Getting Back

Everything he knew was useless now.

There was a cold clarity to that realization, a crystallization of hopelessness that in its own odd way was bracing. It was the first coherent thought to penetrate Ethan Flint's panic in some time. He acknowledged, with an acceptance that was calming, that he was probably doomed.

The cries of pursuit were growing closer. The heave of Ethan's chest and pounding of his heart had quieted enough to hear the sound drifting across the desert, its harsh rasping reminding him of the caw of crows. He'd grown up with the urban birds, watching them multiply on songbird eggs until they flew across the endless rooftops like plumes of smoke, and they spoke in a language hard and aggrieved. It was a relative of that sound the fugitive heard now: human calls that were shrill, excited, and without remorse. It was a yipping designed to induce fear and at first Flint's brain had screamed the need to think so urgently that it drowned out every other thought. Now his peril was being more rationally- more grimly- absorbed. He was being hunted, but why? By whom?

The day had climaxed into an oven of punishing heat, the air so dry that Ethan seemed hardly to sweat. He understood this was an illusion. He was parched and rapidly dehydrating, despite his knowledge of how dangerous such a condition could be. There was so much he'd memorized before coming to the desert: the proper salt balance, his necessary caloric intake, the dimensions of a solar still, or how to splint a bone or identify an edible plant or make fire with a lens. He'd sought to be an aboriginal engineer, a wilderness technician. A lot of good it was doing him now! The plane crashed, his friends dead, his carefully chosen gear a growing deadweight. And now this unexpected pursuit. When running for your life you don't have much time to index-search the precepts of Wilderness Comfort on disk, he observed wryly. His peril would be funny if it wasn't so frightening.

Perhaps it was a bad dream. Certainly Australia seemed unreal. The sand was too red, the sky too blue, the desert brush a vivid, improbable green. Like a children's coloring book. The landscape shimmered and danced, its insubstantiality matching his sense of being trapped in a nightmare. But the pain was real. His head ached and every attempt to rest gave the flies a chance to find him again. Their buzz was as tireless as the sun.

The impossibility of his situation seemed so enormous that he had difficulty processing its logic. He was a sheeter, slang for a computer engineer who matrixed corporate spreadsheets into four-dimensional game theory, and his whole life was built on mathematics. He was an artist of the rational, his boss had praised him. A wizard, a master, a lord of the logarithms. Ethan had swaggered through code like Daniel-fucking-Boone. It was all worth squat right now, a fact that seemed cruelly unfair. Shouldn't all his work, all his education, and all his technological expertise give him some kind of edge? No. Of course not. Cops, credentials, resumes, diplomas: thousands of miles away. And he'd asked for this! Paid a small fortune to do it! Enormously funny, really. A tremendous joke on him. Clearly something had gone monstrously wrong- so nonsensically and outrageously wrong that he thirsted for not just water but retribution. Oh, what rank incompetence this confirmed among the bastards who'd sent him here! What lies they'd told by not telling him enough! If he got home he'd…

What?

Somebody would listen, wouldn't they?

If he got home.

Ethan glanced back. His glimpse of his pursuers produced an instinctive shock of fear. There was an animal wildness about them, a shedding of restraint, that was as unbound and tangled as their hair. He was so disoriented! Drugged for the flight, awakened in wreckage, the harried pilot who unstrapped him displaying none of the cool aplomb he'd come to expect. The aviator had punched out, parachuted down, and moved in anxious jerks, desperate to get away from the wreckage that smoked like a beacon. The plane had broken into two parts, the forward section with his dead friends skidding to the far side of a low rise. Ethan had wanted to go there but the pilot refused. "You don't want to see your friends."

Instead the rattled aviator had unscrewed a tail panel and unbolted an orange-colored electronic box, cursing as he struggled with the tools. Then he brusquely jammed the added weight into Ethan's already-stuffed pack. "This is what's going to keep us from having to walk to the beach," the man had explained gruffly. "If I can get the rest. Wait here." Ethan waited as the pilot trotted toward the nose, and when he'd become bored sitting in the heat and sand and finally trudged up the rise, thinking he was hallucinating a curious murmur of voices, he'd seen a swarm of scavengers who looked like urban groundlings. They'd pinned the pilot against the blackened fuselage like a trapped rabbit, their movements quick, their tone mocking, and their skin brown and hard as bark. "Get back!" they'd howled at the pilot. So Flint had run before he'd fully realized he was running, confused by the impression of faded synthetics and wooden spears, wire decorations and ragged hair, a melding of Stone Age and Information Age: twenty-first-century Huns.

Now he could hear their crowing. Getting closer. Drawing near.

Ethan was so tired. His feet felt made of concrete and he glanced down to check if the sensation was literally true. No, made of clay. The designer swirls of his Orion Supra boots had disappeared beneath a sheath of red dust, the laces ragged already. My, they'd been striking shoes! The urban boutique had been designed to look like one of the lost canyons of the Colorado, its walls sprayed with gunite and its light mimicking the desert sky, painting the rock with a day's rotation every hour. The boots had rested in a cleft beneath reproduced Indian petroglyphs, their sinuous curves caressed by a red beam of laser light emanating from the eye of a robotic eagle. The effect was as artful as a museum display and despite their ludicrous price he'd bought them instantly. The damn things still hurt, however, and they left gridded prints that mimicked the Manhattan street system, a conceit he'd thought cleverly ironic at the time. Now his tracks seemed as obvious as a sidewalk. He had to get out of the dirt and onto bare sandstone, in the approaching hills.

The thought of shedding the boots did not occur to him.

He did sling off his pack in a regretful acknowledgment that he was carrying too much, grunting in relief as it thumped down into the dust. Its colors had gone red as well. Time to lighten.

The task was painful. He'd spent months assembling this gear, web-scanning outdoor advice, downloading lists, and even shopping in person instead of electronically to signal his seriousness. This wasn't a wuss weekend of a guided trek in Patagonia or Nepal, dammit, this was real. The last wilderness! The toughest test left on the face of a fast-shrinking earth! The weeks of preparation had given his life an edge he'd never experienced before. Wilderness! He'd demanded the bottom-line best because it was his friggin' life that was on the line out here, by God, and he paid top dollar for it. Beautiful stuff, virtual jewelry of the outdoors, scratch-resistant, waterproof, shining. Now he had to leave it? Oh, the outrage he'd express if he got home!

He threw the computerized Global Positioning System out first. A week's wages, and so far it had delivered nothing but static. Baffling.

The laser range finder worked well enough but it only depressed him to learn how far away the distant hills really were. He abandoned that too. Both were left in open view: maybe such expensive toys would slow his pursuers down.

After two hundred yards he stopped and considered again.

The palmtop solar computer went next, its dietary calculations confirming what he already knew- that he was hungry- and its Library of Congress memory cache still entirely untapped. With greater regret he threw out the Symphony-Pod and headphones, the cellular receiver for satellite news, the foil solar oven, and the coffee grinder with wind-out antenna and stamp-sized TV. Pricey, precious stuff, designed to give his challenging trek a fringe of fun. Now it was metallic junk he'd trade for a liter of water. He sipped the last he had- a half swallow- and heaved on the pack again. Noticeably lighter, he thought bitterly, and none too soon: the faint whoops were drawing closer. He set out again at a half trot, climbing toward the cracked, polished rocks of ancient hills. They shone like cooked meat.

Despite his anxiety Ethan was slowing, the heat leaching his Health-Plus conditioning. Water was the problem, his throat thick, head light. A burst of effort, a long drink. After that, maybe, he could hide.

Figures flickered through the scrub below, his discarded gear eliciting caws of triumph. Ethan didn't know if his hunters wanted the gadgets or regarded his droppings as a kind of bleeding. They loped like wolves, burdened with nothing, and he conceded he was still carrying too much. But what more could he afford to lose?

At a rock overhang he heaved off his pack again. There was little choice but to jettison necessary items and circle back for them later. The tent, the Spider-Fiber hammock, the sleeping bag, the Duraflex cookware, the fuel cannisters, the battery packs. He yanked them out with furious jerks of his arm, angry at the waste. A change of underwear, his camp shoes, his digital recorder. All abandoned, just to get away. How he wished for a gun! But that was against the rules, wasn't it? Everything was against the rules.

He pulled out the orange-painted metal box the pilot had insisted he carry. Heavy as a shot put, dense as stone. This would get them back? He was a gadget freak but the instrument was unrecognizable. A switch, a button, a few socket ports. He flicked the switch back and forth, punching the button. Nothing. Well, the pilot said it wouldn't work by itself. Ethan hesitated only a moment and then heaved, watching the box kick up a spurt of dust before it tumbled into a ravine. Good riddance.

Then he started upward again, studying the surrounding hills. All he had to do was outrun them, hide, and come back. He was smarter than they were, right? He'd always been smarter than almost anyone he knew. So what insanity had brought him here in the first place? What was he trying to prove?

That he could survive, he reminded himself. That he could go into the wilderness by himself, face life at its most fundamental and formidable, and prevail. It would validate his existence as something more than a cog in a global machine.

Had he been seduced? Drawn into this place by a commercial come-on full of bland reassurances, peppy encouragement, and appeals to his own vanity? Or had he deliberately surrendered his head to his heart in order to break free of the logical prison his career had become, essentially making the decision to come here long before he'd heard of this place? He'd run to a continent that promised respite from contemporary anxieties and monotonous routine, a refuge from the tangled demons of his id. Maybe fear had brought him here. Or some pathetic dream of freedom. Another joke: he wasn't sure himself.

Ethan realized dimly that he was bleeding. The scrub was thorny and the grass pricked as he pushed through it, like a stuttering stab of electricity. Everything seemed hard and angular here: the rocks, the bushes, the light. As rough-edged as the city but in an entirely different way. Even the dirt was unwelcoming. Alive with ants.

He'd give anything for a drink of water.

He sensed more than saw the flicker of movement at the periphery of his vision. It was on the ridge above and disappeared as soon as he registered its presence. Ethan glanced wildly about. The calls had stopped, he realized: was it because his pursuers had fallen back? Or because their net was drawing tighter? He began to trot faster, his breath a saw against his throat.

There it was again! A silhouette on the crest of the ridge above, running easily, checking his location and then disappearing. Christ, the pursuers were even with his own position! They hadn't slowed to pick over his things at all!