Out of the Black - Lee Doty [113]
His flinch was barely perceptible, "Ah! Some kind of proposal, you say? Those kinds of questions..." he made a show of scratching his neck uncomfortably, "Well, they take a long time to ask properly..."
"Sure." She interrupted, shaking her head and rolling her eyes with theatrical disappointment. She was more than willing to get back to a more comfortable level of flip banter, "Someday you're gonna grow up, Ahmed- maybe I'll still be around..."
"...but I think I've been asking for some time now." He said with such deadpan delivery she didn't at first realize he was kidding... and then she realized he wasn't. He was staring directly into her frightened eyes, steady as ever, but slightly less dorky, maybe.
Her mouth moved, trying to find some sarcasm, but willing to settle on irony if that was all that was within easy reach... no luck. Her lips stopped, and they were both left staring at themselves in the mirror and watching fear and hope fight it out in a desperate jello wrestling match in her face.
"'Buh da?' is not an answer, Rae."
"Sudden." she said, for lack of something better.
"Sudden? I think I've been asking since the first time I told you 'no'."
Shock. Time passed, things changed. Now she still stared into cracked glass, full of fear and purpose. Things were different now, but her hand still pressed against cracked glass, palm out, fingers spread. "Not till the end of the world..." She whispered, crying still, but now, her tears were bitter.
Behind her ephemeral reflection, inside the car, Alex lay like a discarded rag doll. She was afraid to open the door, afraid to discover the worst, but she had to move. Now it was all up to her. To her left, Ping sat unconscious, slumped against the open front door of the car, dead or dying; blood matted his hair, stained his jacket from neck to shoulder to chest. Her eyes returned to Alex, she removed her hand from the glass. Her reflected eyes hardened, her jaw set, and her reflection slid away as she opened the door.
Lost and Found
Dek stood on the edge of a bridge above the five southbound lanes of highway 12, perhaps fifty kilometers south of Roy's house on Lake Geneva. He still needed to get farther away before he dared call Kaspari. Dek knew his call would be traced and his position fixed by the resourceful hunters still on their trail, and he didn't want to give them any reason to disturb Alex and the others before they got underway.
Twisting around, his eyes scanned over the approaching traffic. There! His eyes settled on a two-module cargo transport approaching the bridge from the north. An instant after it disappeared beneath the bridge, he jumped. His jump was nearly parallel with the street below because he needed to bridge the speed differential between himself and the transport.
He flew through the air, dropping slightly as gravity exerted its slow acceleration on him. The truck appeared below him, the low rumble of its engine emerging from the rush of the slipstream. As he fell, he reached out with hands and feet, spreading his impact over as wide an area as possible to avoid waking the driver. Dek was reasonably sure the driver was asleep because the transport traveled in a guide lane and it was well after sundown.
The cool exterior of the transport slid beneath his hands. He'd hit the truck a bit slow, but he had plenty of time to find handholds in the slow motion world of his own speed. He hadn't been out hitching for decades and he'd forgotten how fun it was. Roy used to take him out hitching all the time. If Ivo had known what his kids were up to, he would have felt obligated to get a bit stern. That's why they always told him they were going out to a movie or some other half-truth.
Here, a barnacle attached to the speeding transport, Dek smiled at the memories of loved ones and simpler times. Then he stopped smiling when he remembered why he was here, why he was doing this. He was here because his world had been destroyed. He was here because those loved ones were gone and times would never be simple like that again.