Getting Back (35 page)

Australia continued to unfold ahead of them, vast, seemingly endless, but also steadily changing and ever more intriguingly beautiful. The season had pleasantly cooled and they felt more acclimated to living outside than in. They came through a region of artfully interspersed rocky knolls and forested valleys and then encountered flatter grasslands and scrub savanna again. The continent was becoming a mosaic of landscapes. As they traveled their party began to swell. Adventurers were wandering or camped in this wetter country, dazed and fearful, and the appearance of a large, safe, increasingly well armed group with a purpose and destination proved irresistible. Within two months after fleeing Erehwon they numbered eighteen in all, seven women and eleven men, including a second native Australian named Angus. Oliver seemed briefly stunned by this aboriginal competition for ownership, and then embraced his countryman like a long-lost brother. The two continued to share their survival skills and the others pooled information. It was beginning to feel like a pilgrimage, or a migration. The original quartet enjoyed the company of these newcomers but also privately talked nostalgically of the "old days" of a few weeks before, when they'd been on their own.

Angus claimed to recognize some of where they were. "We're nearing the great range that runs north to south," he told them. "And beyond that: the sea." His promise brought a murmur of excitement. The east coast had been everyone's goal since departure from civilization. It would be something to actually get there.

The growing group had developed an intense camaraderie. It came partly from their nightly sharing of tales of danger and trauma, confusion and shame. It also came because the group walked, ate, slept, and bathed together, and within days newcomers would seem more familiar in camp than had office mates who'd occupied an adjacent desk for years in the corporations of home. Soldiers and pioneers must bond the same way, Daniel thought. The sense of human community was novel: strangely missing in the far bigger society of United Corporations.

But while the new recruits were encouraging, the logistics of the trek were becoming more complicated. There were more people to feed, and the noise of their approach drove game animals farther away. Hunters had to be sent ahead or on the flanks to help bring in food and spot edible plants. People were beginning to instinctively specialize: hunters to get meat and scout, armorers to make weapons and tools, and then gatherers, cooks, menders, fire wardens. An easygoing youth named Rupert volunteered, despite inevitable ribbing, to each night mark out- and dig- a latrine. "Lack of sanitation will kill us faster than a wild bull or poisonous snake will," he said. A flag was fixed to indicate whether the facility was occupied, giving some measure of privacy.

With the added numbers their pace had slowed. Sometimes the group would camp two or three days to give time to hunt, treat skins, cook more ambitious meals, sleep, heal blisters, repair clothes, and socialize. The delay worried Raven, who feared the Warden might still be doggedly following, but Daniel believed they'd left the convicts far behind. How could they be found again in this immensity? The party did encounter a small gang of other wandering convicts one afternoon, but the predators fled from the sight of their greater numbers. The experience boosted their confidence. Surely they were safe! And they needed the rest from the relentless walking. It gave people time to bond. The dire nature of their predicament seemed to push people instinctively to friendship, flirtation, commitment, and experimentation. As a result the group bubbled, sparked, and occasionally boiled over with sexual chemistry as partners tried each other and then split back apart.

"It's like a cross between a soap opera and the Oregon Trail," Daniel concluded one night to Ethan. "This is so different than what I expected Australia would be, back when I planned to trek with just three friends."

"If we find many more companions we're going to have to start calling you the Warden," Ethan replied. There was no formal leader but the new recruits deferred to the direction of the initial group and its promise of having the magic to call for help. Unexpectedly, Daniel found himself making more and more of the decisions. There was something about him people responded to, even Ethan. As if he knew what to do. Even Raven noticed it. She said he was becoming more like her.

"God, I hope not," Daniel now said of the Warden jibe. "But that's a problem with bigger numbers, isn't it? Rules."

"We've got enough people now to make a real community on the coast while we wait for whatever." Ethan let his finger wave vaguely at the sky. "But it does pose organizational problems. I told you we were naturals for civilization."

"Can't we do better this time?"

"That's the test, isn't it?" Ethan stirred the coals of the fire, his voice low. "What will we do different when we do settle down to wait? How will we make decisions?"

"I don't know," Daniel said. "I just want to let people keep a sense of identity, instead of only identifying with their company or agency- or our new tribe."

"Maybe there's room here to do that."

"At least we seem to have eluded the convicts. I can't believe Rugard would still be following. Maybe he never left Erehwon."

"Or, if he did, we're going to break clear of the Cone so soon that his pursuit will become academic." Ethan glanced around. "I hope." They hadn't told the newcomers about the Warden, and didn't want to. They didn't want Rugard to become a new bogeyman, seeming to hide behind every tree.

"We've been meandering for months. I don't think we could find ourselves."

"Not unless he knows something we don't."

The convict had been nicknamed Wrench for the things he did to people's arms and legs when they didn't meet their obligations on time. Here in the Outback, his size had won him leadership of one of Rugard's scouting parties. As such he was drowsing in the shade of a ridge-crest eucalyptus, lazy but mentally restless. He'd thought it lunacy when the Warden had ordered them to chase the Outback marks across the desert, and greater lunacy when that smart-mouthed toad called Ico had led the Expedition of Recovery off on highways that seemed to go in the wrong direction. Even assuming the fugitives weren't already dead- birds pecking out their eyes five hundred kilometers back- what chance did they have of intercepting them on the other side of Australia? But Ico the Psycho, a nickname he'd inevitably been tagged with (his shrill protests assuring it would stick) had insisted that he could lead the Warden's men to a point ahead of the fugitives. Ico had predicted that terrain and old roadways might push them in this direction, toward a pass in what his dog-eared, oft-ridiculed map called the Great Dividing Range of Australia. The convicts believed the little bastard not because they thought he was really right, but because there was nothing else to believe.

Actually the journey hadn't been too bad. They'd found some wanderers to rob, shortening their own necessary search for food, and some women to forcibly enlist into what Rugard had jokingly dubbed their Cohort of Joy. They'd found wild cows and pigs and goats to hunt as they went east, whole rivers of clean water, and plague-emptied buildings to sleep in. The truth was, Ico the Psycho had brought them to a far nicer place than they'd come from, and whether they found the transmitter or not, Wrench wasn't about to go back to Rugard's desert dungeon. Screw that! Life was better here.

But unless he wanted to run off on his own, Wrench still had to humor the Warden by keeping watch for the fugitives. It was an easy, brainless job, but so far it had also been a futile one. The convict wished his boss would just give it up and enjoy this greener paradise, but Rugard had become steadily more obsessed with the transmitter, not less, turning ever more irritable and vicious. So Wrench had been posted here for a week, waiting for the bitch and her boyfriends to show up. He was bored beyond belief.

Except that Ico's suggestion did have a core of sense. There was a pass through the mountains that led down to a big lake, with a river canyon below the lake. The only easy way across the water was on the crest of the old dam that had created the reservoir. Anyone passing through came here, to the dam, and here Wrench would wait. And wait. And wait. Until the Warden tired of the game and called them in.

"Wrench! Somebody coming!"

He groaned. "If they're not carrying a damned communications satellite on their back, let them pass." The convicts had already robbed and killed two nitwits who'd stumbled this way. He was tired of it. Let the next ones go by.

"No, this is a big group! A regular army!"

Rivals? Cursing, he rolled upright to look, squinting at a group switchbacking down a hillside toward the dam. No army, but quite a few traveling together. Why? It was peculiar, and didn't match the four they were looking for. Then he looked harder.

"That one there," he muttered, pointing. "That's the woman, isn't it?" A slim, dark-haired woman strode steadily in the midst of the group. Raven, her name was.

"Where'd they get all those other people?"

"Or where did they get her?"

"She doesn't look like a captive. And I think I recognize some of the others."

Wrench wondered if the scouts on the other side of the canyon wall had stayed awake. "Didn't expect this many, but damn! Signal the others! It looks like Ico the Psycho was right after all." He grinned, wondering if he'd get some kind of reward. "We got 'em."

The dam was the most substantive relic of Australian civilization that Daniel's group had seen yet, and it was intact. The reservoir it had created was full, water lapping near the lip of the dam, and a small falls poured over the spillway gates at its middle. The wedge of concrete was of moderate size, its crest two hundred yards long and its downstream face thirty feet high. At its middle was a notch thirty yards long where the dam elevation dropped half the height of a man to a set of rusted spillway gates. It was here the reservoir water slid to the river below.

Before the plague the spillway gates were routinely opened and closed to control reservoir depth, electricity generation, and the flow of the river downstream. Disuse and rust had frozen them shut, corrosion eating into the steel to allow a spray of leakage around the gate edges. The reservoir had risen enough to top the old gates, the outlet water looking orange where it ran down the old steel. Bridging this sheet of water was an old wooden catwalk, connecting one end of the dam's concrete crest to the other. The dam and its catwalk made a bridge across the waterway, its top wide enough for Daniel's group to begin filing over two by two.

"Well, this is convenient," he remarked to himself, leading the way. Almost too convenient.

There was a small concrete blockhouse on the western dam crest, adjacent to the spillway gates. Its door had rotted to paper. Out of curiosity, Ethan kicked it down and went in. Wet concrete steps led down in the gloom to a cluster of gigantic gears and levers that had once controlled the spillway gates. The electric motors to do so were powerless, their electrical cables withered like dead vines. Amaya poked around the machinery curiously, fingering the levers.

"This must be a manual override," she said, pointing to a large wheel.

A short flight of wooden steps led up to the catwalk over the spillway. Daniel told the others to wait, mounted the steps, and stepped out onto the wooden bridge. It creaked and rocked slightly because its posts were slowly rotting, but it still looked capable of bearing human weight. He looked down at the river below the dam, flat and brown, flowing north through a thickly forested valley. At some point it must turn east through the mountains to the sea. Maybe they could follow the river to the coast.

But first to the other bank. "One at a time!" he called. "It's pretty wobbly!"

He went across gingerly. So far, so good. One by one the others began to follow, those having crossed the creaking catwalk waiting on the eastern half of the dam for the others to catch up.

The group was evenly split, half on either side of the spillway, when a rock suddenly sizzled out of the trees on the far bank and hit a recent recruit named Ned Putnam. He grunted in surprise, spun, and almost went over the lip of the dam before the others caught him. Everyone crouched in stunned surprise. The attack was so unexpected they had difficulty grasping what had happened.

The trees on the eastern shore hid their attackers. Ned was down on the concrete, cursing. "It might be broken," he hissed, holding his shoulder.

Daniel and some others quickly picked up a few random chunks of concrete that had eroded on the crest, and others anxiously pointed their spears. They felt exposed and vulnerable. Then three men stepped into sight, one letting a sling dangle menacingly from his right hand. It was the most ancient of weapons, the simple killer that had allowed David to topple Goliath. A stone was fitted into a long loop of leather, twirled around the head to gain momentum, and then released with a snap of the wrist. If it hit the head it could kill. The other two convicts had steel-tipped spears, crude swords, and the same kind of curved throwing sticks the aborigines had once hurled. It was a war party. The trio were tall, bearded, ragged, streaked with menacing daubs of white mud, and confident-looking. Not to mention familiar.

"Who the hell is that?" their first recruit, Peter, asked in bewilderment.

"I recognize them from Erehwon," Ethan muttered. "Rugard's clan."

"Who?"

"There's some convicts who know we have the transmitter," Daniel reluctantly explained. "We thought we'd left them far behind, but obviously we didn't."

Peter looked at the trio with alarm. "We've got the morally impaired after us?" he asked in disbelief. "We have to fight for it?"

"If we want to get back," Daniel replied grimly.