Predator Ch 07

"What do you think?"

"Me? I think if you lose it, a whole lot of people are going to go down with you, so maybe you ought to snap out of it."

He saw the chief down on the ramp, watched him talking with Rutherford and the other women, and he saw the guy point up to the flight deck, then Rutherford looked up at him, nodded and spoke with the guards. He leaned back, shut his eyes then, and felt himself drifting away -- but he spoke again, softly. "I think y'all are going to have to get on without me now, Jim."

Bond tried to keep him from falling out of the seat, but failed.

+++++

Acheson woke in a long night, saw he was in a field hospital of some sort, tried to take stock of where he was, what was happening around him, but there were only a few lights on, and those few were in the distance. A nurse walked by and he spoke out, she stopped and looked into his eyes, listened to his lungs, told him she would bring him something to drink and he leaned back, looked up at the fabric structure overhead -- then he remembered Portugal. Their flight -- their escape -- and then -- the bomb. It wasn't all a dream, he realized. It had happened, yet now everything felt like a dream. Genie and The Duke, Carol and all the others -- like a jumble of crazy-hazy memory, something that had been, and now -- wasn't. He wanted to crawl inside of himself and disappear after that, but Rutherford came to him, pulled up a chair and sat by him.

Then she handed him a Coke, in a plastic cup -- with ice!

He sat up for that, and drank it slowly, savoring it, chewing the ice with a kid's grin on his face, and at one point he looked at her, really absorbed her simple beauty. The kindest, yet most complex eyes he'd ever seen, and her lips. He looked at them and wanted to kiss them, then he saw Genie in his mind's eye and he wondered where she was.

He felt a hand on his forehead and looked up, realized he'd been sleeping again, then he saw Rutherford again. "I'm sorry," he said. "Sorry we didn't get to have more time together."

She was smiling, but she was crying, too, and he wondered why.

"You belonged to someone else, Ben, but I feel so lucky I finally found you."

"Lucky?"

She nodded her head. "Yup. You know, I never fell in love. I was too busy studying all the ways love goes bad, and why people do terrible things in the name of love -- but then there was you. You came out of nowhere and for the first time in my life I knew what love was."

"What was it, for you?"

"I don't know, but I've been thinking about that for a while. Peace maybe? I looked at you once and I knew if I could just rest in your arms that everything would be okay. And that none of this would have happened. Isn't that awful? How one person's silly, shallow life ended up being the end of things?"

It was difficult, but he slid over on the stretcher and made room for her, then he opened his arms. "Lay with me now, would you?" he asked.

And she slid on the stretcher, let him put his arms around her, and she lay facing him -- looking eye to eye, soul to soul. He was searching for something, she thought, some way to make room in his heart for her, and he kissed her once again, then she felt him ease away.

She held him close, talked and talked about all the things they'd do once they were together again, and by the time she stopped talking he was still and cool. She couldn't let go, and she felt gentle, prying arms sometime later, and as she watched them take his body away she felt, for the first time in her life, something like loss.

+++++

I think I'd had it with sailing, really, by the time we sailed into San Francisco. The routines were getting stale, and the perpetual uncertainty about what lurked unseen in the night wore on me constantly. Still, crawling through the shrubbery when Persephone and I ran from Lajes had come almost as an epiphany, a rebirth, of sorts. When we saw that marina I think we were both filled with an endless elation: escape was at hand, and the sea would deliver us from death.

We found a decent boat, Clytemnestra, a Nauticat 371, that had just been provisioned, her tanks filled, and we found her owner down below, clutching her chest, diaphoretic, with her eyes full of panic. I got us out of the marina and rolled out the sails, and we sailed due south for weeks. Persephone's skilled hands coaxed life back into the woman, a physician from London out to see the world after her husband passed, and we found our way to the Cape Verde Islands three weeks later. We took on water, managed to get some fuel, and continued sailing south.

A new routine developed on Clytemnestra, a routine based on washing her decks with sea water every two hours. Blackened dust fell on everything constantly, and the evil stuff got into every nook and cranny, especially down below, if we failed to keep her decks fresh -- yet we noticed something rather uplifting within a few weeks. The further south we managed to get, the less fallout we accumulated on deck. At Cape Verde we took Clytemnestra's sails down and doused them in the sea, aired them on the beach, and Sephie and I shook them out before we put them up again, then we put out to sea, aiming to get as far south as we could before winter.

Jill Armstrong was a sort of minor revelation, and, of course, in the end I fell in love with her. Persephone, being the sort of earth-mother type that blesses all love, made room for Jill in her heart and the three of us arrived at Port Stanley, in the Falkland Islands, just as winter was coming on. Being crewed by a nurse and a physician, and a Londoner at that, saw us welcomed with open arms, and Sephie and I looked at one another and knew we were home, that our journey was at an end. Not quite the voyage we set out to make, but there you go.

There has been almost zero radiation this far south, and that was the end of that, for now, anyway. There was little news about the north, only that loss of life had been extreme. The islanders didn't really know what had happened, and really, neither did we. It was enough, in the end, to realize that man had taken a few wrong turns along the way. Survival would take precedence now, above all else, and perhaps war would be at an end.

Or perhaps not. I tend to doubt we'll ever learn from our mistakes, but I could be wrong.

We moved into a commune of sorts, an agricultural commune at that, and we settled in for the long night as the first snows of winter fell, and we went to sleep, an easy, deep sleep, and we were soon dreaming of the Spring. But that's another story, for another day...

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© 2017 Adrian Leverkühn | abw | fiction, all of it, simply fiction.