Manifest (The Darkening Trilogy) (38 page)

“One foo… uh…er.”

“One foot in front of the other,” she said, breathlessly repeating the mantra.  “That’s all you can do some days… One foot in front of the other.”

A half mile later, Olesianna set Alex down against the hover car in the last bit of shade left from the morning sun.  Some disembodied avatar of herself set to work clearing the sand away from the hood of the vehicle and she watched this image of herself from the air above work tirelessly.  Alex swayed drunkenly nearby.  With inhuman endurance Olesianna continued to dig into the sand with her bare hands, but the dune kept replacing her efforts with more sand from higher up the incline.

No, no, no!
  Olesianna yelled at herself from above. 
You’ll never get it done that way
.  Her image stopped and looked around. 
The crate!  Dig under the crate!
she yelled.  Like a zombie or mindless monster, Olesianna hobbled over to the center of the hover car’s hood where the crate from the rooftop was lodged in the sand and began to dig underneath it.  It wasn’t much, but the crate provided enough of a barrier against the tumbling sands that she managed to clear off much of the submerged sections of the hover car.  She retreated from her work to the driver’s side door where Alex was leaning.  The sun was over him now with no shade left for shelter. 

“It’s so hot,” he sobbed and at this Olesianna was completely overwhelmed.  She felt crippled by her helplessness.  If the car didn’t start she didn’t know what she would do.  Opening the door and pushing the ignition button, Olesianna felt the engine begin to whir.  But it sounded strained and obstructed.  The hover plate began to pick up the car but the engine never made it to full power and so after a few moments it set back down into the sand.  Olesianna looked back down at Alex.  His head hung to the side lifelessly.

“Alex!  Alex you have to do this one last thing for me before you can sleep.  Okay hun?”  She was too horrified at the prospect of his death to acknowledge the possibility.  “Okay?  Then you can go back to sleep.”

Alex stirred and then with great difficulty focused his eyes upon her.  He squinted to try to keep her from moving.

“I need you to push this button when I tell you, okay?”

Alex seemed to slip back into unconsciousness, but Olesianna guided his head back up and tried to catch his eyes once more.  “Okay?”

He managed a nod.  Olesianna helped turn him over, struggling with even his meager weight and laid him with his chest on the driver’s seat.  She draped his hand on the wheel inches from the ignition button and then struggled to back out of the car.  She stumbled through the sand to the rear of the car where the bumper was nearly a foot off the sandy slope.  She grabbed a hold of it and then yelled, “Push it!”  After several seconds nothing happened.  She wondered if Alex had become unconscious, or if he had pushed the button and the engine had nothing left to give.  “Alex!”  She screamed.  “Alex, push the button!”

Still nothing happened.  With all her might, Olesianna gave her last effort at surviving and began to pull on the bumper as if her tiny frame could budge the vehicle.  She struggled nevertheless, pulling for all she was worth.  She pulled beyond her natural ability to do so, beyond her muscles involuntarily release,
beyond the involuntary
stop!
a body gives to avoid injury. 

The engine started.  The hover car began to lift and Olesianna knew this was their only chance.  She dug her feet deep into the sand turned over her shoulder like she was slinging a bag onto her back and tried to walk down the slope with the hover car at her side.  She tried to scream in exertion but her lungs were empty.  At last she gave up and collapsed into the sand.

The hover car floated by her, slowly but freely down to the bottom of the sandy valley.

A
lex woke with the taste of water in his mouth and knew that he would survive.  The desert hadn’t killed him.  Having emerged from the crevasse once more victorious, Alex felt as if his death would now be of his own choosing, and not at the whims of nature.  He would decide when to lay down the next time, to choose to end his journey through mountains and valleys. 

With unexpected indifference, Alex sat up and looked around.  They were on the bank of a narrow river with green trees, bedrock cliffs, and hills surrounding them.  Olesianna came and fed Alex some broth – water and a bouillon cube – and told him about what had happened in the cave. 

Olesianna had found relief in the quickly cooled interior of the hover car once free of the sand, and after a brief rest, though still in very real danger of succumbing to heat stroke, she managed to navigate them back to flat land and then along the valley floor until the desert ended and the other side of a mountain yielded water.  They were not an inch further than where she had stopped then.  Much of their food supply, however, had gone bad in the desert and the water container, the only thing that remained from the crate on top of the car, was all but useless. 

The river where they now were was modest but had a very strong current and at seeing this Alex warned against trying to cross it.  Still it would provide them with water and fish, something he never managed to catch in the mountains.  Alex dozed for the rest of the afternoon and then through the night.  The rush of the water was calming and he felt safe, though not sure why, specifically. 

The next morning Olesianna suggested that they travel north.  The river couldn’t be forded, so why not follow it?  Not daring to question his mother’s sudden inclination to explore, Alex simply agreed, laid back in his seat and spent the next two days recovering as his mother drove north and then east, following the river as it dipped into an ever wider and deeper ravine.  By early morning on the second day, however, it looked as if they might become trapped in the ravine if they continued following the river and Alex suggested they take the closest path to the top to survey the area.  The canyon showed no signs of getting smaller, and its rocky and jagged terrain would make travel significantly slower than on the plains overlooking it.

It turned out to be a good decision since shortly afterwards, rapids, waterfalls and even some completely submerged sections where the water ran under the rock, would have forced them to turn back.  By the third day, covering much ground above, the river had all but disappeared into the distance below, though the faint hiss of rushing water over rocks could be heard just beneath the wind of the plains. 

The canyon was a monumental sight, and Alex likened it to the imprint of a mountain range, one that had grown down instead of up.  Within it, the river had become a mighty torrent of rapids and tributaries, yet was dwarfed by the majesty of its surroundings.  Fearing that the river, their only life support, would soon become too difficult to reach, Alex and Olesianna decided to stop and survey the immediate area for a route down.  The first sight was not very promising.  An imposing waterfall, one which thundered angrily off the canyon walls dared them to navigate the sheer cliffs leading below.  Further up the way though, perhaps a mile, they checked again and found an eerily convenient route, a few switch-back pathways of gravel over slate.

With a subconscious – or nearly so – sense of invincibility, and an eagerness to play in this titanic playground of geologic wonder, Alex decided to go and check the viability of this path before risking the car.  He felt very strongly about his balance and his ability to traverse the comparably safe slopes.  He didn’t for a moment see himself falling, unless an enormous chunk of earth were to give way, and instead was more concerned about testing the rocks.  He imagined it wouldn’t be too different than how he read mountain climbers tested ice and snow for an avalanche.  He’d need to get a hold of a good sturdy stick to prod at the gravel though.  Plans and contingencies of all sorts began to swirl in his head as Alex, under Olesianna’s hand-wringing vigilance, began the descent. 

He could easily have moved down the inclines at three times the speed he was going, but saw that at the slightest dislodging of rocks under his feet, his mother would gasp and utter a breathless prayer.  Alex had never been clumsy and lost his balance on very rare occasions.  Even as a child, he had been sturdy.  It was something he considered himself good at, along with sprinting – he was a fast, if short-distance, runner.  At about three hundred feet from the top, Alex came to the last curve down. 

The slope was likely too loose to support the unpredictable hover car, he had figured that out earlier on, but he wanted to explore and to taste the cold mountain water after so much exertion.  Agilely, he slid down the rocks in a low crouch like a surfer, though he couldn’t even conceive of such a pastime, and came to a standstill at the bottom amidst a dramatic settling of dust.  He paused there, wishing someone w
ho would appreciate such a stunt had witnessed it.

“Alex!  Alex?”

“I’m fine mom!” he shouted back as loud as he could.  He knew it would be tough to hear with all of the echoing and the swoosh of the river, calm as it was in this spot.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m getting a drink!”

She
said something else, very high-pitched, like a worried yelp.

“I’m fine, Mom,” he yelled
, taking a large gulp from the frigid waters.

“What?” she called back, her tone returning to the loud projecting pitch it originally was.

“I said, I’m fine.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“What?”  Alex called back.  He was sure he heard something.  It sounded like a frantic echo off the far cavern wall, his mother having probably lost sight of him had begun to panic… who else could it be? 

With a curious shrug Alex bent over in the stream again took another few gulps, though they only seemed to accentuate his hunger.  It had been a very Spartan diet the past few days.  But then he heard it again.

“Mom?”  He shouted up.  But the noise wasn’t her.  It was someone else.

Whirling around and looking about the canyon frantically, Alex spotted a figure thrashing in the strong current just upstream.  His eyes widened and his heart began to race.  In another second, the figure would be floating by.  Before thinking of anything else, Alex ran through the shallows and dove into river. 

His legs and hands scraped the pebbly bottom in the torrent of freezing water and bubbles and then suddenly, he was being pulled down stream.

Oh, shit.  I don’t know how to swim.

Kicking off the bottom and getting his head high above the water, Alex took in a deep breath and then tried, as his survival book had instructed him, to point his toes downstream and paddle with his arms.  Despite his lack of skill, he remained calm and the buoyancy of his body, along with his determination to do as he had read was surprisingly effective.  With the aid of the current he managed to stay afloat long enough to see the small figure, a tangle of thick black hair, floating nearby. 

Oh, shit.  The waterfall!

Alex knew that his only hope was to swim to the opposite, and nearer side of the shore.  He couldn’t fight the current, but he could swim sideways to it, and if he didn’t, the rapids and eventually – if he survived that far – the steep waterfall a mile downstream would surely kill him.  What had dazzled him earlier that day now spurred Alex to claw his way through the water towards the small figure and drag it with him to the shore.

Already exhausted by the energy it took to stay afloat, Alex could not manage to grab a hold of what he thought, amongst the splashing, was a young girl, but he did manage to guide her limp body
through several pushes, to a tributary leading away from the rapids.  Just as the deafening roar of the crashing waves started to drown out all sound, Alex felt his feet touch down in the water and immediately, he grabbed the girl and kicked off towards the embankment.  As they rounded a corner, now a good distance away from where Alex had seen the waterfall, the current became only a gentle nudge.  Waist deep, he trudged up onto the gravel and flopped the girl down onto her back.  Taking in huge gulps of air and wiping the water from his eyes, he saw that she couldn’t have been more than eight or nine.  She wore an animal skin shirt, like a tunic, and pants down to the knee. 

Without wasting any more of time in assessment, Alex picked up the girls feet and turned her so that her toes pointed up the bank and her head was at a lower elevation.  He had memorized this portion of his manual while in the mountains and quickly ran through the procedure in his head.  Alex lifted the back of her neck and tilted the girl’s head back to open her windpipe.  Even before giving the first two breaths, water was leaking from her lips and nostrils.  At the inflation of her lungs more water quickly rushed out of her chest and she convulsed, but didn’t cough.  Her pulse was either too faint to be felt with his numb fingers or gone entirely.  After only four chest compressions, it seemed that much of the water had drained from her lungs but she still wasn’t breathing.

Alex knew from his survival book that people could be resuscitated after fifteen minutes of CPR – but only with a defibrillator.  His only hope was that the girl had a pulse that he was incapable of finding or feeling and would come to, shortly.  Either way, she was the only other human he had seen in the wilderness, and that made the effort worth it.  So he kept giving the breaths and chest compressions.  For three exhausting minutes he continued until finally the girl stirred as if she had been asleep the whole time.  With a little help from Alex, she rolled over on her side and coughed out the last bits of water.