Free Outlaw by Ted Dekker Page B

voice. It came from the other prisoner. The one who’d spoken English. In my gagged haze, without the means to call out, I’d forgotten about him.
    “Hello?” My speech sounded hollow, suppressed by hard breathing.
    His call came back, just ahead and to my right. “Hello?”
    I hurried to what I now saw as a cell of sorts, made of timbers set in a framework of poles. Twine was knotted around a piece of wood that kept a rough-hewn door shut.
    Breathless, I spoke again, in the thinnest voice. “Hello?”
    “Who is it?” Even through his whisper I could hear that his accent was American, though not Southern.
    “Julian,” I managed.
    The steady song of cicadas came through the opening ahead. Nothing more.
    “Hello?”
    “You’re an American?” he finally asked.
    “I’m from Atlanta,” I replied.
    The moment still stands in my mind as utterly surreal. There in the deepest unknown jungle I had indeed stumbled upon an American, like myself, and I was so overwhelmed that I could not yet think to set him free.
    “Who…who are you?” I asked.
    “I’m Michael,” he said. “Can you open the door?”
    Dropping my shoes, I tugged at the knot with fervor, managed to unwind the twine, and yanked open the door.
    There stood a man taller than my five feet and four inches, looking half my width, and I was a small woman. His hair was thin and receded, tangled and sticking out in every direction. A dark beard hung low enough to make me wonder if he’d shaved in the last year.
    His nose and cheekbones protruded from a gaunt face covered in days of well-worn dirt. He was dressed in tattered slacks and a filthy shirt that might have blown away in a strong wind.
    He stared at me with eyes that looked too large for their sockets and tentatively offered me a thin hand coated in dried mud. “I’m Michael.”
    “We have to go!” I said. I knew that I wasn’t reasoning properly, but I was so eager to be out of that clammy place that I made no attempt to slow myself down. “They’re coming! Hurry.”
    “You’ve finally come?” he said. “You’re her?”
    “Who? No. My boat was wrecked. They found me and forced me here.”
    “You’re an American?”
    His eyes twitched in their sockets and I could see that his mind wasn’t fully coherent. But the fact that we were both alive and together buoyed my courage and I tugged at his arm.
    “We have to get out.”
    “Where are we going?”
    “Out! We have to get back to the coast.”
    “The coast?” His eyes darted to the opening on his right. “No, we can’t. That’s not the way it goes.”
    “The way what goes? We have to! I’ve been sentenced to death.”
    “Sentenced?” He lifted his crusty hand and ran his fingers through his hair. It was clear to me that his captivity had affected his mind in a profound way.
    “This may be our only chance, we have to try,” I said.
    But he didn’t come. “You don’t understand…” He stared at me, eyes searching mine, as if lost in a trance.
    For a moment I felt as if I were disconnected from my own body, watching insanity unfold beneath me. I had no context for what was happening to me. I was lost between worlds.
    But then the moment passed. I wasn’t lost at all—I could see, hear, smell, and feel that much with every cell of my body. I was trapped. A slave against my will, suffering through a horrible tragedy that would surely end in my death.
    As was Michael.
    Even in my own frenzied state I could see that such a fragile man could be as much of a liability as an asset in any escape. But I also knew that any journey through crocodile-infested swamps would be impossible without help. There was no telling what this man might have learned during his time among the Tulim. He spoke their language, didn’t he?
    “How long have you been here?” I asked quickly.
    “What date is it?”
    “August. Nineteen sixty-three.”
    He stared at me. “They only put me in the hole when they think I’ll be a