Wasteland

The next morning cast a pale light on the western wall of the sandy cave. Deeper in, Leona sat in the darkness, blinking at the light on the stone wall as if she'd never seen light before. The apple in her hand had been eaten, the last bite still crunching in her mouth. The bare core, chewed down to the hard center, was left in the dirt to writer and rot. With the pack on her back, she headed out into the early morning light of dawn. She felt for the revolver tucked in her waist band. It was still there. Her fingers probed her pockets for any forgotten treasures stored there. Something hard and smooth met her tips and she pulled out the thing stuck there. It was a key. The key to his room and his bath. Her eyes focused on a length of leather buried in the sand. She was not the first to discover this place. Picking it up and seeing that it did not crumble in her grasp, she threaded it through the eye of the key and tied it around her neck. It could have been an unfired bullet that, if hit just right, would explode and remove her head from her body. A sentimental reminder of what it was like to fall in love with the son of Lucifer. For she had come to love him. That was why she had cared. She had never loved another the way she loved Jack, and never would again, if she ever found love again at all.

Dark smoke billowed up over the rise in the land, like a monolithic mushroom sculpture made of black iron. Her feet started in that direction, as if pulled. As if her body had to see if Jack was still alive, covered with filth and the claret of the fray. But her mind panicked and flashed the memory of what might be mountains, or the fuzzy blur of the horizon clouded with dust. Mountains meant water, shelter and possibly food. Her feet altered their path and removed the pillar of back from her sight and replaced it with open land and open sky. The struggle for life began again, and she welcomed it with a grateful heart.

Nothing. As far as her goggle shielded eyes could see, there was nothing. She slept in the open, under her beloved stars, because there was no where else to sleep. With the pip boy set to sound an alarm if any creature larger than an iguana neared her, she found rest gazing up at the constellations she could still plot in the night sky. Draco, taurus, orion; points of light she remembered from books in her father's library. Then she could not imagine an space so big or so high, or how large the images were that the galaxy had painted in the vastness of the universe. Now their light only filled her soul with a richness of spirit and refreshed her mind from the drudgery of thought. They allowed her to dream in a dreamless world on sand and stone that would provoke bitterness from her otherwise.

The dawn came a little latter each day and the evening a little sooner. As she traveled across the subtle rise and fall of the land, the green pack on her back became lighter as she became a little hungrier. Sand turned to dust that became earth and rock. The mountains on the horizon became a little clearer as she neared them. She began to wish for something to attack her, man or beast, so that she would have meat of which to make a meal. But there was nothing in the open of the rolling hills or flat valleys. She began to wonder if his was the last pit of life in a world that had died.

When she arrived in the shadow of the mountains, to which she had tied her hope, her pack had been empty for three days. Hunger burned in her gut with an acid anger. Though she felt she was starving, her belly only grew. She worried that she had ingested a parasite and she would die. Then the first of many hard blows from the inside pushed hard against her flesh, causing it to bulge out in a small lump. Now she worried that she had gone insane and was hallucinating, or her hunger had created a mirage to goad her into finding food.

The mountain side was crumbling and difficult. She would have circumvented the problem if she could see the end of the ridge where it tapered down into the earth again. The chain seemed to march on to the beginning and end of time to block her passage. After many hours of toil she found a shack nestled in the crevice of two merging peeks. She still had her knife, though she was to round to use it, and her gun, though her ballance was off; weighted by her middle. It was no hallucination or mirage. If it was a parasite it would surely kill her.

Desperate, hungry, tired and terrified of the thing growing inside her, she pushed open the door to the shack. Unlike the scentless harsh winds outside the creaking walls, the air here smelled of old wood and long forgotten solitude. There was a bed, a bucket and a stove next to an ice box and a pile of logs. She found some dried fruit and M.C.I.'s. She didn't know what those were, but she didn't care. It was food and she ate it greedily. Whoever had lived here had stored enough of the brown, plastic packages to last for years. She stuffed what she could in her pack, rearranging them several times to maximize the space to rations ratio. There was no water and the air was thin and dry. She had only a few bottles left of what she'd taken from the kitchen so long ago, rationed to the last drop. Drinking only enough to wet her throat and saving the rest, she wedged the bottle back into the pack. She needed to sleep, but she worried that the hut may still have an occupant. For a long time she waited, sitting on the bed, for someone to arrive and find her as an intruder and a thief. No one ever came. By days end she had elected to block the door with the pile of logs, moving one at a time from their dust covered corner. She had tried the ice box first, but it had caused her great pain in her belly.

The comfort of the old mattress was divine compared to the hard sand of the plain. There were no holes in the roof through which to see the stars, but sleep took her regardless. Upon waking she pains takingly moved the logs to peer outside. The wind blew and the dim sky showed no sign of time of day. It was just a grey and gloomy as it had been the day before. She shut the door against the wind and replaced the logs. Her eyes fell to the floor where the logs had been and noticed the dust settled there in a crisp grey square. A trap door. The lift ring was encrusted with filth, and her need was great. The old, rusted hinges groaned as the heavy lid was lifted from the hole. She might have expected a tunnel or a vertical cave with metal rungs to climb down into the darkness, but instead she found a trickle of water silently dribbling up from the stone to trickle under the shack and behind it into the crevice where it likely filled some large underground cavern. Activating her pip boy's Geiger Counter, she scanned the water for rads. It barely registered. Fresh water. She was almost giddy with joy as she filled up the empty bottles and the canteen. As the last topped off the pain in her belly returned as a large lump that rolled across her abdomen. The pain caused her to drop the bottle and spill the precious liquid within. Grabbing at the source of her discomfort she found it hard and somehow living! The realization of the truth she'd stubbornly tried to ignore settled over her mind like a cloud settles over the peak of a mountain. She was not infected with some monstrous parasite. Not exactly. She was pregnant with Jack's child.