Fifteen
“TERRA INIMICA!”
Date Unknown
Time Unknown
Location Unknown
Hippie fell to his knees. It was so hot that he looked around for the door, but where it should have been, there was only a foot path leading straight from the jungle edge, where he was, into a vast desert with craggy sandstone formations and some low dunes under a cloudless, blinding blue sky. He was trapped.
He noted thick, first-growth jungle on either side, an impossibility. Ahead, there was a tunnel-like path through the canopy of trees but he was unable to focus, and something very strange was on the other side. He had no choice but to try to go that way.
But the thick polyurethane suit had to go first. He set about trying to get it off. This was no easy task, as his strength was flagging fast, his breathing was labored, his heart was being beaten to death by itself, and his lungs, perhaps worst of all, weren’t drawing in much air. What they did get sent the emergency warning to his foggy brain that there was nothing more they could do, and he was about to die.
He wrestled the hazmat suit to his waist, and, gasping for air, crawled out of the lower portion. The heat was worse, and that didn’t make sense. He was trying to breathe, failing, his body had stopped sweating in minutes, indicating severe dehydration and heat exhaustion, and he was near heatstroke, pulmonary failure and death.
The fogginess became disorientation. Lack of cognitive ability followed. With only the sense that he was here alone with a powerful enemy nearby, and that the land and air were also killing him, he gave in to the darkness with no time for a prayer.
Not even a simple one, like a child’s. Death awaited, and now he welcomed it to come to him.
How long he lay as one dead was something he would never know. His mouth felt cool and refreshed once, and surely that was delirium ; then it happened again, seemingly much later. He went back to the profound darkness each time, and finally realized that if he was waking up, he was totally blind. His eyes burned so excruciatingly that he would have screamed if he had the capacity to.
He was still dying. If anything but pain registered in his starved and damaged brain, it was to wonder why it took so long. He wanted it to be done.
Finally something resorted to giving him liquid straight from its own mouth.
He began to gain an awareness of this creature, this enemy. Why was it spitting into his mouth?
Now he was, at times, either semiconscious, or he had been completely banished from sanity, lost in a state of delirium and delusion that was worse than death.
Or maybe he was dead already, and this was hell.
Something like a reprove hit him, not by spoken sounds, but by direct mental contact. Even he and Shannon had never managed this level of…of…what was this?
It seemed to cool a bit. Then some more. Could night have fallen?
One thing was clear: his destroyed lungs were, for some reason, taking in air again. He didn’t like the smell of it, and he thought in a dim, detached way that as ludicrous as it seemed, he must be on some distant planet no astronomer had discovered yet. His despair became overwhelming. Why could he not simply die?
This enemy he was alone with, it could be playing with him, keeping him barely alive before killing him, maybe because it wanted to hunt him. As if it needed a more worthy opponent.
NO!
His head felt like it would explode because the power of that answer was staggering.
Then:
The emotion, unspoken, of apology, delivered gently, with real concern.
Puzzled, his awareness began to return.
Something jabbed him in his side. He lay on his back, blind, but feeling better. The jab to his rib cage was repeated. He still could not make a sound, but his thought was, You’re hurting me!
Genuine, powerful this time, regret and sorrow reached him. Whatever it was, it no longer seemed likely that it was an enemy.
That thought brought happiness, flowing freely. It didn’t want to be an enemy. It cared, it genuinely wanted to save him.
And it was working. A cool, refreshing juice, like that of a fruit he wasn’t familiar with, flooded his mouth. He could hear hands squeezing the outer peel of this fruit.
It was an incredible feeling and the taste was amazing. How could anything taste so good?
For a very long time, this stranger kept leaving and returning with fresh fruit, and he felt better each time.
He believed he was on some very distant planet, and that he could never get home again. Shannon had been right: he would never see her again.
***
Hippie became aware of her scent. By now, he knew its gender. The scent was overpowering, sexually generated by her body, a mix of pheromones and hormones so powerful that he could not help, despite being blind, feeling, not just a powerful sexual attraction, but also something close to romantic love. This made her very happy, and she kissed him several times. She hadn’t kissed before; she drew the memory of it from him. She liked it and kept getting better at it. Each time she brought more of the fruit, she kissed him, and the kisses went from awkwardly affectionate to powerful, lingering and full of passion.
But he still could not see, and his lack of motor control and his exhaustion remained the same. She did not give up.
He was lost once more in a deep fever. During that time, he was reacting to the juice. She brought cool, moist leaves for his head to cool the fever, and continued bringing him the juice.
Then, during the darkness of what he imagined to be early evening, his eyes opened. No longer stuck together, the lids parted to reveal the most beautiful sky, every star visible in the pitch-dark of night. He saw where he was, too. Still on planet Earth. The Milky Way was so clearly visible that it frightened him. It wasn’t right.
In an instant, as he raised himself on his elbows, something truly bright rose over a distant mountain range.
It was the moon, full and much larger than it ought to be, and, he thought, too close.
He could not see much more at first, but he soon felt something happen to his eyes. He could see everything around him, every blade of grass. The woman wasn’t there for a while. He guessed that she was sleeping, but he knew she was near.
His lungs still hurt and struggled, but not as much as before, so he fell asleep.
The toe woke him up sometime later.
It was daylight now, the sun shining brilliantly, so much that his eyes began to burn again. He had no strength, but the woman kneeled beside him and gave him more of the fruit, this time feeding him bits of it after squeezing the juice into his parched mouth. That had an immediate and very profound effect. Strength was trickling into his body, slowly but definitely real.
After what seemed like a very long time, he tried to stand. The sun was climbing high after dawn, and he’d never seen it like that; smaller in appearance but radiating brilliantly, and that marked it as a relatively young star. Impossible!
The woman walked up to him, smiling beautifully, and he felt her relief and joy that he was getting better. She kissed him, her arms up and behind his neck. She became aware that he still had clothes on, his T-shirt and boxers. Making a face, she grunted frantically while pulling at them. He had no hesitation; he stripped and was not embarrassed.
She took a hand in one of hers and urgently pulled him to go with her. She was still scared for him, and he knew why. His energy was sapped in the tropical heat and humidity. He was still in trouble.
He would have been gasping in awe, but lack of oxygen already made him do that. This place was beautiful, and there was a pool of calm water carved out against the bank by tons of fast water; he didn’t even need to see it to feel and hear its raw power. Anyone caught in those waterfalls and fountains of white water would never live to tell a story like that.
Where was he?
The moon was too close, the sun a young star. He was eating fruit that restored him slowly from the edge of death.
Across the rivers, at a distance, there was another lone tree. It had beautiful golden fruit, but he had never seen anything like it. They were not apples, they glistened and shimmered in the mist. If he really was on the planet Earth, which observation proved, then he was in a place and a time that didn’t make any sense to him.
The woman was desperate for him to pay attention to her. She pointed at the purple fruit and gave a sound of urgency. Her face showed her desperation and a deep fear for his life.
He went over and walked beneath the tree in pleasant shade, reached up and picked. He looked back at her and she nodded, eyes wide with fear.
He plucked more of the tender fruit, stacking it at his feet. Then he sat down, bit into one, and felt better. The juice had brought him back, but the flesh of the fruit was better than any drug Sandy could have injected him with. On his third one, he felt even better.
But she didn’t try to communicate with him mentally. After a while she said, “Your language was difficult to learn. It makes little sense. Husband, keep eating and you may never need be sick again.”
“Husband?”
“Yes. You were promised to me long ago. I’ve waited so, so long. Now you are here. I will never part from you, or you from me.”
He stood up, staring at her. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Her tresses of long black hair covered her from his sight, but he became suddenly so erect that it was all she could look at, and that aroused him even more. She came to him, kissed him with a passion no one had ever shown him, and she guided him to lie down in the grass, and with a bit of awkwardness, she straddled him and plunged down, causing them both to moan.
Hippie thought she was so wet that he would never last long enough to please her, but it was so perfect that as he began to orgasm, so did she, and their mouths locked together, their breathing heavy through their noses, and finally, she gave out, leaving him inside her but lying on his chest, her head next to his, still breathless. He looked into her eyes and said, “I love you.”
For the first time in her life, she was happy, so much so that she laid her head back down on his chest and wept silently. “I love you, husband.”
They slept for a while, at peace for the first time in either of their lives.
They each awoke in the early evening, and she held his hand and led him down to the carved out pool where she said they should rinse off their bodies.
She washed, rubbing the cool water over herself, then between her legs which were underwater, then her beautiful long hair, hair longer than he had ever seen. He followed suit, never more than an arm’s length away, desperate to be close to her, and she smiled broadly feeling loved that much.
The water was still barely cool in the aftermath of a long day, and it made him feel normal again. Perhaps better than normal; it may have been the fruit, the sex, the love he felt, or the water, but more likely all of these things together, but he felt his old bones stop hurting, and noticed that the ghastly wounds that pissed Sandy off because she was more worried about morphine accounting than his life, were fully healed.
In fact, as they climbed onto the water’s grassy bank, he looked himself over and was astonished: he had no scars, old or recent, his skin was a deep suntan, healthy, shiny with the clean water glistening, and the hair hanging down his shoulders to his chest was no longer white, but mostly a beautiful black silky sheen.
“Something bad will happen soon. Your faith tells me we will be parted, that our paths back to each other will take years that I cannot bear. Husband, promise me, that however long it takes, you will have no other, and work to find me again. In turn I swear I will do the same for you.”
Her eyes showed fear again, mingled with a desperate heartbreak.
“You sense my every thought. You know the depth of my feelings. I can never love any woman after you. I never could have dreamed of any woman so beautiful, so caring, so full of love. I don’t know how you can think we could be separated, but I would endure anything to get to you again.”
They kissed as they dried in the warm evening air, never imagining what horrors and heartbreak lay ahead of them.
For now, all that was important was the two of them, and endless kissing. A happiness that the world rarely tolerated.