No clue.
“Ryan!” she called again, croaking with the strain on her voice, listening to the way the swamp seemed to swallow up the sound, preventing it from traveling more than a few yards. “Ryan, you there?”
The background noise of insects faded at her yell, then came surging back again immediately.
She stood and listened, waiting.
RYAN HAD GONE TOO FAR. He was already more than halfway out of breath, his lungs straining with the effort of swimming underwater, twisting and turning as he battled his way between the slick roots. He’d swum too far to make it back again, even if he was able to turn around in the cramped space.
If he didn’t manage to reach the outside within the next fifteen or twenty seconds, then he would suffer a bleak and miserable ending.
He could only go on.
KRYSTY KNELT, trying to draw on all of her own mutie special powers, the power to “feel” whether there was any life-form within the immediate vicinity.
Closing her eyes, she squeezed her hands together, scenting the region close by.
There was something, but it was very faint, faint and oddly muffled.
It wasn’t like anything Krysty could remember ever having felt before.
“Ryan,” she said doubtfully.
The feeling seemed to be getting gradually closer, gaining in strengthunless she was imagining it, willing it to happen, making it happen.
LIFE WAS EBBING. The oxygen in Ryan’s lungs was gone, and he was swimming through the slippery tunnel on automatic pilot. His survival reflexes carried him through the stinking mud, his legs kicking more and more slowly, his hands pulling desperately at the elusive roots of the trees that threatened to entrap him and hold him in the slime for all eternity.
A part of Ryan’s brain was actually aware that he had begun the inexorable process of dying, and it was beginning to close itself down.
The urgency had faded and he was barely moving at all, in any direction, his body still held in the grip of the narrow tunnel entrance.
It was nearly over.
From some deep, dark well of reserves, Ryan made a final despairing effort, giving a last kick with his legs and a last pull with both his hands, before the endless night finally swallowed him.
KRYSTY STOOD, shading her eyes against the dying of the light that speared between the trees, turning the clumps of Spanish moss into frail balls of living fire. There was something across the lagoon, to her left, only a scant twenty yards or so away.
It could be a floating log, almost totally submerged in the brown water. Or it might, more likely be an alligator, hunting silently and still.
Or it was Ryan.
She ran a few steps before launching herself, arrow straight, into the water in a classic racing dive, fast and shallow, so that she was already into her swimming strokes the moment she touched the swamp’s muddy surface, heading toward the object that hardly showed above the placid surface.
Reaching it, she paused to shake her wet hair away from her eyes.
It was Ryan, facedown, inert, arms and legs spread like a huge starfish, his curly black hair floating motionless around his skull like a wraith.
Krysty didn’t hesitate.
Reaching her arms around him, she tipped him over, then clutched him to her and started to kick her way backward, dragging him after her, cupping her hand under Ryan’s chin to keep his mouth and nose clear of the water.
The few yards were endless.
Something long and sinuous brushed against Krysty’s feet, but she pushed it away and carried on. Ryan was a deadweight, arms and legs trailing, his right eye open and staring up at the darkening sky.
“Hang on, lover,” she panted. “For Gala’s sake For my sake, hang on!”
Krysty glanced over her shoulder, seeing that the bank of the swamp was now only a dozen feet behind her.
She felt soft mud sliding under her feet and struggled clumsily to drag Ryan’s body up out of the filthy water, onto relatively dry land.
Krysty immediately rolled him on his back, probing into his slack mouth to make sure he hadn’t swallowed his tongue along with the gobbets of mud and watery phlegm, clearing his airway. She knelt by his side, took a deep breath and started the process of the kiss of life.
At first it seemed hopeless.
He was dead. His skin was sallow and cold. There was no reflexive movement when she touched his staring blue eye. She lifted a hand and it dropped like putty to the ground.
No respiration.
No pulse.
Nothing.
Alone in the dank wilderness, Krysty worked on, breathing in, pressing down on Ryan’s chest, repeating the process again and again.
The light was almost gone, and she could barely see the white face below her. But she worked on.
Uncle Tyas McCann, back in the ville of Harmony, had once told her about a near-drowning in a ville that he’d lived in as a teenager, up in the cold north of old New England. A child had slipped through the thick ice of a fishing hole and had been thought lost despite all the efforts of the men of the settlement. They had smashed the ice for many yards around, eventually discovering the little body floating on the dark lake.
He’d been there for at least fifteen minutes, said Uncle Tyas, frozen and still. But the lad’s mother had been the daughter of one of the last of the surviving predark doctors in Deathlands, and she had refused to give up all hope, working away until death had reluctantly loosened its hold on the small child and he had begun to breathe again.
“A miracle!” Krysty exclaimed when her uncle had finished the story.
“Not so happy as might be,” he’d replied. “The boy was sorely brain damaged and died two weeks later.”
But he had been drawn back from beyond the brink of the grave. That was a fact. And if it could work for a little boy, it could work for Ryan.
Krysty kept trying, ignoring the advance of night.
As she worked, she prayed, to Gaia and to her own mother, Sonja, prayed for another chance for Ryan. For both of them.
All her senses were on the alert for some flicker of life from the unconscious man.
“Yes? “she whispered.
There was something, a tiny spark in the darkness, a whisper in the night.
She reached for the artery at the side of his throat, below the ear, and felt a tiny, hesitant tremor of life.
There was still Tyas McCann’s cautionary tale at the back of her mind, but Krysty was almost overcome with relief.
Ryan was going to make it.
Chapter Twenty-One
“Thought you’d all like to have what they used to call a sneaky preview of the latest epic movie.” Johannes Forde grinned at the group of friends standing around his wag. “Before we go and take up the Family’s offer of supper and accommodation for the night. What do you say?”
Ryan nodded. Once Krysty had revived that frail glimmer of life, he had recovered amazingly fast, his strong constitution helping to pull him through. It had taken another hour, into full dark, before he’d come around enough to pick a cautious path back to Bramton, where the others had been waiting anxiously. J.B. had already organized the search party, enlisting John Winthrop and some of the men of the ville.
They’d disbanded with undisguised relief once they saw Ryan and Krysty stumbling out of the darkness of the surrounding bayou.
Now, after a bowl of rich vegetable soup, so thick it was more of a stew, Ryan was almost completely recovered from the near-drowning, though he was still totally blind.
“I’ve got it all processed and we can take a look. Not what you’d call a finished cut, as there’s a few bits and bobs that need trimming.” Forde’s neat white beard and mustache seemed to float in the gloom, with a life of their own. He was still wearing his fringed buckskins, and his pony tail was now tied back with a ribbon of brightest gold.
“When will you show it to the people?” Mildred asked. “That’s when they settle up with some jack.”
“Indeed, yes. Straight and true as an ebony rule, that is. But, friends first.”
“Someone coming,” Jak said, turning to peer into the darkness beyond the Clanton Corral and the livery stable. His nocturnal vision was the best in the group.
“Cornelius?” J.B. asked.
“Come to see why we’re late for the meal?”
“No. The Mayor.”
It was John Winthrop, scurrying along, keeping close to the shadows of the buildings that lined the main street. He wore a long duster coat, dark brown, with its collar turned up high. When he arrived he sounded out of breath and was visibly nervous in case anyone saw him there.
“I have a little time, outlanders,” he panted.