Hunters Run Page 0,98

once known and then forgotten. When he realized he'd fallen asleep and forced his eyes to open again, the rain had stopped, and a wide goldand-green sunset was lighting the clouds from below. He heard the chiming call of a flock of flapjacks somewhere far above him.

He had to get an oar. Something to steer with in case there was another waterfall or rapids. But he'd hear the roar of it if there was one, and his twin owed him a watch anyway. Let the pendejo stay up and keep them safe. Serve the bastard right after he'd blown Ramon off back in the forest. He had wrapped himself in the ruins of the iceroot leaves, the wide fronds reflecting his own body's heat back against him, before he noticed the flaw in that plan, and by then he was too comfortable to care whether he died.

Days passed in fever. Reality and dream, past and future, knotted together. Ramon found himself possessed by the memory of things that could never have happened - flying like a sparrow over the rooftops of Mexico City with a slat of the alien yunea in his teeth, Elena weeping like a baby about his death and then fucking Martin Casaus on his grave, trekking through the bush with the raft strapped to his forehead, Maneck and the pale alien in the pit applauding and throwing a celebratory party for him - all hail Ramon Espejo, hero of monsters! - both of them wearing silly cone-shaped party hats and blowing noisemakers. His consciousness vibrated, split, and reformed like a bubble rising through turbulent water. In his rare moments of lucidity, he drank the fresh, clear water of the river and tended as best he could to his wounds. The cut on his ribs was scabbing over, but his leg had the hot, angry look of infection. He would have considered reopening the wound in case there was some foreign body - wood or cloth or Christ alone knew what - that was keeping him from healing, but sometime during his fever dreams, he'd lost the knife - maybe it had washed over the side - and he no longer had anything he could use to operate. One time, when he woke in mid-afternoon, he felt so strong and well, he imagined he might be able to catch a fish to eat. But just going to the raft's edge to drink had exhausted him.

One night Little Girl sailed overhead, but the moon had Elena's face, peering down at him disapprovingly. I told you a chupacabra would get you! the moon said.

On another night - or was it later the same night? - he saw La Llorona, the Crying Woman, walking the riverbank, luminescent in the darkness, wringing her hands and wailing over all the children who had been lost, her grief endless and inconsolable.

Another time, he had caught up on a sandbar and spent the better part of a day wondering how he might get the raft loose in his weakened state before realizing that he was wearing clothes - his shirt, his field jacket - and was therefore still asleep and dreaming. He woke to find the raft still well in the middle of the wide, now placid river.

Most unnerving, though, were the voices in the water. Maneck, his twin, the European, Lianna. Even when he was fully awake, he could hear them in the clicking and murmuring of the water, like a conversation in a nearby room, whose words he could almost make out. Once he thought his twin was screaming, Madre de Dios, help me! Help me! Please Jesus, I don't want to die!

The worst was when he heard Maneck laughing.

The small, still part of his mind that could sometimes watch the rest and evaluate it understood all of this. The hallucinations, the burning thirst strong enough to motivate even a man lost in the ruin of his own mind, the swelling and reddening leg. Ramon was in trouble, and there was nothing he could do to save himself. He was too disorganized in his thoughts to manage even the simplest of prayers.

Twice, he felt himself drifting off into a strange twilight sleep. Both times he managed to will himself back to awareness, death retreating perhaps halfway to shore. After all, Ramon Espejo was a tough sonofabitch, and he was Ramon Espejo. Still, when the third time came - as it inevitably would - he didn't think he could pull himself back