From a new story

[Das]

A friend of mine named Jack Dumont just published a book called "The Hands of Fate-Legacy" and did the favor of throwing in a short quicksand scene after I told him of how some actually enjoy the prospect of the whole qsinking thing. It's a short entry but better than nothing, I guess...



Chapter 61 – Lost Weekend
The usually quiet Theodis was now chatting happily down the trail back to the river.
“I couldn’t believe those guys, man! They had nothing!” He said.
“Yeah, well they had spears!” Arliss said. “That was about all I was looking at for a while there.”
“That lot faces threats every day…” Lee chimed in. “…And now they have far more to worry over. I’m just glad the sickness isn’t part of it.”
Harris was quiet as he was still reeling from his psychedelic trip last night.
“What do you mean?” Arliss said.
“I mean the diseases from the outsiders was just part of their worries,” Lee said, sadly. “They always had to hunt for their food, gather their water, reinforce against the weather when it got rough. Now they have the farmers and loggers coming in and encroaching on the lands they and their ancestors lived and hunted in for centuries.”
She said all this while a tapir ran by with its young and a grouping of capybaras scattered into the forest as the lot of them walked by.
“They even stopped having children!” She continued.
“Stopped having kids?” Theodis said in disbelief.
“They felt it was their time to fade into the afterworld…until Doc, here showed up!” Lee said.
She couldn’t help but see he said nothing up to now. Harris was listening to all of it but still trying to make sense of what he saw.
“Harris, you OK?” She said to the young Xenon. Harris just nodded.
“So, did anyone tell the law here?” Arliss said. “Someone has to have said something.”
“Yeah, but like anything else with government, they are slow to do anything,” Lee responded. “I hope they do something soon or all this will be gone.”
Their walk continued down the trail to the side of the river heading to where their canoes lay in wait to take them back to the put-in site. Lee had marked the area with several branches when they pulled in. It was just a matter of finding them.
The dry season has started to take place, which was reducing the level of the river and caused the water to recede and create what looked like more ground to appear. They continued to walk through the long grass along the river.
“Man, why do we have to keep walkin’ through this grass?” Theodis asked. “It’s cuttin’ up my legs!”
“The trail is the safest way there,” Lee said. “We just gotta deal with it.”
“That ground along the river is all cleared out now.” Theodis counter. “Why don’t we just walk on that?”
Before Lee could tell him Theodis found out. The deceptively dry sand gave way under him, and he was thigh-deep in the muck and still sinking.
“That’s why!” Lee said, angrily, as she slammed her pack on the dry ground looking through her backpack.
“Hey, get me outta here! I’m sinking!” Theodis yelled as struggling in the soft ground the river was hiding a day ago that revealed the quicksand now visible from the retreated waters.
“Stop struggling, or you’ll sink even more, dumbass!” Lee shouted as she threw a lassoed rope at the large man, now helpless in the river marsh. He tried to stay calm, but it wasn’t easy as he felt his body slowly slip further into the river bed.
“Theodis! Slide the loop under your arms!” She instructed the caramel-coloured man as she threw the rope to him. “Harris, tie this to that tree over there.”
Harris tied the other end around the trunk of the Euterpe precatoria, ensuring that the big guy wasn’t going anyplace.
Arliss and Lee grabbed the rope and pulled only a little at a time with Harris in the back pulling in a slow, similar pattern to the other two.
It took them a half hour to get Theodis back on dry land, and they all fell on the ground in an exhausted heap once their man was back on solid ground.
“Sorry guys,” Theodis said, lying in the sun. “I was just afraid I was gonna drown in that shit!”
“That’s a myth,” Lee said. “You would have stopped sinking at chest level. The worst that would have happened was you would drown by rising river waters or died of starvation….maybe eaten by some animal.”
“Viva la Difference!” He said as they continued to lay in the sun a bit longer.
After ten more minutes, they gathered themselves and kept hiking through the grass, not minding so much, anymore. It was still scratching them as they passed, but it beat the alternative.
They got to where the canoes sat undisturbed on dry land, now a bit more drained from the receded waters. There were no fish nearby as all the ponds stood empty of life by those predators higher up the chain grabbing food from the puddles of standing water and assured they would not be in the middle of an animal buffet. Lee went and stood on the beach to satisfy the boys that the sand was safe to walk on.
“Boys, I don’t know about you, but I need a swim first before we set off.” She said. “Theodis, you need to get the rest of that sand off ya.” The caramel man of colour couldn’t deny that as his legs were chafing from the leftover grit.
The boys wandered into the water and pulled off their shirts and shorts bathing in their underwear and still mindful of any wildlife in the area while Lee joined them in the water…also topless! That didn’t strike Harris as much as he was much more accustomed to this fashion in Europe, but the other two just gawked as they didn’t know what to make of it. She didn’t have much to display, anyway.
“Oh, gimme a break, pervs!” Lee said. “How do you think I lived when I was in the village full time?”
They just brushed it off and swam for a few minutes to get clean the best they could in the cloudy but warm river. Theodis got the rest of the muck off him to his relief, and they were on the water, rather than in it a few minutes later and travelling with the current so it took less energy.
“So, Lee…” Arliss asked. “What did you tell the tribe about Harris last night?”
“Um, I was just thinking on my feet, so I don’t remember much.” She replied. “Just that he was from the Xenon Tribe from far away and that he was a high chieftain where we came from.” Harris just grinned hearing this.
“I hope you don’t mind, Doc.” Lee then said to him. “It was all I could come up with at the time.”
“Don’t give it a second thought” Harris responded as he continued paddling. “You do what you gotta do to stay alive…Besides, what do they know about Xenons?”
Harris was in a daze as Arliss did the steering in the back. He just kept trying to make sense of what he saw. It was all a hallucination, of course, but was there a deeper meaning to it all?
“Man, I’d be insulted if someone called me a Xenon!” Theodis said. “All their robbing and killing! I wouldn’t think twice about…”
His next sentence was interrupted by a jaguar killing a lingering sloth. They all responded by shutting up and rowing their boats faster.
Harris couldn’t wait to get back. He was sure the others felt the same.