Hunters Run Page 0,85

the raft lurched, throwing Ramon forward beside the fire pit. The other man nearly tipped into the water. The flow of water arced at the raft's sides, an icy wave running over the back edge and draining between the loose branches. Ramon slid forward slowly, careful not to dislodge the raft from whatever had stopped their rush. A boulder just below the surface and sharp as the prow of a kayak had nearly split the front float. The stone still penetrated the bent and broken cane. A half meter toward the bank, and they would have missed it. Ten meters on, Ramon saw the streaks in the water where it gained speed as it prepared to fall. His twin's amazed and joyous whoop barely reached his ears, but the man's pounding congratulatory slaps on his shoulders conveyed the meaning clearly enough.

He'd saved them. Precarious as their position was, at least they hadn't died. Yet. Four meters of fast water still divided them from the land, but the raft was stationary.

"Rope!" his twin shouted in his ear. "We've got to get some rope to haul this pinche motherfucker onto the shore! You wait here!"

"What are you ... Hey! Don't - "

But the other man had already taken two long, fast strides and leaped out over the water. The raft shifted one way and then the other, the ruined cane float twisting. For a sick moment, Ramon was sure the other man had freed him from the rock, but the raft steadied. Ramon sat, waiting, with his back and belly aching with fear. Was the other man going to be able to get to shore, or would he be swept over the brink? And if he was, where the fuck did that leave Ramon? And the raft itself, pressed up against the boulder by the constant push of the river, was like a coin balancing on its edge. If the float gave way or the river rose, he was dead. And rope? Where was his twin going to find rope, anyway? They were in the middle of the wilderness. By the time he'd thought all these things, he saw the slick shape of his twin pulling himself from the water.

As Ramon watched, the man hauled himself up the bank, paused for a moment, head hung low, and then vanished among the trees. Ramon squatted at the front of the raft, adding his weight to the raft's in hopes of keeping the float stuck where it was, and also crouching down, ready to leap for the shore if it did come loose. But as time passed, the sun pressing down on his back and shoulders, warming his skin and the cloth of his robe, his urgency and fear mixed with a strange kind of peace.

It was like one of those meaningless Zen stories Palenki liked to tell when he was drunk. He was trapped at the edge of a waterfall, on a raft that might come loose from its stone at any second, waiting for a man who was also in a sense himself to return from the wilderness with some scrounged tool that would save him - a man who would probably try to kill him if he knew the whole situation. And if he did make it out of here, it was a race to get to a city where his future was totally uncertain, where the law might, after all, still be after him, while genocidal aliens floated overhead. And what was he thinking about?

How good the sun felt.

Hours passed. When Ramon's legs began to ache from squatting, he took the risk of sitting. The raft still shifted to the side sometimes, but never enough to alarm him. His mind wandered. He remembered lazy, empty afternoons under the blazing Mexican sun, nothing to do but pray that rain would fill the cistern before it ran dry. It didn't have the immediacy of a newly returned memory. It was just something that had happened to him once, when he'd been a boy on another planet. A school of fish sped past him, scales flashing green and gold under the skin of rushing water. Ramon didn't know if they were all speeding to their own deaths at the falls ahead or if there was some trick they knew that would preserve them. There had to be some way that the inhabitants of the deep, fast flow of the river coped with accidents of geography like this. Perhaps it was only that when