M.A. Kleen

Twenty-five years ago, I self-published The River of Rain, a philosophical exploration of freedom, human nature, and the modern world. To mark its anniversary, I’m releasing a fully revised edition, one chapter every Wednesday. This is the novel as it was meant to be. Continued from Chapter 14.

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Victor saw Ariana and the bear the moment he entered the chamber. His eyes dropped briefly to the torch in his hand before he slowly advanced, waving the flames back and forth in front of him.

The bear retreated a few steps but showed little fear. It swiped at the fire with one massive paw and growled deep in its throat.

Victor lunged with the spear. The sharpened point struck the animal’s thick hide several times, but the blows only enraged it further. Out of the corner of his eye he caught movement and saw Ariana crawling toward the straw bed. A second later she grabbed his knife.

The torch was doing almost nothing, and its flames were already beginning to die. Victor hurled it directly at the bear. Sparks burst through the air when it struck the animal’s shoulder, drawing a furious howl. Under normal circumstances that probably would have driven the creature away, wounded or not, but this bear was starving and half-mad from hunger.

Victor jammed the butt of the spear into the cave floor and braced it with his foot just as the animal charged.

His eyes widened as the sharpened tip punched deep into the bear’s chest.

The beast roared so violently the sound seemed to shake the chamber itself, yet the momentum of its charge carried it straight into him. It crashed down with claws extended and slammed Victor onto the cave floor.

Everything became confusion.

He barely remembered his last fight with a bear. Looking back on it now, he realized he had probably survived through luck more than anything else. The animal’s crushing weight made it hard to breathe. Warm blood trickled down his forehead and across his cheek. One arm lay pinned uselessly beneath him.

Then Ariana threw the knife, and by some miracle Victor caught it.

His free arm immediately began stabbing wildly into the thick fur, slashing at anything he could reach. The bear snarled and pinned that arm too beneath one enormous paw. The pressure shifted off his other side just enough for Victor to move. He grabbed the knife handle with both hands and forced the blade upward inch by inch toward the animal’s head.

Every muscle in his body screamed in pain. His vision blurred. He felt close to blacking out. Still, he pushed.

Finally the blade drove into the bear’s eye.

The creature let out a horrible, weakened roar as Victor gouged deeper. Then suddenly the strength drained from both of them at once.

Victor’s body went limp beneath the carcass, sprawled across the dusty cave floor. Blood spread outward beneath the two combatants in dark, winding streams.

Ariana could hardly believe what had just happened. She dropped to her knees in the dust, crying and shivering so violently her teeth chattered. All the color had drained from her face.

Suddenly the bear’s enormous body rolled off Victor and hit the cave floor beside her with a heavy thud. Ariana screamed and jumped backward. The bloody wooden spear still protruded from the animal’s thick torso, jutting upward at an angle.

Still trembling, she crawled over to Victor and cradled his head in her hands.

He was either dead or unconscious.

How did you do resuscitation again? she asked herself frantically, trying to remember half-forgotten lessons from gym class. With shaking hands she lowered her ear beside his mouth.

He was breathing. Slowly, weakly, but breathing.

Relief flooded through her so suddenly it almost made her dizzy. What did the boy teach you before? she thought desperately.

She dragged him over beside the shallow depression she had been filling with water and tried to wash away the blood as best she could so she could see where he was wounded. There were cuts everywhere. Some shallow, others deep enough to make her stomach tighten.

After a moment of panicked hesitation, Ariana grabbed a stick from the fire, its tip glowing red hot. Slowly she lowered it against the worst wound. The flesh sizzled and Victor groaned faintly.

“That’s good,” she whispered to herself, though she was not entirely sure it was. Trying not to gag at the smell, she repeated the process on several of the deeper cuts, though she left the wound near his eye alone. That one she carefully pressed with a wet cloth instead. Finally, she sat back and breathed a shaky sigh of relief.

The bear lay motionless nearby. Definitely dead.

“Water,” Victor groaned weakly.

Ariana hurried to the underground lake, cupped water in her hands, and carefully brought it to his trembling lips. After drinking a little he slipped back into unconsciousness, leaving her alone to pace the chamber in nervous exhaustion and fear.

At some point during the night Ariana fell asleep.

When she woke what she assumed was the next morning, she briefly hoped the previous day had been some terrible nightmare, but the sight of the dead bear quickly destroyed that hope. Victor still had not woken up. The fire had nearly gone out too.

With nothing else to do, she crouched beside the hearth and carefully coaxed the glowing embers back into flame. Afterward she wandered to the pile of meat and forced herself to eat while constantly glancing toward Victor’s motionless body.

She was still shaking.

Calm down, she scolded herself. You have to hold yourself together.

For most of the day Ariana stayed beside him, leaving only occasionally to refill her makeshift bath from the underground lake, the repetitive task helping keep her thoughts from spiraling apart. Little by little she calmed down. The trembling eased after she drank water and forced herself to eat more.

Every so often she dipped a cloth into the freezing subterranean water and laid it across Victor’s forehead. She did not know whether it actually helped, but something inside her insisted it would. From time to time, he surfaced from unconsciousness only long enough to mutter delirious nonsense before slipping away again.

Still, he was alive. That alone felt miraculous.

Ariana cleaned his wounds carefully and often, doing everything she could think of to keep them from worsening. As the hours passed she found herself studying his face while he slept. Even battered and pale, there was something strangely noble about him. She brushed the back of her hand gently across his cheek.

This was the second time he had saved her life, whatever secret motives he carried buried inside himself.

She felt overwhelmingly grateful. In some strange way she was almost thankful now that the bus had crashed, because otherwise the two of them never would have met. Their lives had collided through tragedy like characters in some old romantic drama, lost together outside the world.

Her thoughts drifted back to the one and only time they had truly been together. Though they shared the same bed every night, nothing like that had happened again since.

To her surprise, she found herself wanting it. The realization felt strange. Wasn’t it usually the man who obsessed over such things?

She imagined what it must have been like for him, lying beside her night after night, close enough to touch but never asking for more. For the first time she understood that maybe simply having someone there beside him had been all he ever wanted.