“Almost six years had passed since the plague — five since Teina and I met
— when we realized we were ready for a change.”
“We weren’t little kids anymore,” Teina asserted. “I was twelve . . . I mean fourteen. Older people on this planet, when there still were any, would have called me a little kid, but my short childhood was far in the past, and barely remembered.”
Jimox nodded. “We had safe houses and food stashes in twenty or more little towns, and several in the big cities to the north and south. A military base to the east had given us a warehouse full of dry canned food that was supposed to last forever. As best we could figure, we had enough for the rest of our lives.”
Kibi smiled at the thought.
“We knew as much about the plague as any public official had ever been told,” Teina took up the story. “We had watched the harbors, airports, motorways, and train tracks for two hundred miles up and down the coast, and from the ocean to the mountains.” She paused to find her voice again.
“We had listened to every radio frequency, at different times, on different days. Except for the wild creatures, we were as alone as any two monkey mammals could be.”
“It was early spring,” Jimox said, searching his memory, “and the winter had been really cold . . .”
NEBADOR Book Eight: Witness 51
Teina, dressed warmly and with a blanket over her shoulders, huddled by the propane heater as she wrote in her journal.
Jimox peeked out from under the covers. “Good morning.”
“Hi. I was so tired last night when we got in that I forgot to write.”
“Me too. I’ll make breakfast, then I’ll write. I think . . . potato patties and scrambled eggs.”
Teina concentrated on her journal while Jimox worked with instant potatoes, powdered eggs, and spices. Finally she closed her journal book and started helping with breakfast. “I know I was the one who was always dragging my feet about exploring other towns and cities,” she began, “but now, every time I look at the map, I catch myself wondering about . . . that big city way down south . . .” She unfolded a map to refresh her memory.
“Westron.”
Jimox laughed as he turned patties in the frying pan. “You mean . . .
where it’s warmer?”
She smiled as she stirred powdered milk into cups of water. “It seems like we spend three-quarters of the year shivering, especially the last couple of years.”
“Why don’t we go?” he posed as he slipped potato patties onto plates, then poured eggs into the frying pan.
Teina’s eyes grew wide. “You mean, just go?”
While the eggs cooked, they dove into their potato patties. Jimox spoke between bites. “After picking out the best bikes, getting spare parts, securing stuff here . . . you know.”
Teina’s brow remained wrinkled as she thought about it.
Jimox served hot, spicy scrambled eggs.
NEBADOR Book Eight: Witness 52
It snowed that day, and Teina was glad. It gave them lots of time to look at maps, think, and talk.
Mid-afternoon had passed when she finally blurted out the concern that was driving her crazy. “We just spent six years of our lives scraping up food and stuff! How can we take it with us?”
Jimox let a moment pass before answering. “We can’t.” After saying that, he could have sworn he saw smoke coming out of Teina’s ears.
“But we can’t just leave it all here!”
“Why not? We’ll find more along the way, and we’ll always know there’s a lifetime of supplies here if we ever need them.”
Teina wasn’t ready to say anything else, so she looked at the map again.
For several days, in between necessary trips out into the cold, they pondered the journey they both craved and dreaded to make, each for different reasons.
Jimox shared his fears of huge dog packs overwhelming their firepower, even with each of them carrying several pistols. He admitted that he’d kept his eyes open for machine guns in the stores, but hadn’t seen any.
Teina smiled, and reminded him that any time more than about six dogs got together, a fight broke out that kept the packs small. But somehow, listening to his fears helped her put her own into perspective.
They gazed at the maps for hours, and both frowned at the steep mountain passes, and the desert roads with long stretches between towns. That left the
NEBADOR Book Eight: Witness 53
winding coastal route.
They made calculations, based on the distances they liked to pedal closer to home, added days for scrounging, and realized it would be a journey of four to six months.
Jimox suddenly grinned. “Perfect! We can leave here in the summer, when it’s nicest, and by the time we get down there, it’ll be winter, when it’s nicest. We won’t freeze or bake! Shall we do it?”
Teina looked at him, and realized she could definitely take one thing with her on this journey, and every journey — the thing in her life that mattered most. “Yeah!”
“We both suddenly felt the irresistible urge to check all our safe houses and food stashes,” Jimox shared with a grin.
Teina chuckled, coughed for a moment, then smiled. “That took half the summer!”
“And we were both very picky about what we took with us, changing our minds almost daily.”
“That was mostly me, and took another month,” Teina admitted.
“The hardest thing to leave behind was our journals.”
Teina
nodded.
“There were just too many of them! We could take them, or a little food, but not both.”
Everyone
laughed.
“Food won,” Teina said with a smile.
“But those old journals were lovingly wrapped up in plastic bags, then locked in sturdy metal boxes!”
“Little did we know . . .” Teina paused to clear her throat. “Little did we know we’d be coming back to get them, about seven years later, in a Nebador life-monitor ship.”
All the listeners clucked, smiled, or shook their scales.
NEBADOR Book Eight: Witness 54
After two days of pedaling, then crossing a bridge over the mouth of a river, the pair of young travelers came to the first town they had never set foot in before. They coasted to a stop while still in open country, two or three blocks from the buildings.
“Now I feel like the journey has begun,” Jimox declared as he pulled out a spyglass.
Teina swiveled in her seat to watch sides and rear.
“Grocery store looks intact,” Jimox reported. “A mangy mutt poking around. One motel burned down. Taco stand. I can’t see much more.”
“Those same five or six ghosts are still following us,” Teina remarked.
“One more than yesterday, I think.”
“I wonder why they ignored us for five years, and all of a sudden we’re super-interesting.”
Teina shrugged. “We didn’t exactly keep it a secret that we were leaving, maybe for a long time.”
“True. I thought they’d be glad to get rid of us. Little motel on the left, just before the grocery store, looks like the best bet. It’s definitely a one-mutt town.”
NEBADOR Book Eight: Witness 55
Teina laughed and checked her pistol.
“So we began riding from town to town, and they were all about the same,”
Jimox shared, searching his memory. “We soon knew we could handle it.
Dogs were few, and usually weak from hunger. Most houses had burned, like everywhere else, but there was always something we could camp in.
Scrounging was good in most places, and we always carried food for an unlucky day or two.”
Teina jumped in. “But for weeks, we couldn’t figure out why ghosts were following us, more and more of them all the time.”
“Then we came to Gibson’s Bay, where we learned more about ghosts than we ever wanted to know.”
