William Dietrich - Getting back

"Send some rocks at them," he instructed his slingman uncertainly.

The man whirled his weapon over his head and let fly. The stone rocketed along the crest of the dam and banged off the metal grate harmlessly. He flung again, and again. One rock ricocheted into the adjacent reservoir and a third bounced up in the air and fell down on the dam crest behind the bastards crouched with the grate. One of them scampered back, scooped it up, and hurled it back, forcing Gallo's men to duck out of the way.

"You dropped something, you clumsy cretins!" the pitcher yelled. It looked like the bastard they'd already hit with a rock.

"Maybe we should just rush them," one of the convicts ventured.

"There's too many," Gallo snapped. "You want to get pushed off the face of this dam? I say we keep them pinned here until help comes. They're trapped."

Wrench had arrived at the same conclusion. He'd actually loped forward along the other end of the dam with the intention of jabbing tentatively at the metal grating with his spear, but as soon as he started the fugitives hurled chunks of concrete, the blows sending him scampering back out of the way. If he tried to climb over the gratings they'd stick him like a pig. Well, if he couldn't advance on the dam's crest, neither could they, right? It was a standoff. He hoped.

Still, he was worried about doing nothing and getting the Warden mad at him. He stood watching the frenetic activity at the center of the dam with foul confusion. What the hell were they trying to do?

Suddenly there was a shrill, wailing shriek, so loud and unearthly that the convicts on either side of the structure instinctively jumped. What the devil was that? Excited shouts were coming from the gearhouse. Then there was another shriek, and encouraging yells from the women. The flow of water down the face of the dam began to quicken. The catwalk was beginning to lean out over the dropoff, increasingly precarious.

"Are they trying to commit suicide?" Wrench muttered, his chest sore from a thrown missile. If they lost the transmitter in the river Rugard would hang them all. Damn! He began to realize that things were going horribly wrong.

There was another metallic squeal, the complaint of corroded metal, and then a sudden bang. One of the spillway gates snapped open and a plume of water shot out from the crest of the spillway, carrying two women with it. Screaming, they hit the river below. The catwalk shuddered and, with a creak of its own and a snapping of timbers, it followed the two women off the top of the dam, toppling into the river with a titanic splash. The wood went under for a moment and then floated in a boil of foam, rocking away downstream. Shrieking with a combination of triumph and fear, more women jumped into the growing waterfall and slid down the face of the dam to follow their makeshift raft.

Behind them there were more snaps of metal, a chain reaction of failure, and the spillway gates pried open wider, pushed by the force of the reservoir behind them. The roar of the unleashed flood was growing. Men boiled out of the gearhouse, shouting and waving their arms at their comrades behind the shields. Abruptly the gratings clanged down and the two defenders behind each one ran to the lip of the spillway. "Jump, jump!" Daniel cried. One by one, they obeyed him.

Wrench and Gallo started to lead their men across the top of the dam.

Raven hesitated at the edge of the spillway, eyes wide with excitement at the growing flood, the transmitter strapped to her belly.

"These are your people, now," Daniel shouted to her above the growing roar of the water. "They've decided to put their trust in you. Don't let them down!"

She looked at the heads bobbing downstream, thrashing after the makeshift raft. "I won't." Then she leaped.

"Ayyyyyy!" Daniel glanced around. Wrench was charging at him with a wild cry, sword swinging over his head.

It cut empty air where Daniel had been. He'd jumped too.

There was the terrifying irruption of foam below, the endless seconds of free fall, and then the plunge into cold water and the buffeting of current until he could force his way back upward, gasping for air. All he could see was water. He began swimming downstream.

Gallo and Wrench wavered to a stop at the two edges of the spillway, separated from each other by ninety feet of roaring flood. "Fire, fire!" the two squad leaders screamed. The convicts hurled spears and sticks but the fusillade was a pointless mistake: they were simply throwing away their best weapons. All they had to aim at was mist, and white water, and beyond it a series of heads swirling downstream like corks. One by one the fugitives were reaching the floating catwalk, accelerated by the growing flood.

"Jump in after them!" Wrench roared in frustration. But his companions hesitated. The pounding of the unleashed water was getting more violent as the corroded gates were pried aside, the reservoir swirling toward the dam's open mouth with an ominous suck. And how would they fight in the water? Rugard's scouts began backing warily away from the spillway lip.

The fugitives were already out of sight.

Wrench and Gallo looked at each other across the gap, as impassable as an ocean. The lake behind was big and might take hours, even days, to drain itself back down to the level of the new opening. They howled in frustration. And then turned to try to follow as best they could along the steep, brushy banks on either side of the river, falling farther and farther behind.

The energy that swept Daniel's party downstream was frightening in its power, and a narrower river canyon with more rocks might have resulted in serious injury to the members of his party. The reservoir water was cold, deep, and turbulent. But the valley below the dam was wide enough so that the pouring water had room to spread and run smoothly as it rushed downstream. The fugitives were mostly young, immensely fit after months in the wilderness, and good swimmers: none had come to Australia without that skill. So instead of being caught in a white-water death trap, Daniel's group was instead sped by a brownish current that was tidelike in its steady power. The wreckage of the catwalk became a life raft that supported most of the fugitives, though a few clung to random logs that had been picked up and carried downstream as well. The water moved so fast that the frustrated cries of Rugard's men were soon left behind. Then the pulse of the current began to slow, and by concerted effort the group clinging to the catwalk eventually managed to kick the structure to the eastern side of the stream so that it grounded on a sandbar. By that time they'd been washed down several miles.

The shaken trekkers staggered ashore to collapse and steam in the sun, panting, and then roused themselves to unlash their belongings and sort themselves out. Surprisingly, few of their supplies had been lost: Raven's plan had worked. And besides cuts and bruises, there were no serious injuries. Even Ned had decided his shoulder was only hurt, not broken, by the slung rock.

"Well, we crossed the river," Ethan spat. "Not quite the way we intended."

The other fugitives were looking at Daniel with a mixture of triumph and stunned uncertainty. What now? He stood stiffly, took a deep breath, and faced them. Everyone was a bit dazed by the sudden confrontation but also exhilarated to have escaped: thrilled to have beaten this sudden foe, thrilled to still be alive. Come alive! Outback Adventure had promised. They had this day.

Now they had a choice to make, and a hard one. If they were going to help him, he had to play to their desire for escape.

"We've told you all that we think we have a way to get a couple of us back to where we came from," he began quietly. "And if the transmitter works they might just be able to expose this scandal for what it is and get the rest of us back as well. But to use the transmitter we were forced to flee with it from a convict community hundreds of miles to the west of here. After so much distance and time, we thought the convicts had given up any hope of pursuit, but obviously we were wrong."