was doing, she replaced the bag and let the strap slide from her fingers. When she turned back to him, she was empty-handed.

“I’m sorry,” he said, touching her cheek briefly.

“It was just force of habit. Since we can’t eat it, drink it, or kill with it, we don’t need it, do we?”

“No. Wing will replace everything you lose.”

She nodded.

But even if she survived to have Wing replace her camera equipment, nothing could replace the exposed film. She put the thought out of her mind, because thinking about it wouldn’t help.

Cole took a reading on his compass and headed up the dry streambed with an easy, long-legged stride that was neither fast nor slow. Erin followed, trying to ignore the sweat sliding down her body and the heat rising in sheets from the parched land.

After two miles he turned and headed for a black velvet shadow that lay partway up one of the limestone hills. After a steep climb, they reached the shadow. More alcove than cave, the overhang gave shelter and a good view back down the wash. Faded pictographs showed against the rough limestone. Tongues of soot rose where campfires had burned.

“Aborigines,” he said, glancing around. “A band must have camped here during the wet.”

She forgot about the heat as she looked at the pictographs. By reflex she reached for her camera, remembered, and had to be satisfied with thinking about how she would have photographed the images if she could have.

“We can’t be spotted from the air here,” Cole said. “We’ll be safe until dark.” As he turned away from the drawings he saw the expression of longing on Erin’s face. “If it makes you feel better, there are thousands of places like this scattered around the outback. This won’t be your only chance to photograph an old Aborigine camp.”

She nodded, wondering if he believed the implication of his own words—survival, not death. But she didn’t ask.

Their odds of living wouldn’t improve by talking about it.

“Looking at those hand designs is rather eerie,” she said.

“Holy ground.”

“Really?” She examined the pictographs with new interest.

“Every piece of landscape that’s the least bit different is sacred to the Aborigines. Every seep, every oddly shaped rock, everything that isn’t flat and spinifex or rumpled and covered with sparse gum.” Cole shrugged out of the rucksack and flexed his shoulders. “But we don’t need to worry about guests dropping in. This place hasn’t been used since white men landed down under.”

“How can you tell?”

“No broken bottles or beer cans.” Cole pointed to the rucksack. “Use that for a pillow. Sleep if you can. We’ve got a long night of walking ahead.”

“All night? Are you really that afraid of being spotted?”

“We’ll need less water walking at night and sleeping by day.”

She hesitated, then asked the question she’d told herself she wasn’t going to ask because the answers really wouldn’t change the outcome. “How long will it take to reach Gibb River Road?”

“Four days, if we’re lucky. Six days, more likely. The country gets rougher than hell in the last half, and we’ll be a lot weaker by then.”

“How much time do we have?”

“With only the water in the canteens, we’d be dry by this time tomorrow. By the day after, we’d be staggering.” He sat, leaned against the wall of the overhang, and pulled his hat down to cover his eyes. “If we get lucky, we’ll find an unmarked seep. If not, there are other ways.”

Before she could ask what he meant, he was asleep.

She closed her mouth and envied him that catlike ability to sleep whenever and wherever the opportunity offered. She didn’t think she would be able to sleep, but her body surprised her. Even the few miles she’d walked that day had drained her strength. Her last thought before she dropped off was relief that she wouldn’t have to face another hike through the brutal sunlight.

Erin didn’t awaken until she felt Cole stirring beside her. The quality of the light told her it was late afternoon. Pale, almost invisible lightning stitched through the dark gray sky. The river of clouds had become a seamless, seething lid over the land, holding in heat without bringing the cool sweetness of rain.

“You’re sure it rains here?” she said, swallowing to relieve the dryness in her mouth.

“Eventually. But not today. The clouds will be gone in a few hours. That’s just heat lightning.” He stood and held out his hand to her, pulling her to her feet. “We’ll make much better time while it’s still light.”

When he shouldered his rucksack, she followed him out of the rock shelter into the naked land. They walked.

The sun vanished with an abruptness that Erin found startling after Alaska’s long twilights. Even in darkness, heat still came up from the Kimberley’s ground in tangible waves. The humidity was high enough to be suffocating, but not high enough to preserve the moisture in her own body or to prevent her sweat from evaporating.

Cole walked steadily, reading his compass by flashlight until the clouds thinned and broke to reveal the glittering massed stars of the southern sky. The Milky Way was a tidal wave of distant light washing across a third of the sky. From various quarters of the horizon, lightning stabbed upward, looking hardly brighter than the stars. The moon added its silver glow.

Erin walked in Cole’s wake through spinifex and rocky scrubland. Their only rest came when he checked the compass against the stars or the black, uneven silhouette of the night horizon. More often than not, he chose to walk in dry watercourses despite the soft footing. In the dark, places where water had flowed were a lighter shade of black than the rest of the land and usually had less obstacles.

They drank the last of their water in the small, nearly cool hours of night.

By the time dawn exploded across the sky, Erin was stumbling from weariness. The land around them had changed a bit during the night. The hills tended to be steeper and separate rather than strung out in long, low ridges.

Cole took advantage of the light to walk more quickly. He kept to a hard pace through the increasing heat until he found a place where thin-leafed trees shaded a ravine at the base of a hill. He stretched the survival blanket between two tree trunks and lashed it in place, creating a canopy to shade them as they slept.

“Lie down in the shade,” he said. “Don’t move any more than absolutely necessary.”

He dumped the rucksack on the ground for a pillow, grabbed the shovel, and walked out until he was in a place without shade. He dug a hole three feet wide by two feet deep and lined it with leaves he stripped from the acacias and gums. He put his large tin mess cup in the center of the hole, spread one of the plastic sheets over it, and anchored the sheet with rocks. He placed a rock in the center of the plastic, making it sag to a point over the cup.

Without pausing he came back to the shelter, grabbed several more plastic sheets and went to work again. These sheets he wrapped around the ends of living tree branches, then carefully gathered the edges of each sheet until it made a bag with green, living leaves inside. He tied off the neck of each bag tightly and went back to the shelter’s welcome shade.

Erin looked up as Cole sank to the ground beside her. “What are they?” she asked, gesturing toward the shiny, clear bags.

“Stills. There’s a lot of moisture in leaves. We’ll let the sun work for us rather than against us for a change. Sleep.”

She licked her lips, wondering how she could feel so dry when the air was so muggy. It was only a brief moment of curiosity. Sleep slammed down over her like a tropical sunset. Just as consciousness spun away, she felt Cole rubbing sunscreen into her skin. She tried to thank him, but the effort was too great.

The next thing she knew, she was being shaken awake.

“Erin. Wake up, honey. Breakfast is on the way.”

The thought of food made her salivary glands contract painfully. She sat up and rubbed eyes that were gritty with dust and sleep.

“Breakfast?” she asked.

“You’ll have to work for it.”

“How?”

He pulled Erin to her feet. “See that?” he asked, pointing to a spot about fifteen feet away.

“See what?”

Then the snake moved, curling sinuously through the dry debris beneath a gum tree, hunting prey or simply a cooler place to rest.

She made an odd sound. “Breakfast, huh?”

“If we’re lucky.” He handed her a leafy branch as long as her arm. “Take this and keep him occupied while I circle around behind. Don’t stir him up, just hold his attention. He’ll be a lot harder to catch if he makes it to the rocks.”

“Is the snake dangerous?” she asked as he started out from the shelter.

“Only until I kill it. Then it’s food.”

She shook off the last of her lethargy and walked out from the shelter to head off the snake. Though it was late afternoon, the sun beat down through the clouds with savage force. She rattled the leaves at the tip of the branch against the dusty ground. The snake turned toward the motion with a muscular twist of its body.

“I’ve got its attention,” she said.

The reptile watched her with eyes like flakes of black glass. The snake showed no nervousness at her presence. Mulgas were the undisputed lords of the outback. For them a human being was a novelty rather than a threat.

“Don’t get too close,” he said.

“Look who’s talking.”

He didn’t answer. He just eased closer to the tail of the snake while Erin made small movements that kept the mulga’s attention fixed on her.

Suddenly Cole’s hand shot out and fastened on the snake’s tail. He jerked his arm, snapping the mulga like a bullwhip, breaking its spine and killing it instantly. He gave the snake a final snap to be certain, then waited.

Four feet of food hung limply from his hand.

Swallowing dryly, Erin reminded herself that protein was protein was protein. Her mind might know the difference between snake and sushi, but her stomach wouldn’t. Certainly snake couldn’t taste any worse than seal.

“There’s a lot of water in snake meat,” he said as he drew his knife from its sheath on his wrist. “If you don’t believe me, watch me skin it out.”

“No, thanks.”

“Don’t worry. After you cook it, the meat is white and tastes just like—”