“We’re trying to save the world,” he said blandly. “More or less.”
“Hey, yeah?” said Teresa, with a crooked smile. “How’s y’all gonna do that, then? Seemsta me, it’s a’ready good an’ fucked. What chew whitecoats gonna do ta save that?”
“Well,” said Justin, choosing his words, “we hope to stop the plague. To develop a vaccine for it. A cure, so to speak.”
“You mean the Sick, heh?”
“That’s right.”
“Huh,” she said, grimacing. “Well, that ain’t never gonna happen.”
“No? Why are you so sure of that?”
“Cause it’s the end’a the world,” she said casually. “Like alla preacher-greep say. Ever’one knows that.”
“Hm, yes,” Justin nodded, humoring her. “I see.”
After another moment, he was about to ask her about her compatriots, the Bloodclaws, when he realized that she had fallen asleep. Slowly, he raised himself on one arm and stared at her, but, sure enough, she was sound asleep, breathing deeply and evenly through her nose.
He thought for a moment of doing something crazy like going for her gun or trying to escape, but then, thinking that this girl was probably almost as dangerous asleep as she was awake, he gave it up and lay back on the bed. In a moment, he was asleep.
Chapter Nine
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He woke up the next day to bright sunshine pouring through the container door and the smell of what he could have sworn was coffee. A nightmare had left a sour, depressed sort of feeling in the back of his head, but he was almost used to them by now. Disoriented, he blinked in the bright light, shading his eyes, until he remembered where he was. And with whom.
“You finely up?” came the girl’s voice, and he turned to see her, sitting at the nearby table, naked as the day is long, and holding a steaming mug. “Wan’ some java-brew?”
Even more disoriented—after all, it was definitely not every morning that he woke up to a beautiful naked woman—he blinked some more and then swung himself from the bed.
“You don’t mean coffee, do you?” he asked, stretching perfunctorily. His head, while still throbbing lightly, felt much better.
“Sure,” she shrugged. “Why not?”
“Oh, well,” he said, rubbing his eyes, “I haven’t had coffee in a long time. Where did you manage to come by it?”
She shrugged again. “Traded. Cost two cartons, too. Ya wan’ some, or what?”
“Oh, yes please!” he said, nodding. “That would be lovely.”
Eyeing him strangely, she rose, retrieved a mug from a handy shelf, and poured him a cup from some sort of antique contraption called a Mr. Coffee. As she did, he couldn’t help but stare; the interplay of light and shadow on her perfectly shaped body was almost mesmerizing. When she turned back with the coffee, though, he hastily looked away. She set the cup in front of him on the table and sat down again.
He was busy savoring the coffee—which was, despite being acrid, lukewarm, and weak, the best thing to pass his lips in months—when he noticed that she was staring at him. Self-consciously, he sat back in his chair and blinked at her.
“Is anything wrong?” he asked warily.
“How comes y’all talk like that?” she asked. “Is it cuz yerra whitecoat?”
“Talk like what?”
“Like, I dunno, some dude in a ol-time 2D vid. Like yer the pres’dent er somethin’. All fancy an’ shit.”
“It’s…” he said, frowning, “just the way I speak. Sort of a dialect, you might say.”
“Naw,” she said. “I knows why. ‘S cuz you got edu-cation. Y’all went to school, heh?”
“Well, yes, of course. One has to to become a doctor!”
“Henh,” she said, making a face. “Thought so. See, I never got no school. I was born jus’ before the Fall, right? So no edu-cation for me.”
“That’s too bad,” he said, honestly. “You’re obviously a very intelligent person. You would have probably flourished in academia.”
“S’at mean? Floo-rished?”
“It means,” he smiled, “that you would have grown. Gotten smarter. Learned things.”
“You sayin’ I ain’t smart?” she said, dark eyes flashing alarmingly.
“No, no!” he protested, hands up. “You’re undoubtedly very smart! I mean, just surviving what you do, every day, well, that takes all kinds of smarts. Truly! No, what I was talking about was actual book learning. Reading, writing and arithmetic. Not to mention everything else, like art and poetry and music, the sciences, history, and politics…”
“Never learnt ta read,” she said sadly, the sudden anger just as quickly gone. “Write, neither. Don’ even know what arithmajig is.”
“Arithmetic,” he gently corrected. “It’s the use of numbers. Adding and subtracting.”
“Like how?” she said, turning to face him square on. “Show me.”
For a long moment he just sat there, bemused as could be. Here he was, sitting in a converted shipping container in the middle of nowhere, sipping real coffee and trying to explain the basics of math to the hot, gorgeous—not to mention totally nude—young woman who had recently kidnapped him. It made his head hurt. Or maybe it was the concussion. Or the almost frantic worry for his colleagues and their charge. At any rate, it was most certainly deserving of bemusement. Finally, he smiled wanly at her and jerked his shoulders. Why not?
“OK, I’ll show you,” he said. “But can you do me one small favor, please?”
“S’at?”
“Could you put some clothes on?”
They’d made it to the basics of multiplication—Teresa proving to be a quick and avid study—when suddenly she chopped the air with one hand and hushed him to silence.
“What’s wrong?” Justin asked.
“Shuddup,” she spat, head cocked, listening.
He did and waited as she listened. All he could hear was the wind and some birds; other than that it was very quiet. Just as it was almost everywhere, nowadays. He was musing on this, how the world had become a very quiet place since the Fall, when Teresa suddenly swore nastily and jumped up from the table.
“What is it?” he asked. “What do you hear?”
“Bike,” she said simply, angrily. “Maybe more’n one.”
Moving quickly, she went to the back of the container, flipped over some of the carpet, and then jerked up and open a trap door of sorts in the floor.
“Down here,” she said, jerking her head toward the opening. “C’mon, go!”
He walked over and peered down.
“Down there?” he said, eyes wide. “But why?”
“C’mon, don’ fuck aroun’,” she said, scowling. “Them’s bangers out there. Maybe even Brothers. An’ they comin’ this way. An’ dooya know what happen if they findja? Cause trus me, it won’ be like with me! Now c’mon. Get down there an’ stay total quiet, heh? Or do I hafta makeya?”
“No, I’ll go,” he said, not liking the sound of this. Gingerly, he crawled down into the space, which turned out to be nothing more than a hole, about four feet from side to side and about five feet deep, dug into the earth beneath the container. Then Teresa slammed the trapdoor shut and, other than a stray beam of sunlight through a crack, he was plunged into total darkness and the dense smell of raw dirt.