At the End - a post-apocalyptic novel (The Road to Extinction, Book 1) (22 page)

Reluctantly, I gave in. “All right, but if I
can’t get my ass back up here, it’s on you.”

She laughed. “I’ve been working out, don’t
worry. Haven’t you noticed that it’s already on me to get you up
here?”

I blushed and hid my eyes from her. She was
right; I was weaker than her, and I didn’t possess a tenth of her
perseverance or willpower.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” she said,
trying to comfort me.

“What way did you mean it?” I asked, my
voice cracking. I couldn’t even make myself sound bold, and I knew
it was easy to see through my feeble attempt to appear manly.

“It’s a lot easier to pull someone up, you
know that. I was just kidding. I wouldn’t make it if you didn’t
boost me.” She put a hand on my shoulder, then slid it down my arm.
“It was just a joke . . . nothing more.” With a smile, she jumped
through the hole onto a cushioned bed, piled with blue-green
blankets. “You’re good to go,” she said.

Though her words hurt, I brushed them off
and descended to the bed. Penelope was out of sight. “Penelope?” I
called.

“Around the corner,” she said. She was
poking her head around another corner, spying.

I came up behind her, and as she twirled to
meet me, her soft hair slapped me across the face. The long strands
of copper smelled like citrus and sweat. “What are you doing?”

“Watching,” she replied. “I saw one, lying
on a bed around the corner. It looks sick.”

“I hope we gave it to the beast,” I
spat.

She nodded. “Come on, it can’t see us.” She
sidled past the corner and along the warm wall, turning down
another corridor. Five more beds sat spaced out evenly along the
hall, one of them occupied. An alion rocked side-to-side, calling
in a sickly tone. In the next hall, rooms branched off, and we
glanced inside. A mother and her newborn cub lay sleeping, curled
up together.

I walked out and down the hall, where it
ended in a T, and a large room with a huge glass windowpane. I
stopped at the window. Dozens of warm blankets clumped together in
mounds. Little fur balls slept, interwoven with each other and the
blankets.

Penelope brushed up against me. “A maternity
ward,” she whispered when she spotted all the little critters.

“Guess so,” I responded. “They don’t seem so
evil when they’re small.”

She pressed a hand against the glass,
spreading her fingers wide. “That’s certain. Maybe we should ransom
one of them, a trade: our lives for the cub’s life.” Her quiet
steps stopped at the door’s threshold. “What do you think?”

“I think I wouldn’t know how to go about
communicating that to the alions.” I stepped back from the window.
I spotted a reflection in the glass and flinched to the left.
Whirling, I fell, backing away from a gigantic alion. The beast
stared through the window, observing the sleeping young. It seemed
to smile in serenity. The alion pressed its nose up to the glass as
another alion crept to its side.

Penelope walked around them, and joined my
gaze in utter bemusement and apprehension. One of the alions
entered the room for newborns and nuzzled a cub, then it nestled
down and fell asleep. She turned to me and offered a hand.

I took it. Once on my feet, we ran down the
corridor, without a word spoken. After a few more twists and turns,
we entered a massive room with hundreds of beds, all fit to the
size of the biggest alions. At the opposite end of the room, a line
of alions waited, communicating in low cat voices. Their soft
speech was unlike anything I could reproduce. The line went
hundreds back, and as we drew closer, it became apparent as to
their task.

At the head of the queue an alion stood,
holding a silver gun in one of its humanlike hands. It grabbed hold
of an alion patient nearest to it, tapped one of its humanlike
elbows, and injected something into a bulging vein. The alion
patient growled. The doctor nodded for the patient to leave, and it
scooted out of line and went back to its duties, grumbling as it
disappeared down a lengthy hallway.

One after the other, alion patients stepped
up to the doctor to receive a shot in their humanlike arms. Each
one growled, then plodded off, annoyed. The line did not seem to
dwindle at all, as a replacement filed in the moment one left
it.

“What do you think they are doing?” I asked
Penelope, to see if she had an answer. My mind drew a blank.

“Did you ever play the old video game
War
of the Worlds
?” she said, returning my question with a question
of her own.

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. At least
it doesn’t sound familiar. What about it?”

“In the game, at the end, the aliens died
because of diseases, bacteria attacked them that we had grown
immune to over time. It was devastating to them, like smallpox to
the Native Americans.”

“Never thought of an end like that,” I
said.

A cheerful grin spread wide, and with it,
her dimples grew deep and beautiful. “Yeah, it was pretty profound,
ingenious, and simple all wrapped into one.”

“So, what does that have to do with
anything?”

“These alions are smart,
very
smart .
. . twenty bucks says those are inoculations.” Her voice overflowed
with confidence. “You want to get a closer look?”

“I want to find a craft to fly us off this
piece of shit,” I said, irritated. “Come on, let’s get out of
here.”

Her eyes showed the intrigue that captivated
her into staring at the alion doctor. “Fine, fine. Wouldn’t mind
getting one of those shots, though.”

“We have no idea what’s in it, might kill
you. Better not risk it.” I turned back to the corridor we had
entered from, navigating down several halls, twisting and turning
again, until we realized we had made a mistake along the way. “All
right, let’s just get back up into the duct. We can use one of
these empty rooms.”

She sighed. “Our trail is becoming easier to
track. They’ll know we’re using the duct system the more we leave
open panels with desks and beds underneath them.”

“You have a better idea?”

She grabbed my arm and stopped me. “They
can’t see us, we don’t need to use the ducts.”

“Uhrm. Well I feel a lot safer up there,
don’t you?”

“Okay, fine.” She used the yellow disk to
open a locked door. Jumping atop the bed, she began poking the
panels again. POP. The panel at the head of the mattress flew into
the duct. “Boost me.”

I wrapped my arms around her knees, touching
her warm legs, so close to her thighs. I almost dropped her as I
cleared my throat, slightly dizzy. Once I was safely in the duct,
we took a breather. I drank some water. She didn’t want any.

Then we crawled and crawled and crawled
until I was bone-tired. I collapsed, my chin planted into the duct.
A curse escaped.

“Yeah, it’s probably time we rest.”

“Probably a few hours past the time,” I
said, smiling a soft, sleepy smile. I closed my eyes and found
dreamland welcoming me with caressing warmth.

I woke up as my stomach rumbled. It ached. I
wasn’t as hungry as I had been the last time I awoke; my fingers
weren’t quite as appetizing, but I definitely needed the salted
meat, worried that those thoughts might return. Penelope had the
meat hidden away in a pocket, and I didn’t want to wake her, but my
fingers were twice as big as her pockets, and her jeans were so
tight, I knew I would have to squeeze a finger into them just to
get a centimeter. I gave up and shook her shoulder. “Hey wake
up.”

“Why?” she asked, drowsy. “I’m not
ready.”

“I’m hungry and you have the meat,” I
explained.

She reached into her pocket and tossed it to
me, along with some lint. She said no more and nodded off
again.

I tried to conserve the meat, taking small
bites at a time, but each small bite led to another and another,
until it was almost all gone. I cursed myself for my weakness. I
swished around the water, listening; less than a quarter remained.
I didn’t think she would be kissing me any time soon. I waited for
her to wake, anxious. I feared her reaction to the situation. I
feared her disappointment in me. I played out the scene in my head
a hundred times, and every time it ended with me getting slapped,
or punched, or kneed, or some kind of physical abuse.

My stomach growled again.

When she woke and saw the leftover portion,
a sigh left her, but that was all. “It wasn’t going to last anyway.
We better find some more.”

I nodded and sighed in relief. “Lead the
way.”

We gathered up our things and began to
crawl. “Can I ask you a question,” she said a short while after we
had started our trek.

“If I say no, will you not ask it?”

“Probably not,” she replied.

I laughed. “Well, then, I guess I don’t have
much of a choice but to say yes.”

“That’s certain.” She laughed. “Why do you
let Maggy call you Jelly?”

An awkward silence crept in. It was easy to
tell Jacob off, he was a guy; I didn’t know what to say to a girl.
“It’s just what she calls me,” I finally said.

“That’s not really a reason,” she
argued.

I suppressed a laugh. “No. No, I suppose
it’s not. You think it’s mean that she calls me Jelly?”

“A little offensive, yeah,” she said.

“Because I’m fat?”

“Because you’re
not
fat,” she threw
out quickly. “You don’t have nearly enough kilogramage to be ol’
Saint Nick.”

“I guess I should be thankful for that,” I
said, laughing. “I’ve gotten used to it; it’s not a big deal.” We
turned left at a T. My knees ached, red and sore. Regardless, I
followed on.

“I just think the nickname is insulting. I’d
call you Tyro.” She glanced back at me and smiled.

“Why Tyro?”

“Because I like the way it sounds . . . it
means novice, and compared to me, you’re a novice at Death Squad.”
A giggle filled the duct.

“Is that so?” I laughed.

“It’s certain.”

“Well after we get off this dismal ship,
we’ll have to go a few rounds,” I challenged her.

“We’ll have to find the game and some
computers first.” She plopped her butt down and rested. “Let’s take
another breather. How are your knees?”

“No worse than my back, I suppose,” I said.
“Yours?”

“They feel raw, like they might be bleeding,
but every time I check, there’s nothing on them.” She pulled up her
pant leg and showed me.

“Ouch.” I rolled up my pant legs and
examined my own knees. Spots of thin skin promised to break soon,
but there was nothing to be done about it, we had nothing to pad
them.

“Yours look worse,” she said, cringing.

“Maybe we should just hack them off and be
done with it,” I joked.

She grinned, then suddenly changed subjects.
“You know, you never really kissed me. It was too short to call a
real
kiss.”

I flushed. “Uhrm. Didn’t seem right with the
alion there and all.”

“Oh, is that the reason? Well, I don’t see
any alions around now.” To my eyes, her soft lips seemed to pucker
up, dry and splitting, but still alluring and desirable. “Do
you?”

I cleared my throat. I shifted
uncomfortably, scanning the duct left and right. My cheeks grew hot
to the point that I thought someone had set them ablaze. I opened
my mouth to say something, but only a squeak escaped. I sat
frozen.

“You’ve never kissed anyone before, have
you?” she asked in a sympathetic tone.

I shook my head.

“I think you’ll enjoy a
real
one.”
Her smile grew and grew until it swallowed her face. Then she
advanced, her eyes excited.

My heart pounded so hard I was afraid I
would faint, or just drop dead after it exploded.

The kiss lasted a quick second. It was a
closed-mouth peck that made my head swim.

Penelope bit her lip as she slowly pulled
back. “Let’s do that again,” she said, exhilarated and beaming.

“Why?” I asked.

She stared at me, curious as to why I would
ask that.

My nerves ate away at my stomach and it
growled, so noisy and fierce.

“Because it was too quick, and I want
another,” she replied.

I leaned in, and this time our lips locked,
moist despite our dehydration. When we parted, I was smiling so
wide, I thought my mouth would split apart; luckily, it didn’t.
“You were right.” My words were rushed and screechish.

“That’s certain. Now you can say that you’ve
had a
true
kiss.” She chewed on her lip and grinned. “You
ready to find some food?”

I looked at her, mystified. She was an utter
mystery to me: one minute she wanted to kiss, and the next, find
food. I couldn’t argue with my stomach, though. “Uhrm. Yeah,” I
said, nodding.

After a few more turns, Penelope stopped and
pried off a panel with her nails and poked her head through the
hole. When she came back up, she shrugged. “Looks like an engine
room or something like that. No food.”

She repeated the process a few more times,
each with the same result.

Finally, I took a turn, hoping my luck was
better. I slid off the panel and a blue cloud engulfed us. I
couldn’t see Penelope for a second, until the cloud dissipated in
the duct, though a trace lingered around us like a disconcerting
mist.

“Spooky,” she said, half-joking,
half-afraid.

“It’s cold,” I said, feeling the air. I put
an arm through the hole, lying on my stomach. “I think it’s a
freezer.”

“A freezer could be promising.” She scooted
up beside me and waved a hand around in the blue mist. “Shall we
take a look inside?”

“What if we freeze to death?” I
shrieked.

“Then it’ll feel better than a gash through
the belly.” Pushing herself up by the elbows, she turned around and
held on to the ledge, easing down. “It’s not a far drop. Maybe a
meter and some change.”