Chapter One
I should have shot her. Gritting my teeth I went over in my mind for the hundredth time why I hadn’t taken the shot.
I’d had my gun squarely centered on her back and…… and she’d turned and flashed me that playful tease of a smile that she was famous for. I’d froze. Then with a wink she’d jumped from the hovercraft to the ice lands below with stolen jewels in hand.
My only hope was that she had hit the ground hard. I’d certainly hit hard.
Looking around I acknowledged again, for perhaps the thousandth time, that I could really use some water. I wiped at my brow. My hand should have come away with sweat, but I had been too long without water for that.
Another day like this and I’d be dead. Looking around at the sparse desert environment around me I shook my head at the oddity of the situation. Half of this world was a land of ice, while the other half was a baked leftover portion of hell.
I’d landed in the hell part, while even now she was most likely sipping ice cold water and chilling beside a lava flow. The urge to curse was strong and I felt at the gun by my side in futility.
She’d deliberately set a course for the hovercraft to crash on this arid side of the planet. She’d known I couldn’t work the technology in order to avert the ship’s course.
She could’ve set the craft to explode or crash into the surface, but no, she’d set it to land down remotely. Once it had landed in this parched wasteland the self-destruct countdown had begun.
She’d given me all of five seconds to get clear of the ship. I hadn’t had a chance to grab anything. All I had was the shirt on my back and the gun on my hip.
I should’ve shot her.
Zayri LaRarque was a beautiful woman and she used her beauty to full advantage. I’d fallen under her curse just like everyone else and let my guard slip.
She’d asked for her hands to be free and giving me that winning smile of hers for some reason I had done as she asked.
Before I knew it some stale chemical smelling piece of cloth had been shoved under my nose. I’d blacked out almost instantly with the last image I remembered being of her smiling down at me before blowing a kiss.
Anger coursed through me at the memory of how I had been duped. To her credit, while I was out she could have killed me easily, but she hadn’t. Zayri LaRarque never killed anyone outright, unless they deserved it.
Perhaps her not killing me when she had the chance was why I hadn’t pulled the trigger.
Morosely, I looked forward and scanned the arid plain. The sockets of my eyes felt gritty from lack of moisture and upswept sand. The view was the same as before, nothing but desolation.
Something buzzed and my half-asleep senses seized to life. Glancing to the left I saw a bee hovering in the air. Bees in the desert mean only one thing. Water!
It moved far faster than I could, but I managed to follow it long enough to come within distance of being able to see a few scattered out shade trees that grew up around a nesting of boulders. Trees, like bees, meant water and with the eagerness of desperation I made my way quickly across the rough terrain.
I could already taste the water. Unfortunately, as I got closer I could smell it. The smell was utterly rank!
With a heavy heart I approached the small waterhole. The pool of water wasn’t much more than four feet by four feet in size, but squarely in the middle of it was a Tanic wolf.
From the rate of decomposing tissue I placed the wolf’s death at about three days before. To drink the putrefied water was a death sentence all of its own. There was also the highly likely possibility that the water itself was poisoned, hence the dead wolf.
What to do?
To go on without water was death. To drink the water was death with a lot more misery involved. A bullet to the head would be more merciful.
That left me with Option C, but that option had a lot of issues to overcome. It was in me to do whatever it took to survive though.
Lethargically I moved about gathering up dry branches from the three lonely trees situated around the waterhole. I put a pile of branches together and reaching down I picked two rocks up.
Starting a fire on this side of the planet was a thing of simplicity. Everything was dry and the rocks had unique explosive qualities to them.
It wasn’t the process of striking flint together as I had used often on Earth. In truth, very little about being off-world was as it had been on Earth.
I began grinding the two rocks off each other and the brittle stone easily pulverized into dust. It had been three years since Edgar and I had come into the worlds beyond Earth.
I’d left the memories of my life on Earth long behind for the most part. My efforts a year into the cleaning up of the frontier settlement that we had first landed in had been largely successful, but the work had been unrewarding and the planet of little interest to me.
I’d left and expanded my outreach into traveling among different worlds acting as a solitary voice seeing justice was done. The life of a traveling lawman hadn’t been for Edgar. He’d settled down on one of the more civilized worlds that we’d come across. I visited him time to time, but something always drove me on to keep exploring and righting wrongs.
I shook my head disgustedly. I was a dumb fool!
That point of fact had never been made more clear to me then now. With the rocks all but disintegrated into a pile of dust I took one stick and dipped it into the pool of green water.
Removing it I held it over the pile of dust and shifted the stick about so the dripping water achieved full coverage over the little mound of dust. The dampened pile of rock dust began to smoke and then heat began to emanate from the pile.
Flames burst forth and I moved the pile of sticks over the flaming dust. I shuddered to think what would ever happen if it actually rained in this land of perpetual desert. It really would be a land of fire and ice then.
Watching carefully I kicked out the exploratory flames trying to lead off away from the fire along the top of the ground as rock dust scattered throughout the soil caught flame. My stick pile was well ablaze and I went in search of more wood with which to feed the flames.
The whole time that I gathered sticks I had to fight against the conscious urge to drink the polluted water. The smell didn’t seem to matter, nor did the rotting corpse squarely in the middle of it, because to my body it was simply water and I needed it to survive. My brain seemed to be alone in its fight to keep me from committing suicide.
The waiting was hard, but I did it and then I did my best to prepare for what came next. I’d stripped off a wide piece of bark with my knife from one of the trees and now with the fire’s work done I rolled the piece of bark into a funnel.
Crumbling some dry leaves up with my hand I let them spill over into the funnel which I held closed with my other hand. Reaching forward I picked up some charcoal from my fire that I had pulverized into smaller pieces. I let the charcoal fall on top of the crumbled leaves in a shallow layer. Then I brushed at the sandy dirt beside me in order to remove the volatile surface soil and get at the non-volatile dirt that lay below.
Scooping up some of the non-volatile soil I let it trickle from my hand on top of the charcoal until it formed a layer. I repeated the entire process until I had five repeating layers of charcoal and sandy dirt. Holding the funnel gingerly I got up and moved closer to the pool of stagnant water.
I suspended the bottom end of the funnel, which had about an inch wide circular opening, over top of a piece of twisted metal shaped like a bowl that I had managed to scavenge from the blown apart wreckage of the hovercraft. With my other hand I then began to carefully dip the putrid green looking water out of the waterhole to then let it fall on the top layer of my funnel.
It took a while, but eventually the water began to seep all the way through the layers to drizzle into the makeshift metal bowl below. Patiently I continued to dip water out of the pool until the bowl was full.
The bowl now full I carefully moved it over to where my fire had been and taking some fresh sticks I built up the fire again from the remaining embers of the first fire. The sticks soon caught on fire and taking three larger sticks I laid them across the fire to make an even plain to set the bowl on.
Now all I could do was wait and watch the precious ingredient for all life cook away before me. Wispy tendrils of steam rose up out of the bowl.
Groaning I hugged myself with my arms and tried to think of something to distract me from the water that needed time to boil before it would be fully safe to be drunk.
Even after the water had boiled it would be too hot to drink. I’d need to let it cool, but before too much longer I’d have cool running water trickling down my throat and into every part of me. Maybe I could drink a little bit of it now and the rest after it was done boiling.
My hand was reaching for the bowl and I had to literally seize it with my mind to stop the foolish intentions of my body. I forced myself to get up and walk away from the fire. Some temptations were just too great to be resisted it seemed. Zayri was such a temptation.
In desperation to distract myself I allowed myself to think about her. She’d been hard to catch. She’d led me on a merry chase across the plains of one world and through the forests of another. Finally I had enlisted the help of some traders and with the use of their ship I’d been able to run her down.
While I’d been out from whatever she’d drugged me with she had jettisoned the unconscious crew suited up in the hovercraft’s parachutes, until only one parachute had remained, hers. Where the traders were now I did not know, but they weren’t here. They probably had plenty of water to drink wherever they were though.
Zayri had stayed on board just long enough for me to revive so she could gloat over her victory. I’d slipped my hand free of the restraints that she’d had me trussed up in and been able to reclaim my gun from her. She’d streaked for the open portal and I’d lost the opportunity to exact the revenge I should have in order to repay her for this purgatory she’d caused me to land in.
Well, despite what she had intended, I was going to survive this. Turning back to the water I saw that it was boiling enough for me to believe it to be safe.
I had water and thus the source of life that all humans needed. Anything was possible now.