James Axler – Trader Redux

And then they were through.

Ryan had kept his eye closed for what seemed hours, knowing that there was no point in seeing what was coming. Not when you didn’t have an iota of control over it.

Now he blinked his pale blue eye open once more, sensing a change in both the pace and movement of the river, a new gentler calm.

“Trader?” he said, coughing and spitting up a mouthful of the cold, sand-filled water.

“Fuck.”

“Trader. You okay back there?”

They were in a wider, shallow section of the canyon. The walls were still fifteen hundred feet high above them, but the gorge itself was less constricting, the actual river nearly fifty feet across, meandering through willow-lined shallows.

Ryan glanced behind them, seeing the towering column of spray hanging in the moonlit air, showing the white water that they’d run through and survived.

Immediately at his back, Trader was still lying flat on his stomach, arms and legs spread, as if he were riding the coils of some monstrous sea beast.

Ryan tried again. “Hey, Trader! We made it.”

“Who gives a flying fuck? I don’t have an unbroken bone in my body, Ryan. Half my guts are stuck in my throat, and the other half’s hangin’ out my ass.”

“Sit up and look around.”

They were moving at a little more than walking pace now, the shore unrolling past them. Ryan looked farther down the canyon, then rubbed at his eye again, trying to make sure what he’d seen. It seemed like the walls were closing in again. Out of the corner of his eye he thought for a moment that he’d spotted a ruined building, perched on the edge of the chasm far above. But he wasn’t certain of it.

The certainty was that he could see more of the dread spray less than a quarter mile ahead, and it seemed, already, that the uprooted willow, setting markedly lower in the river than before, was starting to move faster again.

“Fireblast!”

The concern in Ryan’s voice at last made Trader sit up and take notice. It took less than five seconds for him to realize the danger of their situation.

“We’re fucked,” he said quietly.

Chapter Nineteen

“Never much cared for swimming,” Trader panted as he lay flat on his back in the soft sand.

“Nor me.”

The first glow of the true dawn was already beginning to show itself above the top of the cliffs to the east. The river had continued to rise for half an hour or more after they reached land, but now seemed to have leveled off.

There had also been several aftershocks of diminishing strength, the last of them more than a half hour back. A number of fallen trees had been carried past them, toward the sheer rapids they could hear a quarter mile or so to the south. Another dead horse and several drowned deer drifted by on the swelling current.

The swim to safety had been a desperate struggle.

If the river had been moving any faster, Ryan very much doubted whether he’d have been able to get Trader to the muddy shallows. The old man was exhausted by the terrible buffeting that he’d received going through the turbulent stretches of white water and could hardly muster the energy to kick out with his arms and legs.

In the end it had been Ryan, weighted down by his boots, rifle and soaked clothing, who’d taken his old leader around the shoulders, supporting him beneath the chin, dragging him with agonizing slowness toward the gentler-moving edges of the wide river.

Even when they could both stand, he had been forced to half lift and half pull Trader through the shallows, up the sloping shelf of soft damp sand, to collapse among the willows that lined the banks.

“HATE FUCKING SWIMMING, Ryan.”

“You told me.”

“Love fucking. Hate swimming.”

Ryan laughed. “Don’t we all, Trader? Don’t we all?”

The top dozen feet of the western cliffs were tinted with the gentle opalescent light of the full dawn. Far above them the sky was a blur of thin, high cloud, with the promise of some fine weather to come.

Ryan stood and stretched. “Shouldn’t take too long to get ourselves dry.”