Chapter Twenty

Krysty had finally stopped the futile crying. Tears streaked her cheeks, and deep marks marred her palms where she'd dug in her nails.
Her shoulders slumped, and she stared vacantly out across the gray-brown expanse of the bayou. She ached all over from the violent battering she'd endured from the powerful jaws of the giant mutie gator, and her chest hurt when she took in a deep breath. But Krysty figured that there was nothing too serious done to her. No broken ribs.
She'd actually watched Ryan readying himself for his blind dive to the rescue, and had done what she could to stop him. But she might as well have tried to stop a maddened charging buffalo with a spitball.
A part of her brimmed with pride at the way her lover had come to her aid, though he had to have been aware how bitterly the dice were loaded against him.
And a larger part of her was filled with a hopeless bleakness at the certainty that he had offered his life in exchange for hers, and that she would never see him again.
"Never."


"ACTION WITHOUT THOUGHT can be time totally wasted. If you got the time to think, then do it."
The saying came into Ryan's mind as he leaned against the pile of wet twigs and gnawed bones, trying to regain full control of his body and his nerves.
"Yeah, thanks a lot, Trader," he said. "Ace on the line, as usual."
There had been a way into the creature's hidden lair, which meant that there was also a way out of it.
Ryan could remember the mad race along the narrow twisting tunnel, between the roots of the mangroves, hauled by the wounded gator. Then they'd exploded into the underground nest, hollowed from the living mud.
There was an exit from the hole, somewhere below the level of the swamp water. All he had to do was take a good deep breath and dive down to find it, then swim along until he was able to break free to the surface.
It couldn't be more than forty or fifty feet to swim under water.
Maybe eight feet?
"Hundred," Ryan offered. "Any advance on a hundred? Do I hear one-fifty?" The movement of the water had ceased and it was utterly silent. "No advance? Hey, are you speaking to me? Guess you must be. I'm the only one here."
He smiled.
If there had been light down there and anyone to see, they would have been appalled at the rictus of shock and horror on Ryan's face.
"Waiting won't make it any easier. Time to go exploring, Ryan. Find the way out is all. Deep breath and let's have a feel around under the water." He laughed, a harsh, abrupt sound. "Least being blind doesn't make much difference to this one."
He drew what he could of the foul air into his lungs and dived down out of sight.


KRYSTY HAD TWO CHOICES.
She could go back into Bramton and enlist help to try to find Ryanor his bodythough she wasn't sure if she could ever locate the place again. Trees, drooping with the white fronds of Spanish moss, were all around the edges of the dark, scummy water. One lagoon and causeway looked much like another.
The starting point of the old tourist motel and the time-frozen marina was a couple hundred yards away. Krysty knew that much. But she wasn't sure how far the gator had dragged her. Or in what direction.
The alternative was to try to follow the way the beast had taken Ryan. She'd been able to crawl out of the swamp in time to see the foaming turbulence that had man and reptile at its bubbling center. But that had disappeared behind a large group of drooping mangroves, a good hundred paces to the east.
Krysty glanced at the sky.
Light was already beginning to fade, the dull shadows lengthening, making the place even more dark and gloomy. There was certainly no hope of returning with rescuers from the ville before full dark, which meant the two options were really only one.
She began to pick her way cautiously around the edge of the bayou, stopping suddenly and carefully reloading her blaster, her fingers only trembling a little.


THE FIRST TWO DIVES were fruitless. All he found were hollows and pockets in the mud, none of which went more than a few feet in any direction before closing off in dead ends, which meant a difficult retreat, wriggling backward, fighting all the time to overcome the rising waves of terror at being helplessly trapped in the filthy hole.
"Third time lucky," Ryan panted.
As he filled his lungs, it seemed that the pocket of air in the den was much diminished in quality.
Maybe he wouldn't drown after all.
Just suffocate.
Ryan dived once more under the dark surface, hands reaching for the tunnel out.


IT WAS HOPELESS. Krysty knew that the big carnivores had their nests, dens or lairs some way beneath the surface of the water, hollowed out from mud, where they would take their prey. They often used the dark holes as larders, sometimes allowing their victims to stay alive for several days.
But there was no way of identifying them from outside, on the banks above.
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.