Death is Forever

the darkness wore on. Huge sheets of lightning arced across the sky, transforming half the blackness into a blinding blue-white light. Thunder exploded. The last echoes hadn’t faded before a different kind of fire came from the sky, snake tongues of lightning licking at the edges of darkness, flaring in patterns that evoked ancient pictographs drawn on coarse rock walls.
    Besieged by thirst and taunted by hopes of rain, Erin and Cole slept badly. When the first light separated sky from earth, he slipped away to see if their guard had returned during the night.
    He found nothing but broad, barefoot prints in the dust where the man had circled their camp before heading off into the bush.
    As Cole headed back to Erin, a sprinkle of water fell. The raindrops were heavy and wet and teasing. But the promise of real water wasn’t kept. Reality was the savage burning of the rising sun.
    “Hurry,” Cole said, gathering everything. “Sign-cutting light doesn’t last long in the tropics.”
    She dragged herself upright. “How can I help?”
    “The first slanting light of day made tracks jump out of the landscape like neon paint.” He pointed to the footprints. “That’s one end of our lifeline,” he said, drawing a line in the dust in front of the prints. “The other end is somewhere out there at a waterhole.”
    Where the prints were clear, Cole walked quickly along the trail, marking tracks by drawing a circle around them in the dirt, then looking for the next track. When he lost the trail he returned to the last marked track and began again.
    The tracking itself was enough of a novelty at first that Erin could push aside her thirst while she watched Cole read the land in a way that was almost eerie. But as the sun rose higher, beating down on them again like a hammer, she felt strength flowing out of her in an invisible tide.
    He forged ahead without a pause, cursing the changing angle of the light that smeared and smudged signs that had formerly leaped out of the ground to his eye. Then all signs of tracks vanished on a stretch of windswept, sunbaked rock.
    “Stand here,” he said, pointing to the last tracks he could find.
    She stood beneath the brutal sun while he checked the entire perimeter of the slab of hard stone before he found the tracks again.
    “Got it,” he said. “Let’s go.”
    She walked across the rock, wondering if the stone was truly hot enough to cook eggs. It felt like it, even through the thick soles of her walking shoes.
    At a spot where the terrain presented several choices for a man walking over the land, Cole knelt and sighted along the hot ground, searching for the shadow traces of the trail the Aborigine had left.
    “How far would he go for water?” Erin finally asked.
    “As far as he had to. But he’s moving at a good pace. He’s not doubling back or casting around, and he’s not climbing hills to get a look at the countryside.”
    “Is that good?”
    “It means he knows where he’s going. All we have to do is hang on to his trail.”
    Cole’s eyes narrowed as he spotted a slight, regular disturbance in the surface of the earth. When he shifted to hands and knees, the pattern disappeared. He sat on his heels and sighted along the direction of the trail. A vague notch showed in the landscape ahead. Beyond it rose the flat-topped, steep rise that seemed little closer for the hours of walking.
    When he stood up, Cole had two pebbles in his hand. He brushed them off on his shorts and offered one to Erin. The other he put in his own mouth.
    “Think of it as a lemon drop,” he suggested.
    Her salivary glands responded instantly to the idea. For the first time in two days, her mouth was moist again.
    “It only works the first time,” he said, almost smiling at her startled look when saliva ran once more. “But even when it doesn’t work, the pebble gives your tongue something to do besides feel dry.”
    “A trick, huh?”
    “That’s all life is,” he said roughly. “A trick played on death.”
    She followed him through increasing heat and humidity while monsoon clouds thickened and billowed toward the instant of rain she no longer believed would come.
    The trail was difficult to follow. Time and again Cole had to cast around beneath the brutal sun while Erin waited and watched.
    Without warning the world began to dim and revolve slowly about an unknown center. She sank to her hands and knees, head hanging, until reality shifted back again into the dusty