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 with greedy menace, and both men feared their companion was already gone.
There was a flash and a following crack of thunder so close upon it that they staggered as if an artillery shell had gone off nearby. Sparks flew in the night and there was a crash of something falling in the trees. Daniel wanted desperately to crouch and hide and wait until the storm was over, but forced himself to keep going. He tripped, sprawled, and got up again as Tucker hauled on his arm. "I heard a yell!" the big man shouted.
They felt their way to the river's edge, rain beating on them like hail. Lightning stabbed again and they saw a tree had toppled into the current, something synthetic caught in its branches and fluttering in the current like a flag. Ico's tent! There was another yell and they saw a dark shape in the branches that could be someone's head. "Ico!" Tucker roared. "We see you! Work yourself this way!"
Their companion was obviously trying, but any loosening of his grip threatened to release him into the current. "I'm going after him," Tucker growled. He leaped in, dropping to his waist on the upstream end of his log, and immediately his feet were jerked out from under him and he went under the tree, saving himself only by grabbing the bark and hauling himself back upward on the downstream side. With difficulty, he heaved himself back onto shore, spitting dirty water. "Damn!"
Daniel studied the tree trunk shuddering in the flood, its roots not yet fully pried out of the ground. "I'm lighter!" he shouted above the rain. "I'll climb out to him and you follow. When I get to him, hold my ankles and don't let go!"