Hunters Run Page 0,65

land. His feet and hands stung and soon went numb. His earlobes ached. His face and chest grew thickfleshed and rubbery, but he pushed on. He couldn't die out here. He had to reach the shore. It was his goddamn tatecreude.

He focused on moving his body - legs kicking, arms and hands scooping at the water. Time lost its meaning. He might have been swimming for three minutes or an hour or his whole life. The chill was deadly, and he could feel it knifing into him. He faltered once, seduced into thinking he needed a moment's rest.

He was dead. The only reason to keep trying was stubbornness, and Ramon Espejo was a very stubborn man. Even when he was hardly doing more than floating, he pushed his mouth free of the water and gulped one more breath. And then one more. And then one more. His mind began to fade, and he recalled his dream of being one with the river, of becoming the flow itself. Perhaps that would not be so bad after all. Just one more breath so he could think about it. Then one more.

It was a sandbar that saved him. The river widened, its eastern half becoming shallow as it broadened. Driftwood rose from the sand like the antlers of some nightmare beast. Ramon found an ancient log standing at an angle from the water. He crawled up its black, slimy side and held it like it was a lover. He was too cold to shiver. That wasn't good. He had to get out of the water. The river still lapped at his knees, and his feet were numb. Ramon bit down on his lip until he tasted blood, the pain focusing his mind.

He had to reach the shore. Then get dry, and then hope that the sun would warm his flesh. There was enough debris on the sandbar that he could move from one support to another; it seemed as if anything that went into the water upstream ended up caught here. The danger was that he might slip, fall into the water, and lack the will to rise again. He had to be careful.

With a deep breath, Ramon pushed his blackwood lover away and stumbled to a small dam of branches that had been laced together with ivy and strips of bark. Then from that to a low stone. Then another slime-slick log. And then the water was no higher than his ankles. Ramon trudged slowly to dry land. He collapsed on the ground, laughed weakly, and vomited up what seemed like several liters of river water. His alien garments were sodden and heavy, the shoes kicked off somewhere in the river. Fingers clumsy as sausages, he pulled the clothing from his skin and lay back naked, trying with the last of his conscious will to angle himself toward the sun.

It wasn't sleep that took him, but neither was it death, because sometime later his mind reformed and he struggled to sit up. The sun had moved the width of three hands together, lowering toward the western sky. His teeth were chattering like a badly tuned lift tube. His hands and feet were blue, but not black. The alien robe he had cast aside was dry and sun-warmed. He pulled it on awkwardly and sat, arms around his knees, laughing and weeping. His neck, where the sahael had entered him, felt unnaturally hot. The skin there was smooth as river stone and numb as a witch's mark. Ramon rubbed his fingertips over the insertion point and let the reality of his situation sink into him. He had made it. He was free. He looked out over the water with a sense of glee and disbelief. He'd done it!

It didn't occur to him that the mesh of branches tied together on the sandbar was odd until he heard the sharp intake of breath behind him and turned to see a surreal and familiar sight. The other Ramon stood at the tree line. His chest was bare, his pants ripped into rough shorts. Dark hair rose crazily from his head. His right hand was wrapped in a bandage black with dried blood and his left gripped the old field knife, Ramon's field pack slung over one sunburned shoulder. Of course. He'd made a raft; the branches out there hadn't wrapped themselves with bark. And now the flow of the river and the cruel irony of the gods had brought both Ramons to the same place