Death is Forever

where a lush green exclamation point of foliage marked a seep or a spring.
    Lightning stabbed down repeatedly, dancing across the top of the hill. Thunder followed instantly in a drumroll of sound that shook the earth. Wind sighed down the steep, ruined face of the limestone and lifted veils of grit from the dry land.
    “Water?” Erin asked, her voice hoarse.
    Without answering, Cole started for a notch cut in the base of the steepest part of the hill. It was the only place where a spring or a seep might be hidden.
    The approach to the notch was strewn with limestone boulders whose faces had been eroded into hollows and cups and bowls that, in the wet, would hold rain. But that water had long since evaporated, leaving behind an eerie black sculpture garden surrounded by sterile drifts of soil as fine as face powder. An empty watercourse snaked among stones like a dry, many-forked tongue whose source was the notch at the bottom of the hill.
    Across the top of the limestone formation, lightning danced with lethal grace. Thunder came, hammering the ground.
    Erin followed Cole to the base of the stone ravine, where the ground would be shaded much of the time. Someone had been there before them. Small mounds of dirt were scattered at random, connected by the same broad, flat footprints that Cole had been following across the empty land. He went to first one hole and then another, and in each he found the same thing—dry dirt for a few feet and then equally dry limestone bedrock.
    “So far the little bastard isn’t having any better luck than we are,” Cole said grimly.
    The footprints went from the dry watercourse to the hill itself, then vanished on the stony surface. The Aborigine had ignored the danger from lightning and climbed up to the top of the limestone formation to look for sinks or deep potholes that might hold water from one wet to the next.
    Cole had no choice but to follow. Without a word he shucked out of the rucksack and began looking for the easiest way up the stone maze.
    “No,” she rasped urgently. “Lightning.”
    Even as she spoke, an incandescent sheet of lightning went from horizon to horizon in a cataract of violence that left the air itself smelling burned. Thunder exploded, shaking sky and ground alike.
    The barrage of lightning continued until the hair on their bodies rippled and stood away from their flesh in response to the electrically charged air.
    Between one minute and the next, the day darkened as if the sun had been ripped from the sky. The world convulsed, changing air for water. Rain hammered down as abruptly as lightning, as violently as thunder, an ocean turned inside out to flood land and sky alike.
    Holding each other, Erin and Cole laughed and turned their faces up to the life-giving rain.

42
Kimberley Plateau The next morning
    An hour after dawn Erin watched the campfire flicker beneath a sky that trembled with misty light. The sky was so thick it fairly breathed water. Before yesterday’s downpour had finally stopped, the sky had been black with night as well as clouds. Just before dawn a rain-scented breeze had begun blowing, bringing with it the sound of water running from every crack and crevice on Bridget’s Hill.
    Despite the shelter Cole had rigged from clear plastic sheets, and wearing the spare shirt he’d brought for just such an eventuality, Erin was almost chilly. The novelty of it amused her, as did the fact that she was actually looking forward to the rest of the mulga Cole had killed when the first onslaught of water had driven it from a limestone crevice.
    Laughing softly, she reached for a full canteen and drank as much water as she wanted.
    He looked up from the fire he was coaxing into life and smiled. “Feeling better?”
    “Ridiculously good,” she said, putting the canteen aside after only a few swallows of water. “We could die tomorrow or the day after, but I’m sitting here glad to be chilly and licking my lips over the idea of snake for breakfast.”
    His laughter was as rich and lively as the firelight reflected in his clear eyes. “Better than seal, huh?”
    “No comparison.” She stretched, shivered lightly, and sat up. “What a difference water makes! Although I have to admit, for a time there I was worried about drowning.”
    He smiled slightly. “So was I. I still can’t believe a wall of water didn’t come down through that notch and wash us all the way to the Admiralty Gulf.”
    “Yeah.” She rubbed her palms over her