Seventeen

I floated in the endless darkness, a vast space devoid of anything. The light feeling was the best one I'd ever felt so far, an eternity in here wouldn't bother me at all. '...Five." An echo. The same voice spouted something incoherent and sounded far away. 'Thirty-Five." But like a rubber band snapping back into place, the voice suddenly became clear and loud. It was as if it was very close to me. I took deep steady breaths to calm my surprised heart and slowly opened my eyes. My sight focused on the fluorescent light and then to the orange pipes above it. 'You good?" I turned my head to the direction of the voice and came contact with a pair of amethyst eyes. 'Your face is still as beautiful as ever." I got up, not minding the momentary vertigo and hugged my friend. 'Elliot." He held me as much if not tighter. 'We have two additional agendas now beside our main goal of living in the norm." 'Mmm." It had been so long since I last saw him that I thought... Our last encounter was Nathan's betrayal. I lightly pushed him to end our embrace but he kept his hands on mine. Speaking of that booger Nathan, 'Do you know where he is?" Elliot shook his head. 'No, they are masking their location wherever they are." He looked down on our hands, a wrinkle appearing between his perfectly shaped and positioned eyebrows. 'I fear that they might be close and we won't have any fight if ever they find us." I mimicked his expression. How could he say that? We were indestructible. 'Why? There's only him." He looked up and worry was evident on his face. 'He managed to make others, Thirty-Five." His hold on my hands tightened. 'He slaughtered all the people in the laboratories throughout the years and took over, it was my luck that he wasn't around when I decided to get you out. Our only advantage now is that their cloned DNA is only fifty percent of yours." I processed the information Elliot gave me and didn't talk. I looked around and noticed that we were still in the grocery slash mall we took shelter in earlier and seated on the same orange couch. He let go of my hands and passed me a bottle of water. I accepted and unscrewed the cap. 'How many do you think were created?" I asked him before taking a drink. 'More or less five hundred." He paused. 'We should get going, there are wires." I looked at him questioningly. 'Wires means there is the presence of electricity, when there is electricity there is transfer of communication and data, thus they can easily locate us whenever we are within their zone." Ah. My eyes landed on the burns on his shirt. 'Nice prints." Elliot stood up and began to walk away. 'Your fault." Were his words that echoed throughout the place. As we were already at a shopping area, we decided to change clothes but Elliot told me that the one I was currently wearing was heat proof up to four-hundred degrees Celsius and suggested I kept wearing it. So, no wardrobe change for me, just a pair of white combat boots and white trench coat. 'As I was saying earlier, we have three objectives now." 'Okay." We were a little bit farther from the building we came from and we were walking at a normal speed. The piled snow didn't get any thinner, instead it got thicker as we trudged beyond. It came up to my mid-thigh while it was a couple of inches above Elliot's knees. 'Our original goal was to get away from the confinement of the labs and live a normal life, right?—well, as normal as we can." 'Mhm." I remembered the hairband I got earlier and tied my hair. It was beginning to get annoying slapping it away from my face every time a wind blew by. The thought of cutting this waist-length bundle was a good idea at present. 'Now, the world froze over and we can't have a normal life as it," Beside me, he gestured around us. 'There's no sign of life at the moment." 'What if there are still some left and they're probably just holed somewhere." I was still hopeful that there were still lives out there. Elliot ruffled his hair, dropping bits of snow out of it. 'Probably. I am thinking that to achieve our primary purpose we need to do side missions. And those would be, eliminate the ones coming for us; namely Nathan and his gang of mutants and second we need to reignite the core of the Earth to bring back the heat, melt the snow and rise up the world temp to normal—or to something that's livable. After all that we'll only be able to live the normal life we wanted." That was a lot to do to be able to live in peace. 'Can't we just fly to another planet? I'm sure we'll be able to live in any of the three neighboring ones." It was getting darker and the mountains of frozen buildings were becoming scarce. 'We cannot jump that high nor fly, my friend and every space vehicle ever created would've probably frozen beyond salvage by now—or not." 'Where are we going?" 'To the southern part of Africa." 'Why?" 'We'll enter through there." Okay..? I didn't respond because I didn't know what he was talking about. 'There is a hole there—the TauTona Mine—close enough to the Earth's core, from there you can reflect heat and defrost it." I nodded. It was doable after all and I was not being sarcastic. 'Elliot, there's only me." 'And?" The heck, did he trust me that much? 'I am a dot—not even—when it came to the size of the Earth-core, do you think I can ignite it in one go?" I might turn to dust without even heating a fourth of it. He stopped walking and faced me. 'I know you can do it—and I am not saying this for the sake of boosting your lacking confidence," Ouch. 'But I'm telling you this because it's a fact, scientifically factual." I was about to ask him how sure he was when he cut me off before I could even breathe a word. 'Let me talk first, that night when he deceived us, my system was still conscious despite looking dead on the outside. There was an active camera on the dash of the SUV we hijacked and from there I watched and calculated the heat you projected." He paused. 'It was a whopping ten-million degrees Celsius in a controlled manner, and you only need to use one percent of it to wake the core!" 'Okay, let's say that it is possible—" 'It is possible." I rolled my eyes. 'Did you just rolled your eyes at me, Anastasia?" What? 'What?" The ass chuckled, 'Nothing, a reference from a movie I curiously watched many years ago." I couldn't help but shake my head at his antics. 'Going back, let's say that reheating the core can be possible, are we going to get out of the hole alive after it comes back to life?" He bit his upper lip and looked as if he was contemplating his answer. 'Probably not." Elliot started walking again and I followed. 'Then that contradicts everything! We cannot be a sacrificial for the others. What about our goal?" I looked around and it was just snow, no silhouette of buildings nor frozen trees, just a sea of snow in the darkening place. 'Where are we anyway?" 'We were in Khartoum a few moments ago." 'Are we close to where we're going?" 'Yeah, just a few miles." I couldn't help but narrow my eyes at him, he seemed suspicious. 'How few are we talking about here?" 'Three-thousand four-hundred miles." He said it like it was no big deal. I involuntarily took a huge amount of air by mouth. 'Don't tell me we're going to get there by feet." 'There are no cars functioning at this age. And it's only fifty-four days." Oh, I just wanted to push him and plant his pretty face in the snow. ●●●●● Three and a half days of nonstop running and no talking, it was already dawn when we reached Kadugli and its abandoned buildings. Like in Sudan, everything was covered—no, buried—in snow, the difference was that electricity was still present there. Only the top-half on the one-floored houses were seen and I was basically submerged in the snow. Elliot, thanks to his six foot and a two, could still see the surface. I started projecting heat around me when we were halfway to Kadugli because of the sudden change of terrain and the increasing height of the piled soft-snow. 'Should we take a break?" It was the most proper thing to say but I knew neither of us felt weary. 'Not a bad idea." Elliot answered while looking up, probably checking for wires or anything that might tip our location to our hunters. We were walking towards the direction of the house we decided to occupy when I remembered something. It seemed irrelevant before but now that I think about it, 'Why do I always pass out when they electrocute me?" Most of the time my consciousness ended after they zapped me, but why was that? Blood loss from bullet wounds never made me black out before, except from the extreme pain from the operations, there was a new level of pain every time I got opened. 'Uh, it might have seemed like it was just a few volts that shocked your body into passing out but, it was actually seven-hundred volts. Enough to burn your ass to crispiness." Hah, so that was why. Elliot stopped, we must've reached the house. I still couldn't see the top of the pile thus, I was following him from behind. I had to melt the ice that sealed the door to its hinges for it to be opened, and inside was a total darkness. Only my friend's glowing purple eyes were the miniscule source of light in the room. There were no creaks on the floor so it must have been concrete or something compact. 'Thirty-Five." He was a few steps from me basing from the floating pair of marbles directed my way. 'Yeah." 'Tell you what, did you know that you can make yourself glow?" No. 'I don't think you know or told you this already but eighty percent of your genetic make-up came from spliced DNA of a heat thermophile called Strain 121—well, that's what it was called many years ago." I think I recall this one on one of the conditionings, when my then brother Leib was educating me about it. 'And to stabilize its foothold in you they also introduced a variety of other microorganisms such as those that can glow. That said, you can glow!" He sat down on a wooden lounge. 'I don't think I will be needing to glow when my eyes have perfectly adjusted already." 'Mm, suit yourself, it would've been cool seeing you do phosphorescence though." 'You know more about me than me." I mumbled, I saw a stair case leading to a second floor and took it. 'Don't be surprised, they all stored your data in my system—some I stole from Dorothy." He was behind me as we climbed the narrow stairway. 'Who's Dorothy?" As far as I knew that was not the name of his first and only love. The house was emptied, like the owners moved. There were no signs that it was hastily abandoned. 'The lady you won't ever see." Oh, that lady. There were two doors that probably led to bedrooms. 'Dibs on the one at the end of the hallway." Elliot rushed and walked past me so fast that its doors opened and closed before I could blink. Whatever. I went to the remaining room and the musty smell kicked me in the face. It was still dark—at least to the ordinary eyes—but I could already see the light, or the ones that could get through the thick, gray clouds in the atmosphere, breaking in the glass of the windows although very subtle but it was there. There was a single naked bed backed beside one of the walls...and that was it. Whoever occupied this area was too sentimental to leave anything that they'd owned, except the bed. Probably because the metal frame became too rusty-for-salvage. I didn't bother patting the bed's mattress for dust or mold and just laid on it. Fungal infection can go fuck itself. As far as I knew my body, I didn't need that much of a rest, but sleeping was one of the things I got used to doing since I was, born, created? The action made me feel more human than I actually was. Will we even succeed waking up the world? Say, we did, what if there were really no humans left? Does that contradict the normal life we worked so hard for? What will happen if Nathan's gang captures us, back to square one? I closed my eyes and steadied my breathing, soon after the thoughts that worried me, slowly faded and its place was a peaceful void. The silence of the darkness I was in was broken by breaths, echoing breaths so close to my ear. I could feel its heat as soft lips grazed my neck—I didn't know how I knew as my surrounding were still so dark, but I knew. The hot air coming from those lips was making my chest hot and it was becoming hard to breathe, like something was on my torso, warm, hard, and deliciously heavy. What? That momentarily pulled me from the fog I was in causing me to open my dream-eyes, but even as they were open everything was blurry. But then they focused and my sight locked on a pair of glowing red orbs intensely gazing down at me. Deep, husky chuckle made my breathing become more erratic. I gasped along with my eyes springing open as something loud startled me. It took me a few seconds to calm my pounding heart and noticed that the room was brighter. There was scuffling outside, probably Elliot looking for things. And then I remembered the weird dream I had. A wet dream? The fuck?