Gemma and Anton

She spied the bag of dried fruit under the rock. Raising her unsteady hand to her brow, she surveyed the expanse of broken and churned rock and made sure no one was looking. Easing along the shadow of the rock, she crouched down and jerked her hand down to the bag, when a swarm of insect drones pummeled her arm, forcing her to abandon the bag.

She turned away and walked, her gut empty and her heart heavy after ten days of searching.

“You left this,” a kind male voice said from behind her. He jogged past, and faced her, his brown eyes nestled in a criss-cross of lines from scavenging under the harsh sun like herself. He held out the bag of fruit to her.

“The drones didn’t attack you?”

“I’ve learned a distraction technique.” He swiped back a lock of deep black hair that fell over the side of his face.

She hesitated and then snatched the bag of fruit. “You get fifty percent.” Her fingers pulled at the small plastic clasp to open it.

He grabbed her arm. “No, you keep it all.”

His arm showed inflamed dimples from drone impacts.

“I’m sorry. You must be in agony,” she said.

He shrugged. “I’ve watched you going through the encampments. You never stay in any of them. I know you’re looking for your sister. Let me help.”

“You’ve followed me?”

He opened his mouth, but nothing came out for a few seconds, then he spoke haltingly, color flashing across his high cheekbones. “You’re unusual. Almost everyone is looking out only for themselves,….but, you’re different. In all those encampments, even though you’ve had a better chance of surviving if you stayed in them, you never stayed; you’ve kept going…looking for your sister.” His eyes glowed with admiration.

“My sister is my problem.”

“Let me help. I don’t mean to be creepy. I’m Anton, from the Northern Quarters, what used to be Ontario.”

“Gemma, from the Lowlands, what used to be Texas. Thank you for your help, Anton, but I can’t ask you to endanger yourself more. You really should take some of this dried fruit.” She opened the bag and held out a handful to him, blushing and glancing away from his firm red lips.

He shook his head. “No, Gemma, only if you let me help you search for your sister.”

She fiddled with a piece of fruit, badly wanting to chew it, and taste the fructose sugaring her tastebuds and saliva. If it were sweet with notes of sour, that would be so much better, but she couldn’t with Anton watching her.

“Thank you, but I refuse your help, Anton. Out there between the camps, as you know, there’s more and more desperation. Each time, I don’t know if I’ll make it to the next encampment, and it’s difficult enough to forage enough calories to fuel myself, let alone two of us.”

He brought out from his back pocket a slingshot made from wood and leather, and heavy-duty rubber. “My granddad gave this to me as a kid. I’m a pretty excellent shot.”

She laughed, then she whispered in his ear, “So your name is really David, and do you know the weak spot in our Goliath, aka the midsize drones, roving out there between the encampments?”

“No, but you never know…I could use it as a diversion technique.”

She lingered by his side, and he leaned in to her, so that there was a half-inch of electrified connection between them.

He folded her hand into his own, and she resisted an overwhelming urge to forget about her sister and melt into him. He took the packet from her hand, dug in and picked out a dried cherry and popped it into her mouth.

She pulled him to her and kissed him hard and urgently, feeling his lips part and accept her, until she passed the cherry into his mouth. Then he grabbed her, but he was too late; she had pulled away and tucked the small bag of dried fruit into a hidden fold inside the hem of her coat.

“I didn’t want to scare you, but I’ve been following you; I couldn’t help myself. Every day, I’m more and more in love with you, and talking to you has done nothing to dispel it. My feelings for you are so much stronger now.”

“What do you think I can do with a man carrying around a slingshot in this desecration of the beautiful planet earth, with malicious forces ever ready to wipe us out?” Tears sprang to her eyes.

He took the saliva-wet cherry out of his mouth. It glistened in the sun as he held it out in his palm to her. She shook her head. “Please don’t follow me; I promised my parents that if anything happened, I’d take care of my younger sister. This is a cruel world; there’s no room in it for romantic distractions, at least not for me.”

He wiped the cherry in his hand and dug his hand deep down into his trouser’s pocket and secreted it there. “I respect a lady’s words, and you are a lady. I respect you.” He bowed and turned and walked back into the thick of the encampment.

Darting like a sewing needle back and forth through the roads that circled the encampment and led away, into the outskirts of the rocky land, she kept hidden, ducking down onto her stomach everytime she heard a noise. The insect drones would have reported the two of them outside the boundary. She’d been foolish to let herself linger talking to that man, and get taken in by his romantic notions, even if he had left her with the bag of dried fruit.

Hearing the high frequency buzzing, she stitched her way back into the encampment to throw the insect drones off her track. She huddled in a corner between two pieces of broken drywall from a bombed building, she ran through videos of her family memories, the ones she’d kept from the ‘Friendly Intelligence’ probing and extracting tactics. After a while, she fell asleep for a few hours, and then woke, as she always did, at 1:10 AM, the time when her family had been ripped apart by the Attack Bomb explosions.

Pushing aside the drywall pieces and laying them gingerly against other haphazard building debris, so as not to make a sound, she checked her surroundings and then crept out, keeping her body low and obscured by the debris, until she came to the boundary. For a moment she hesitated. There was always a chance her sister had come into the encampment, but her intuition told her that wasn’t the case.

For four hours, she crept among the upturned rocks and debris that made up the slope that ran up a hill. At the top, the sun poked out from among the ruined earth. In the distance the lights from two encampments gleamed. The path to the right one appeared more obscured in shade, so she started down that one and determined that she would go to the one on the left if her sister wasn’t there. Keeping within the shade of rocks that poked out like a broken crust, she made her way. She’d eaten two pieces of dried fruit and had had no water. Her saliva gummed in her mouth, and her head felt woozy.

After half an hour, off the road, she found a creek running almost under a large rock. Bending down, she cupped her hand and brought up a brackish fluid. It would probably be tainted. She risked running upstream toward the east a bit to where the water could be clearer, which meant going back up the hillside.

It was risky, since that would be where the insect drones would expect to find runaways and other delinquents who hadn’t remained in the camps. Giving a wide berth, she followed the stream uphill, and then decided she was running out of time and darted in to get some water. Besides the pocket in her hem, she’d sewn in a waterproof pouch she could fill with water.

She waded into the frigid water when a medium size surveillance drone showed up over the hillside and focused its laser surveillance on her. There was no escape; she crouched down and took several gulps of the cold, sweet water.

Then there was a ‘ping’ sound. A small stone struck the side of the drone, and it emitted a series of beeps, spun around, and headed towards the crest of a hillock, beyond which she was sure Anton was hidden. The drone would locate him by his body heat. The drone moved quickly. She ran after it.

Anton was running. He saw her and waved at her to run away from him.

She paused for a moment, mouthed the words, ‘Thankyou,’ Her heart fell full and empty at the same time. She turned and ran out into the wild.