Man On The Run

The setting is a remote jungle in South America. The character in the story is being hunted by the authorities.

MAN ON THE RUN

Now as the storm broke and he scurried for shelter he knew quite well what he would find – nothing.

The huts kept up it the lightning and stood there shaking – then disappeared again in rumbling darkness. The rain hadn’t come yet: it was sweeping up from Campeche Bay in great sheets, covering the whole state in its methodical advance. Between the thunderbreaks he could imagine that he heard it: a gigantic rustle moving towards the mountains which were now so close to him – a matter of twenty miles.

He reached the first hut: the door was open and as the lighting quivered he saw as he expected, nobody at all. Just a pile of maize and the indistinct grey, movement of – perhaps – a rat. He dashed for the next hut, but it was the same as ever (the maize and nothing else), just as if all human life were receding before him, as if Somebody had determined from now on he was to be left alone – altogether alone. As he stood there the rain reached the clearing: it came out of the forest like a thick white smoke and moved on. It was as if an enemy were laying a gas-cloud across a whole territory, carefully, to see that nobody escaped. The rain spread and stayed just long enough, as though the enemy had a stopwatch out and knew to a second the limit of the lungs’ endurance. The roof held the rain out for a while and then let it through. The twigs bent under the weight of water and shot apart: it came through in half dozen places, pouring down in black funnels. Then the downpour stopped and the roof dripped and the rain moved on, with the lightning quivering on its flanks like a protective barrage. In a few minutes it would reach the mountains: a few more storms like this and they would be impassable.

He had been walking all day and he was very tired: he found a dry spot and sat down. When the lightning struck he could see the clearing: all around was the gentle noise of the dripping water. It was nearly like peace, but not quite. For peace you needed human company – his aloneness was like a threat of things to come. Suddenly he remembered – for no apparent reason – a day of rain at the American college, the glass windows of the library steamed over with the central heating, the tall shelves of sedate books; that was peace. He had made his own world, and this was it – the empty broken huts, the storm going by, and fear again – because he was not alone after all.

Somebody was moving outside, cautiously. The footsteps would come a little way and then stop. He waited, lacking energy, and the roof dripped behind him. He thought of the man who had been following hi,, padding around the city, seeking a really cast-iron occasion for his betrayal. A face peered round the hut door at him and quickly withdrew –an old woman’s face, but he could never tell with people in this part of the world – she mightn’t have been more than twenty. He got up and went outside; she scampered back from before him in her heavy sack-like skirt, her black plaits swinging heavily. Apparently his loneliness was only to be broken by these evasive faces – creatures who looked at him as if they had come out of Stone Age, who withdrew again quickly.

He was stirred by a sort of sullen anger – this one should not withdraw. He pursued her across the clearing, splashing in the pools, but she had a start and she got into the forest before him. It was useless looking for her there, and he returned towards the nearest hut, it wasn’t the hut which he had been sheltering in before, but it was just empty.

P.S. taken from my exercise papers for IGCSE preparation when  I was in senior high school