and that. Daniel was transfixed. Finally she finished and waded to the shore to slip into her underwear and walk back to camp. She paused a minute and looked across the pool as if staring directly at him, then slipped away into the dark. He waited ten more minutes and then followed. She'd retired into her tent. He slipped into his own bedroll, looking up into a night sky that seemed like a pool of dark water itself.
The next day was long and hot, and the following evening they were on a scrub plain and couldn't find even a likely place to dig. They nursed what water they had carefully, sprawled on the red earth. After a few minutes Tucker sprang up again. 'Ants! I'm on a damn nest!' He moved to a new spot, searching the ground carefully. 'Some campground,' he grumbled.
'All we can do is sleep as best we can and push on,' Daniel said.
The dryness was beginning to be discouraging. He felt sunburned, insect-bitten, and grimy, and had yet to get close enough to an animal to successfully kill it. He knew he hadn't been patient enough but didn't want to hold up the group to take the time necessary to learn how to hunt. At some point, though, they would need the food- even Ico. Daniel mused about making a bow and arrow, but it sounded difficult and he knew the aborigines hadn't bothered even when shown them by visiting tribes; their spears and throwing sticks and rocks had been adequate to bring down game. All he was lacking was skill.
'We'd better walk tomorrow until we find water,' Ico said. 'Walk and pray for rain.'
They hiked on the next day through the midday sun, conversation trailing off into numbed silence under the pounding heat. Red dust puffed up from their footfalls. The morning's birds disappeared and the desert was as still and radiantly hot as an emptied parking lot. Nothing moved except the flies, no breeze blew, and there was no sound except the creak of their gear, the trudge of feet, and the relentless buzz of the insects. They joked halfheartedly about missing beer, or air conditioning, or a winter blizzard, but after a while the jokes seemed lame. The liberation from noise and humanity was beginning to seem oppressive. It seemed like they'd been walking forever and had encountered only a vast nothing; that they were no closer to finding whatever it was they were looking for than they had been in the city. It was becoming harder and harder to pretend their outing was a good time.
It was sunset when they finally came to another riverbed, this one broad and shallow in a valley so imperceptibly sloped that they hadn't realized they were in one. There were no standing pools, no likely bends, and a test dig yielded nothing but dry sand. They slumped around the hole wearily.
'We're exhausted,' Amaya said. 'We'll have to ration what we have and search more carefully in the morning. We'll find a place for a well like last time.'
'What if we don't?' Tucker asked.
She brushed her hair back from a dirty cheek, tired. 'We will. If it was going to be easy, there would be no point in coming here.'
Daniel nodded at her. He'd found himself looking and thinking about her differently since seeing her at the pool, and even though he hadn't said anything about it, he thought she noticed. She turned her head away shyly.
'This is fucked, you know that?'
Ico's complaint was ignored. What could they do?
He persisted. 'I mean, dying of thirst was not a part of the brochure that I remember.'
'Ico, stuff it, okay?' Daniel said with irritation, turning to unstrap his bedroll. He was tiring of the little man's attitude. 'We're all hot and tired and thirsty.'
'Maybe we're doing something wrong. Maybe we're going in the wrong direction.'
'You want to walk away from Exodus Port?'
'I just want a drink, man. Doesn't it ever rain?'
'It does up there.' Tucker pointed. To the north, lightning flickered in the dusk. They heard the distant growl of thunder. 'Maybe we'll get a storm down here.'
Ico stood and looked to the north hopefully. 'Hey! Rain! Come this way!' He waved his arms. 'Yoo-hoo!' He turned to the others. 'We just need to think as well as walk, that's all I'm saying.'
'So think, don't complain.'
Ico watched the luminous horizon, rumbling like an artillery barrage. 'If rain comes, we should put out some containers to catch it. And a ground sheet.'
'Now you're an optimist again.'
He grinned. 'In this godforsaken place? I'm not stupid, Tucker. Just desperate.' He bent to his pack. 'Just in case we get lucky, though, I'm going to put out every dish I have.'
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Daniel's exhausted dreams were so turbulent that at first Tucker's warning cry seemed to come from the miasma of his nightmare.
In his sleep he was lost on a vast white plain. It was as flat as a piece of paper and crisscrossed with his own tracks. His footprints led off confusingly in all directions and he was uncertain if the whiteness at his feet was sand or snow. There was an ominous rumbling in the distance. Daniel was overwhelmed by a feeling of sad uncertainty, of having made a fatal wrong turn, and the resulting dread was threatening to paralyze him. Before he could decide what to do, however, Tucker's cries became more insistent. Finally they blew the vividness of his dream into the shards of dark reality and he opened his eyes. It was night in Australia, black and confused.
'Get up!' Tucker was roaring. 'Get up, get up! It's flooding!'
The big man was dragging something uphill. It was Amaya's tent, Daniel realized, and the woman was yelling inside it. Then the horizon flashed and in the lightning's lurid blast he saw trees shaking wildly and the glint of something wet pouring toward him like a chocolate slurry. It was as if the land had risen and was being shaken toward him in undulating waves.
Flash flood!
Daniel's bedroll had the grace of being zipperless, and he was out of it and scrambling for higher ground in an instant, instinctively dragging his bedding with him. A breaking wave of muddy water was pouring down the dry river bottom to devour their camp. As he surmounted the bank and grasped the trunk of a tree, lightning flashed again and he saw the water strike something angular and carry it off. There was a muffled shout. Ico's tent! In numbed fascination, Daniel watched one of the containers that had been put out to catch some raindrops being swept away in the current.
The wall of water had appeared out of nowhere and now it roared by with a furious gush of rolling stones, pitching logs, and jabbing branches, devouring everything in its path with the noise and clumsy power of a medieval army. The sound was overwhelming and the night had turned pitch black, Daniel's blindness relieved only by strobes of lightning. The flashes were dry- there was not a drop of rain- and yet even as he registered the weirdness of this the storm opened and a cloudburst sluiced down, adding to the din. Daniel felt he'd been clubbed, so heavy was the water. It pushed him to his knees.
'Ico! Daniel!' It was Tucker, shouting from the dark trees farther from the river. Daniel groped in that direction. There was a flash of lightning and he saw the tall man leaning against a tree with rainwater streaming down his face. A stunned, wet Amaya was crawling from her tangled, muddied tent, her eyes wide, and she clutched a moment at Tucker's leg as if to seek reassurance. Daniel stumbled up to them.
'You all right?' They said it simultaneously.
'Ico,' Daniel gasped. 'I saw the river take him. We have to go hunt downstream.'
Amaya stood unsteadily, the rain lashing at them, and then gripped them both with a look of grim determination. 'We might need a rope!' she shouted. 'I'll get the clothesline we rigged! You two start down and I'll follow!'
'Are you going to be all right?' Daniel shouted back.
'Yes, yes, go on!'
Tucker pulled at him and the two men moved off clumsily in the dark, following the edge of the flood but keeping a wary distance as sections of sandy bank collapsed. The water bucked and pitched, eating at the shore
