TRUE NATURE
He ran through the woods, the pack bouncing off his back as his feet crunched in the undergrowth and leaves.
He preferred to move quietly when he could but running for your life sometimes meant stealth had to go by the wayside.
He could hear a helicopter in the distance, the roaring of the rotors waxing and waning as it flew in wide circles, hunting for him.
He could hear the thumping echo off the stone cliff walls. It made it difficult to pinpoint a location.
All that mattered was they were out there.
Still hunting.
They wouldn’t stop.
Brill could smell water and the path ended at a river.
The water coursed out of the park, pushed out of the narrow canyon walls into a fifteen foot wide stream of fast moving water.
Even though it was clear, he couldn’t see the bottom.
He dropped his backpack ten feet back from the water and started looking for medium sized logs.
It wasn’t going to be easy to fashion a raft without tools, but a river pouring out of the highlands could move him much faster than he could run, and carry him farther away from the men searching for him.
It took fifteen minutes to gather up enough branches and logs.
He lashed them together with vines stripped from a tree, weaving it in a crisscross pattern.
He made a platform big enough to lay on, with two branches at the front and back to make outriggers for stability.
It was made quickly and wouldn’t last for more than a day, he knew, but his goal was to get on the water and get the hell out before the choppers got closer, or a team in the woods picked up his trail.
He launched from the side of the river back, water splashing him up to his chest.
It was cold.
The river was mostly snowmelt and runoff, the temperature somewhere between forty and fifty degrees.
He couldn’t stay in it for too long.
He shoved the raft to the center of the river with three strong powerful kicks and hauled himself on board.
He never would have done that in Africa.
Too many crocodiles, too many hippos.
Even a raft like this would have him second guessing a land route on the dark continent, no matter who was hunting him.
He felt a little safer in America.
Even with a kill team hunting him again.
The river kept a steady speed.
He tied two branches lashed together to steer, an awkward paddle, but long enough to propel him off the shore and bounce the raft around the middle of the rushing water.
He was starting to shiver. Even curled up in a fetal position around the pack, the body warmth was leaking off him too fast.
He needed to get off the water and get a fire built.
The river had carried him miles away from the canyons, and he hadn’t heard a helo in hours, but that didn’t mean they would stop looking.
A smart pilot would wait until dark, pull up the infrared cameras and start hunting for heat signatures.
It would be easy enough to find him against the cooling ground, even slightly hypothermic.
He tried to calculate the math in his head, but couldn’t get it to work. His muscles kept demanding his attention as they shook and seized.
Ten or fifteen miles downriver from the park, they couldn’t know what direction he escaped in, multiplied by run radius of nine to fifteen miles meant a heck of a lot of ground they would have to cover to search for him.
The chopper could make wide sweeps, and try to zero in on anything it caught.
But he could hear them long before they saw him.
He liked his chances for a fire until they did.
The river spit him into a long narrow lake.
He could tell by the receding shoreline on either side that the lake spread several hundred yards across, and even further in the middle.
He could try to ride the current as it pushed through the water, but the speed in the lake was slowing him to a drift.
The wind was picking up and it made him shiver harder and impeded his progress.
He decided to make camp here.
But before he could camp, he had to get wet again.
He slid over the edge of the branches and the shock of the water sent tremors through his body.
He gripped the edge of the branch with one hand and dog paddled toward the shore until he could feel muck under his feet.
He pulled the raft as far up on shore as he could, grabbed his pack and moved inland, casting about for a clear spot.
He found a shallow depression in the ground between two trees, partially blocked by a third fallen tree.
It provided good cover from three sides, and he made enough noise to scare off snakes.
The fallen tree also provided branches and kindling and ten minutes after he started, small flames flickered in the growing twilight.
He stripped off his clothes and hung them over branches to dry, then pulled out peanut butter to eat with his fingers.
The shivering stopped as the fire and food did their trick.
It gave his brain time to work.
He still had supplies for days, especially if he rationed, and could forage along the way.
The kill team sent for him at the National Park was gone, dispatched as they hunted him and the Deputy, but Barraque had plenty of bodies to throw his way.
Another would soon take their place.
He needed a plan.
Chris Lowry Books 