Chapter 1

“What's out there?” whispered a small voice in the dark.

“Nothing; nothing, of course. It's just the wind,” the exhausted voice of a man tried to soothe. “A sandstorm. Nothing more.”

“I'm cold.”

“Wiggle yourself over here a bit. There. That better?” he asked, wrapping an arm around the blanketed girl. A pair of wide eyes glanced his way, then shifted back to her knees. “Yeah, there you go. Nothing to worry about.” He shifted his attention from his right to his left, whispering something to the young woman beside him. She looked away to the lone burning candle beside the creaking bunkbed. “I've told you, we have to stay here.”

“Why?” the woman snapped, pulling away from him and pushing herself against the plaster wall.

The man's eyes searched the room for argumentative aid, but came up lacking. Instead, he held the little girl a little tighter and sighed. “The storm is too bad,” he said at length.

“Why?” she asked again, this time without any tinge of emotion. Her deep blue eyes, obvious even in the dark, stared somewhere beyond him. The man ran his fingers over his scalp; his hair was short, light brown, but receding on the edges of his forehead. He turned again his hazel eyes to the little girl curled up tightly next to him and rested his hands on his jaw. One couldn't have picked him out in a crowd; he was neither very muscular nor incredibly tall. He might have been the one who sat alone in a cafeteria or the last one picked for dodgeball in school. But his shoulders never slumped, those he carried well, like a sodlier. His face was lean and peppered with a few days growth; his eyebrows rather thin and inexpressive. But his eyes were remarkable. Not in size, shape, or color, but looking into them, one might have felt invigorated, lightened, lifted.

But his eyes couldn't pry the woman from the wall. Her question hung with the darkness in the room, sustained by the winds wrestling with the doors. “The sand would hurt you. We can't have you in pain, now can we?” he tried to soothe.

“Sand is soft!” the little voice next to him exclaimed.

He nodded. “When you let it fall through your fingers, yes it is; but when the wind throws it at you, it hurts. It's like being shot with a thousand tiny guns. Do you like being shot by guns?” He watched his query ping around in the small mind for a bit and hoped it would find its mark.

“No, I guess not,” she answered after a long pause.

“Why not?” the woman asked again, but this time from the far side of the room. Startled, the man thought at once to go after her, but as he began to move, a faint tug on his shirt from the little one at his side convinced him otherwise. And so he watched her pace, interjecting every now and again a plea for her to return. She didn't seem to hear a word he said. She strode around the room, almost like a cat in a cage, on long slim legs and bare feet. Her clothing hung on her body like morning dew on a blade of grass; he guessed it hand-cured leather of native design: rather more revealing than anything he might have seen on the streets of upper Talamer, but it certainly seemed well suited to the climate here. She was most definitely a beautiful woman, by any physical standards of which he knew. Her face looked extraordinarily symmetrical, with a short, pointed nose, narrow cheeks, dark eyebrows, large ruby lips, and of course, those incapacitating blue eyes. Long curling dark hair fell across her shoulders as she paced the room—she almost seemed to flip it around every time she turned. The man on the lower bunk began to watch the marks she set in the sandy floor; the little girl only pulled closer to him and shivered.

A sound from above the man drew his attention upward. “Still alive up there?” he called.

“Yes, still alive,” another male voice remarked, but trailed off into whispers. A female giggle found its way down to the lower bunk. The man on the lower bunk just shook his head and watched the woman in hand-stitched leather pace back and forth. When she suddenly stopped, he sat up a bit and squinted at her. She seemed to be listening intently, staring at the door.

“Whatcha doing?” he called after her, but to no avail. She reminded him so much of a cat it was almost frightening. He couldn't have imagined such feral behavior from any woman in Talamer, nor even from his days at Stratis. But again, he couldn't have imagined himself stranded in a deserted military base with only four other people alive and an uncountable number still outside, more likely dead than alive. Or worse. He shuddered and kept his eye on the woman, who now crouched and approached the door.

When she reached for the latch, he yelled out, “Don't touch that! Don't do it!” She shot him a maddening glare and pressed her lips together in defiance. “We'll never get it shut again,” he tried to reason. Another sound, completely inaudible to him, snagged her attention and she again put her fingers on the door. This drew the man from the lower bunk. He took four quick steps towards her, said, “No!” as emphatically as he could. She ignored him and flung open the door. A burst of sand and wind and a blur of blue filled the room. The man shielded his face with his arms, but when the gust died almost as suddenly as it had started, he looked up to find the woman with her back to the again-closed door and a large blue deer standing nervously in the middle of the room, panting and eying its new roommates.

The little girl with short dark hair, in a tee shirt far too big for her, stood, wrapped her blanket more tightly around her shoulders, and walked past the man towards the deer. She stretched out her hand and took slow, deliberate steps towards the animal, which fidgeted uncomfortably, watching the little one's every move. It seemed to gasp and hold its breath as a shiver passed down its body just before the small fingers touched the coarse, blue fur. But then its eyes closed and it snorted, stamped its hooves a bit, but allowed the girl to take a longer, firmer stroke on its side. She smiled and stepped towards the animal's shoulder, petting the fur lightly. At last she reached as high as she could and brushed down its neck. A final quiver rippled under the skin and it turned its nose to the girl, nuzzled her cheek, and set itself down to sleep for the rest of the night in the relative safety of the dugout. The little girl wrapped her arms around its neck and sung soft notes to it and the man, astonished at the fact that a wild deer was bedding down right in front of him, retreated back to the lower bunk and put his head in his hands.

The woman in leather, who had been lingering still at the threshold, looking in a cool feline manner at the spectacle before her, warmed simply and sauntered to the other side of the deer and ran her fingers down it's neck with fluid motions. Several things happened before settling into regularity: the little girl sighed and set her head against the blue shoulder, the deer shivered and set its head on the sandy floor, the woman stretched her lithe form next to the animal and curled an arm around its front leg. After that, the rhythmic breathing of the deer, the circular strokes of the woman, and the fluttering eyelids of a tired girl falling asleep all fell under the gaze of the man on the bed.

The manner in which he beheld the small girl curled up next to the sleeping animal oozed a love of adoption. Pity and compassion combined in him a genuine kindness, but one driven by the purpose of protection. He sat, yes, but with alert eyes, as if ready to spring forth to confront any who would threaten her safety. His gaze most often returned to the little one, only six or seven years of age, but he regarded the newest refugee second-most, but with far less empathy. His lips worked while looking it over—at once pursed, then bitten, then screwed to a corner of his mouth. He didn't seem quite sure what to do with it; it deserved the same shelter from the storm as they did, didn't it? It had brought a peace to the room, that much was certain; but it had also brought something foreign, something strange with it. He couldn't pinpoint it, but a tension of sorts held the peace—and while he sat back and did nothing, one could easily see his mind was at work on the issue.

But something altogether different came into his eyes when he looked at the woman. His cheeks rose in perplexion every time. He would blink more often, and his hands never felt comfortable at rest in any position. They rubbed his neck, ran themselves through his hair, scratched at his stubbly jaw, or tucked themselves away in his armpits. But the look he gave the woman, despite his nervous symptoms, could not be denied: it was pure desire—and not simply the fantastic glimmer of physical attraction, but the steady, radiant yearning for her shone from his eyes.

That she did not notice nor even understand this fact didn't elude the man; that she lay next to a beast, stroking it lovingly, holding it tightly, did not escape him. But still he gazed, probably wondering when in the future an epitome might dawn; when she might realize his affections and return them. However beaten he might have been by a mere animal, he gazed on with absolute certainty in the future, as the storm raged outside.

The upper bunk, however, was far from quiet; in fact, its inhabitants' whispers grew in the relative silence from the sleeping forms on the floor below. A man, far more solidly built than his counterpart on the lower bunk, with a ragged, torn sand-camouflage shirt and pants held a girl tightly in his embrace. She rested her head on his chest, gazing ever upward into his eyes. He played with her long blonde hair with his left hand, held onto her arm with his right. She seemed to be awaiting an answer to a question; an answer struggled to break from his smiling lips.

“Do you?” she whispered again.

“No, I don't recall that particular incident. Enlighten me,” he replied, trying desperately to smother a laugh, to get the right emotion to follow his words. It didn't work and she called him out on it.

“Yes, you do,” she insisted. He only smiled and rolled his eyes.

“Alright; you win. But I tried hard to forget that memory altogther, you know.”

She feigned shock. “Why ever so?”

He mimicked her. “Oh, I haven't the foggiest clue; I honestly love open, plain, no-holds-barred embarrassment, I really do.” She giggled as he continued. “It's those moments we discover who we truly are, how we handle exposure, you know. Why should I remember that when I can make people believe whatever I say about me? I'm far more clever than life allows me to be, you know.”

“Uh huh; well you can be sure that I will be telling everyone the true story behind it all.”

“And they'd believe you, you say?”

She smiled. “Uh huh!”

“What about this?” he said tugging on her pony-tailed hair. “You know it isn't much helping your cause.”

It was her turn to roll her eyes. “Yes, but I am a woman, which means all the respectable people whose opinions actually matter will naturally defer to me, over any man, any day.”

“You have a point. If only they were real people, too,” he said with shrugged eyebrows. She gasped and he grinned. “Like that old friend of your father's? What's his name? The one always wearing the striped suits.”

“Mr. Rentz?” she volunteered.

“Yes, that's the one. Absolutely made of money, isn't he? Has he ever smiled? Or laughed?”

“I'm sure he has.”

“I'm not convinced,” he said with raised eyebrows, as if the fate of the planet, or perhaps an election, depended on it. “He's only always frowned at me, except this one time, when I think I actually got a sneer. I know! Blew me away, my fortune was so good...well, not nearly so good as his, but still...”

“Now, now you married one of “those people” you know. You're only poking at yourself now.”

“Are you kidding me? I didn't join them; I set you free from that prison. You see, that was the only way you could escape. I mean imagine if you married some snobbish law student, you wouldn't be living on the edge in this daring adventure of life, scrapping for your very breath in a small dugout deep in the heart of a blistering sandstorm with me, now would you? You'd be holed up in some townhouse in western Chicago, hosting tea parties and gossiping about the latest political scandal with all the other doomed ladies. You wouldn't want that now would you?”

She laughed. “Of course not.”

“We have it damned good, here. Good, decent company, food enough for a couple months, a nice little outhouse only a few yards away, unrelenting winds, and a three fuzzy stations on a radio. What more could you ask for?” he asked her with a silly grin on his face, but truth lingering in his eyes.

More soberly than perhaps she meant to, she answered, “Nothing.”

“And that, my love, is why we're real people.”

She sighed and closed her eyes, leaning her head into his chest. He pulled her close with his left and and leaned his cheek on her head. “We've never had it so good, huh?”