No predators had shown themselves, so far, which led Ryan to conclude that there weren’t any. To survive and breed, predators needed a dependable supply of victims. There was nothing in this hell-blasted landscape for large carnivores to hunt.
The uptilted plain of beige gulleys and boulder outcrops seemed to go on forever, to the curve of the world, and beyond. There was no sign of a sizeable body of water ahead. No great crack in the earth, either. As the sun broke free of the horizon, it was like the door of a blast furnace swinging open. In seconds the air temperature jumped twenty degrees.
Ryan glanced over his shoulder. Behind him, Doc, J.B., Mildred, Krysty and Jak still appeared in good shape. Their emergency food had run out the previous day. They had shared the last, tepid sips from their canteens hours ago. Like Ryan, they were all sucking on small stones to quiet their thirsts. The companions were a battle-hardened crew, but even they had their limits. As the morning’s heat increased, to conserve their strength and bodily fluids, the rest stops had to come more frequently.
The one-eyed man called a temporary halt to the march, waving the others down behind the shelter of a big boulder. Krysty, Mildred, Doc and Dix sat with their backs pressed against the base of the rock, in the lee of the wind, out of the sun for the moment. Soon they would have to stop for the day. If they couldn’t find permanent shade, they’d have to create it.
Jak didn’t sit down and rest with the others. He paused only long enough to nod at Ryan before he loped away, his lank white hair flying around his shoulders. He continued in the same direction they were headed, doing a recce. Ryan had known the albino youth for a very long time, but seeing him run like that after a brutal, all-night march, still brought a smile to his lips. Jak was the hardest of the hard, a true wild child of the hellscape.
“How far do you think we’ve come?” Mildred asked.
“Plenty far enough if you ask me,” J.B. said as he wiped the caked dirt from his glasses with his shirttail. “We should be able to see it by now.”
“Mebbe, mebbe not,” Ryan countered. “This end of the canyon looked damned narrow on the map. The way the ground is tipped up, we might not see it until we’re right on top of it.”
“But we’ve got to be close,” Krysty said. “We’ve got to be….”
“I find it distinctly odd that there is nothing green before us,” Doc remarked. “Odd and importune.”
It was an absence they’d all noticed.
Water in the desert meant an oasis, densely clustered weeds, shrubs, trees taking advantage of the scarce resource, a green stripe cutting through the panorama of sunblasted beige.
A green stripe that wasn’t there.
They sat in silence in the shade, sucking on their pebbles, regathering their strength, asking themselves the same questions. How much farther could they go without water? How many more days could they last? How badly would it hurt when the end came?
When Jak returned from the recce, his bloodred eyes revealed no joy, no sadness. Nothing.
“Well?” Ryan asked him.
“Canyon ahead, quarter mile,” Jak replied.
“Good work! Let’s go, then,” Ryan said, rising to his feet.
Jak caught his arm. “No water,” he said.
A two-word death sentence.
“What do you mean no water!” Mildred exclaimed.
Jak shrugged at her. His only response was, “Come, look.”
After they had advanced another hundred yards, the edge of the canyon came into view, a dark line across the ground that grew broader as they approached. It was the far wall of the fissure dropping away sheer. To the southeast, for as far as they could see, an ever-widening gash divided the hammered plain.
When they reached the canyon’s near rim, they looked down a hundred-foot drop.
“Radblast!” J.B. said.
There was no reservoir. No river flowing at the canyon bottom. No plants. As Jak had said, no water.
Only dirt and rock.
“This has to be it,” Ryan said. “The distance is right. The size is right. And the map only showed one canyon.”
“Mebbe the water didn’t back up this far,” Krysty suggested.
“Or the reservoir has been drawn down considerably since Armageddon,” Doc commented.
“It’s also possible that the dam’s been breached,” Mildred said. “And that either the river’s dried up, or it’s running deep underground.”
Tipping his hat brim to block the glare of the sun, J.B. looked down the gorge, in the direction of the dam. “The water might still be there,” he said. “Below our line of sight in the canyon bottom.”
“Even if the river has dried up,” Mildred added, “low spots in the bed could hold standing pools. The deepest part of a reservoir is usually at the base of its dam. Even if the dam’s broken, there could still be plenty of water trapped in front of it.”
“Our best hope for finding water is the canyon,” Ryan said. “We’ve got to follow it. We’d better get moving. Cover as much ground as we can before the sun gets high.”
There was no discussion about whether to descend to the canyon floor; in fact the subject didn’t even come up. Although walking along the rim was a much longer trek because of the short side canyons they had to skirt, it was also the high ground, and that gave them a tactical advantage. They couldn’t be pinned down and ambushed on the rim.
About a half mile down-canyon, they came to a wide, flat spot that had been cleared of rocks. They would have walked right past it if Mildred hadn’t spoken up. “Hey, wait a minute,” she said. “We’ve got ourselves a field here. A cultivated field.”
Doc stared at the empty patch of dirt bounded by boulders and said, “Not in recent memory, my dear.”
Mildred corrected herself. “The field is a remnant of prehistoric agriculture,” she said. “A thousand years ago the local cliff dwellers grew crops on top of these canyons in plots just like that. There should be a path somewhere around here down to their cave….”
“There,” Jak said, pointing out a shiny, shallow groove worn in the bedrock. It led away, to the apex of the side canyon ahead.
“This is important?” Krysty asked.
“Storage wells,” Mildred told her. “All the ancient settlements had them. The residents hauled water up from the river and stored it in stone cisterns in their caves. They also built catch basins and channels that fed rainwater from the plain down to their wells. These cisterns were always covered and in shade. There could be some water left from the last rain, whenever that was.” She paused, then said, “I know it’s a long shot…”
“Worth a look, anyway,” Ryan said.
The prehistoric path ended at the cliff edge. The companions stared down at a steep, rubble-filled chute. The scree of large rocks had been tossed from above, forming crude steps, which turned around a bend fifty feet below and vanished from sight. Ryan and the others carefully descended, as the loose rocks shifted under their weight. Around the blind corner a sandstone ledge jutted from the canyon wall. They followed the narrow walkway along the face of the overhanging cliff. It was a long, straight drop to the bottom, at least two hundred feet. The ledge led them to a broad, shallow cave with a towering, arched ceiling.