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  “What the heck are you doing?” he said and ran to it and slamming it shut and locking it, “There are wild dogs roaming around out there.”

  He heard the squeak of fear in his voice when he spoke and felt ashamed of his reaction.

  “I know,” she said grinning,” they drove past in a van.”

  Her grin widened in response to the look of distress on his face.

  “What were you going to do if someone came in?” he said.

  “Well,” she considered, “If I did not like the way they looked I would shoot them,” she said matter-of-factly like shooting people was something she did all the time. He looked at her and wondered if the fever and infection had affected her mind.

  “Are you okay?” he said. His question clearly implying that she wasn’t.

  Sara got up from the couch and walked over to where he was standing.

  “Here,” she said handing him the gun,” I’m way too hungry to shoot anyone right now.”

  He opened two cans of beef stew and a can of pork and beans and used the barbeque to heat their meal. Sara ate quickly washing it down with a bottle of water and he was still eating when she began to sing.

  “Beans, beans, the musical fruit the more you eat the more you toot.”

  He laughed, she was obviously feeling better.

  “I need to take another look at your arm and give you another shot,” he said.

  “You can get in trouble for practicing medicine without a license ya know,” she said smiling.

  “I’ve got my learners permit,” he said in defense of his medical skills.

  “That’s only for driving,” she mimicked steering a car.

  ***

  She was still weak the next day from the infection and she dozed off in the warm car on the short drive to the travel agency on Main Street. Jack parked in front of the building but unlike most businesses he discovered that this one was locked. He would need to break in to look for a brochure for the space adventure tour. Sara woke and watched him casting about looking for some way to break into the building. After a few moments she buzzed the car window down and asked him what he was doing. He grinned sheepishly and shrugged, “the door is locked, “he said, “I need to find a way to get in.”

  He turned around gesturing to the glass display window with palm trees painted on it and yelped at the sound of a gunshot and the window imploding. He looked up from the ground where he dived and saw her grinning at him. She held the gun out the car window.

  “Do you want me to open the door too?”

  They discovered that Jericho One Space Adventures Limited was located at a private airport in New Mexico which was closer than Nevada. She calculated that the trip would take three days to complete traveling during daylight hours. Leaving the town and his family behind was hard for Jack though he knew they were dead. For a long time he had believed his dad would come to look for him but after a month he had to admit that he would not be coming back. There was no longer any reason to stay in Eloy and with the mysterious van driving around town there was good reason to get out.

  Their next stop was the hardware store for bungee cords, gas cans, and a siphon hose. He spent the next two hours siphoning gas from cars all over town while Sara dozed. He filled all six gas cans and lashed them to the carrier on the roof of the Outback. He was feeling nauseous from the gas fumes by the time he filled the last one. She was awake when he climbed in to drive them home and she looked at his pale face.

  “We have enough gasoline to drive to Botswana and back, twice,” she said and laughed.

  “I guess I take after my mom in the preparedness department,” he said.

  ***

  Sara watched him as he prepared their evening meal. She saw him glance over at her a few times but he said very little. She liked his serious nature and she was glad that he could laugh at himself but she wished he would talk more. She hated people who talked too much but being with Jack was almost like being alone. She did not know anything about him and when she tried to learn more by talking about school and social stuff he got even quieter.

  They never talked about what happened to the world they’d both seen the news coverage, there was little to say. He was definitely a mystery; she’d never met anyone like him before. He was quiet even for a guy and, though she knew he was intelligent, she wondered why a seventeen-year-old still has model rockets in his bedroom. Aside from the Penthouse magazine there were no pictures of girls or rock bands in his bedroom just space stuff. There was something mysterious about him but not in a scary way. He was nice and funny, but quiet and different.

  “What kind of music do you like,” she asked.

  At her request he’d run a cord in from the generator and plugged it into the stereo in the living room while she looked through his sister’s music collection. She looked over and Jack shrugged his shoulders. He did not listen to music much, never had.

  “Do you like music?” she asked.

  “Not really,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  He thought about her question for a while and said, “Are you afraid of heights?”

  He already knew she was because she’d mentioned it to him.

  “Yes I told you that don’t you remember?” she said.

  “Why are you afraid?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, I just am okay.”

  “It’s the same for me with music, I don’t know why but it doesn’t do much for me, it just doesn’t.” he said.

  He could see by her face that his answer was not good enough. He watched her mind working as she dealt with the foreign concept of someone not liking music. This was something that was clearly not feasible in her world.

  “Didn’t you dance in music class? They made us dance.”

  “No.”

  She regarded him sceptically because she knew that everybody had to dance in music class.

  “How did you get out of it?”

  “I never went.”

  “To music class?”

  “To school,” he said and turned away.

  Sara regarded his back and wondered what that meant. Everyone went to school. It was the law.

  Jack got on the radio after dinner and asked Steve what they needed to resupply the space station. He was happy that they were no longer trying to talk him out of it instead he gave him a long detailed list of items. The extensive shopping list meant they would need to travel to Phoenix to acquire some of the requested items. He figured the city would be a good place to collect the virus sample they needed but the prospect of what had to be done to harvest the sample chilled him.

  They left the next day and the drive was uneventful but he noticed that Sara became quieter as they neared the city. Normally she talked a lot but approaching the city quietened her. It was where she lost her dad and when he saw her tears in her eyes he knew she was thinking about him. They searched the city for the items requested by Steve, and Jack kept an eye out for a suitable corpse from which to harvest the sample. He had a sealable plastic container and an axe and serrated knife with which to harvest the part needed. He had been shocked when Steve told him they wanted a complete human head from a virus victim. Jack thought about it all the way to Phoenix, he wasn’t sure he could go through with cutting off someone’s head, even if they were dead. It took a long time to find everything on the list and the car was full and sagging under the weight. When they were ready to leave for New Mexico Sara asked him to drive her to the motel where she and her dad were staying when the plague hit.

  She wanted to get her clothes. She asked him not to come inside with her when she got her things. He was worried about what she might find but she had tears in her eyes and he let her go by herself. She was crying hard when she came back with her things. While she was occupied inside the motel Jack took the axe and put on a pair of rubber gloves. He’d spotted the bloated carcass of a woman beside the swimming pool when they pulled up. He closed his eyes as he hacked at her neck with the axe because the visuals
were just too grizzly and he felt like he was going to vomit. On the third blind swing the axe hit the concrete beneath her and he opened his eyes in time to see the head roll away into the empty swimming pool. His hands were shaking when he climbed down into the pool to get it. When he grabbed the severed head by the hair the mouth opened and a cloud of tiny black insects flew out. It was sickening. He did not mention it to Sara because she was already feeling bad.

  At four pm on Saturday November 21, 2023 they set off on their journey to Clayton New Mexico. They were four miles from the Phoenix city limits when Jack pulled to a stop and opened his door and puked his lunch onto the pavement. It was less than ten miles after that they ran out of gas.

  “Jesus Jack, you got all that gas but you didn’t fill the tank? “

  She was smiling, the look on her face was not serious, and he knew that she was ‘giving him the gears’ but his face turned red anyway.

  “I forgot, okay,” he said and she laughed.

  He climbed out and went to the back of the car and unstrapped a five gallon jug and poured it into the tank feeling embarrassed as the fuel glub-glubed into the empty tank. He was happy that she was feeling better. It took three jugs to completely fill it. It was late by the time they got going again and his head was aching from gas fumes. That was when he glanced in the rear view mirror and noticed headlights on the road far behind them. He was afraid to tell Sara about the lights because she might insist that they stop and talk to whoever was coming. After finding her sitting with the front door open and the gun on her lap he was concerned that she did not really understand the seriousness of their situation and what kind of danger they might face from people.

  “We’d better find a place to sleep I don’t want to drive at night. We are way too visible with our headlights on and I don’t really want to run into anything in the dark,” he said.

  She studied the road map unfolded on her lap.

  “There is a lake with a campground about five miles from here. There might be cabins and we can get more gas if there are any cars,” she said.

  That sounded good to him, he knew the lake, and he wanted to get away from whoever was on the road behind them. They were driving fifty miles an hour when he said, “I know a short cut,” and veered off the road into the open desert shifting the Outback into four-wheel drive on the fly. He was fatigued from a full day and the amount of driving he’d done and it took all his concentration to not kill them as he sped along in the overloaded car. He was relieved when he heard Sara whoop with excitement when they caught a bit of air as they barreled through the sand dunes.

  “This is fun,” she shouted.

  They came to a rutted track that Jack knew led to the lake and they followed it until they intersected the tree lined gravel road leading to the camp ground on the south shore of Lake George. It was a small cold water lake fed by snowmelt from the petering out Southern end of Casa Grande mountain range. The sign advertised twenty five serviced camp sites for $30 per night with free Wi-Fi; most of the sites were empty. There were a few cars and a tent and one large recreational vehicle with a satellite dish on the roof. It had California plates.

  “I don’t know about you but I vote for the big guy there,” she said nodding to the RV, “maybe we can watch TV,” she added hopefully.

  The RV was huge inside and spotless. It reminded Jack of the hotel room his family had stayed in while on vacation in Las Vegas. There was lots of chrome and mirrored surfaces and two fat white leather seats that swivelled on their bases. The RV smelled like old people he thought as he flopped down onto the overstuffed couch. He leaned back and got comfortable and shut his eyes.

  “It suites you gramps,” Sara said laughing as she walked past him to explore the rest of the vehicle.

  He heard the taunt but he was so weary he drifted, off to sleep before he could think of a comeback. He was well on his way to deep sleep when she screamed. He jumped straight up off the couch and whacked his head on the overhead storage locker.

  “What’s wrong?” he yelled struggling to pull the gun free of his coat pocket.

  “Oh my God,” she yelled from the back of the RV,” it’s got hot water.”

  He sat down trembling from the scare she gave him and laughed. He laughed so hard tears streamed down his face.

  “What’s so funny?” she said when she came back but he could not answer he was laughing too hard and holding his stomach.

  “Why do you have that out?” she said.

  He looked at the gun in his hand and laughed harder, it took a while but when he got control of himself he said.

  “When you screamed I thought you were in trouble but you were only in hot water.”

  “Very funny,” she said giving him a look, “give me the keys I’ll get our stuff and by the way you need a shower.”

  He handed her the keys and after she went outside he said to the air behind her.

  “I think I’ll have a shower.”

  When she came back inside he was in the tiny bathroom and she heard him killing an old Beatles song. After the second chorus she banged on the bathroom door.

  “Hey Ringo, save me some hot water.”

  She heard the water stop and he came out a few minutes later wrapped in a pink bath towel shaking water from his hair. Washing it had made it curly. She liked the way it looked though he needed a trim. She also noticed that he’d shaved the blonde fuzz over his lip. She’d wondered about it, was it supposed to be a moustache or what? She had to admit he was kind of cute for a weird space geek.

  They brushed past each other in the narrow hallway and she caught the scent of clean boy skin and shampoo.

  He was taller than her by a few inches, strong and slim, not unattractively skinny, just spare and really kind of muscular for a science geek who never worked out. She realized that she’d been avoiding looking at him as a ‘guy’ these past few days but now she couldn’t avoid it. She slipped into the tiny shower and shrugged out of his sister’s clothes. She opened the bottle of shampoo that was on the shelf behind her and soaped her hair and the smell of the shampoo made her think about his curly hair. She found a wash cloth and soaped her body all over while she thought about his strange pale blue eyes.

  She’d never seen eyes like his before, sometimes they were greyer than blue. Set wide apart in an open and seriously handsome face. He still had lots of child in his features but they hinted strongly at the man he would become. His strong jaw and symmetrical features in her mind somehow did not mesh with his weird personality and odd lack of talking. She stopped herself when she started thinking she liked the sound of his voice. At that point she realized she was letting him get way too far inside her head and she needed to stop. Her resolve was short lived when her mind wandered to the bump she saw in his pink towel but just then the hot water ran out and took those thoughts away with it.

  Jack was studying the map spread out on the dining room table and shovelling microwaved spaghetti into his mouth. The best way to get to Clayton would be to take Interstate 40 East through Albuquerque and Santa Fe. It was about seven hundred miles. They decided to take the RV reasoning that it would be easier than looking for a place to sleep every night and after all the keys were right there in the ignition. Though neither of them had driven anything that large he figured they would manage. It was an automatic transmission and there wouldn’t be much traffic. The thing that made up his mind was the CB radio installed right in the panel above the driver’s seat. They would be able to talk with ISS anytime they wanted. It really felt like they were making progress.

  After they ate he put on a movie he found in a drawer. If they’d had any doubts about it before it was now clear that the RV belonged to old folks because the movie was really boring. Before it ended Jack went out and sat on a picnic table down by the lake and looked up at the stars. All his life he wanted to fly into space, he’d watched all the launches on television when he was a kid and he knew every astronaut’s name and where they were from. Now he was a
ctually going to fly into space and the sky loomed huge above him and he felt the beginnings of elation take hold of him; this was his chance to make his dream come true.

  “What are you thinking about?” the sound of Sara’s voice startled him.

  “I was thinking about what it will be like up there,” he said.

  The evening sky was bright with stars when she gazed up.

  “I think it will be cold.” she said.

  She hugged herself pretending to shiver and then shivered for real when a breeze rose up off the lake. He looked at her and smiled.

  “You’ll need to wear a pair of long johns under your space suit.”

  They sat quietly watching the silent universe turn before them. A falling star streaked across the sky.

  “Quick, make a wish,” she whispered.

  He thought for a moment but there was really only one thing he wished for and, though she never said it, he knew what she wished for was the same.

  “I’m cold I’m going in,” she said, and she turned and walked back to the RV and a few minutes later he joined her.

  There was something different this time when they went to bed. He was not aware of what had changed but something definitely felt different. Maybe it was because this was not his bed they would be sharing. They never talked about whether they would sleep together in the RV neither of them had wanted to bring it up. When it was time to get ready for bed he found himself watching her. She stood with her back to him and he noticed that tonight all she was wearing was one of his tee shirts and panties. He felt shy when he stripped down to his under pants and tee shirt and crawled into the bed. When she lifted the sheets and got in he noticed that she was not as careful not to brush up against him as she was last night. Her foot touched his bare calf and it was shocking.

  “Ahk! Your feet are really cold,” he said.

  “I know, I feel kind of cold tonight,” she said. Her voice was low and sounded vulnerable to him.

  “Do you want me to see if there are more blankets?”

  “I looked already there aren’t any,” she said.

  He was surprised that she felt cold because he felt oddly warm in spite of the cool night. He lay silently thinking about her, wondering what she would do if he touched her, if she would freak out. Before he could stop himself he spoke.