Plasma Cat

Ch. 3: The Golden Gate

As the sun reached the very top of the sky, Lisa suddenly realized that it was possible that today would be the day she died.

Yesterday had started so normally. She got a call from Ariel at five in the morning, packed up her tools and the spare parts she would need, and headed off to work. The malfunctioning solar array was sixty miles away, but that was actually fairly close as far as Lisa was concerned. She was at the array by seven, and the job was done by three in the afternoon. After a quick lunch and a few minutes of simply taking in the vast, endless desert that surrounded her, Lisa climbed into her truck and pressed the on button.

Nothing happened.

Lisa liked to think that she was the independent type, the kind of gal who could skin a deer, unclog drains, and fix any goddamn car on the planet. And although she had been a car mechanic for four years, even owning her own shop at one point, she had absolutely no idea how her company-issued truck worked. It was an electric truck, with a strange metal cylinder where the engine should have been. It operated using sub-atomic particles and computers that she simply didn't understand, since her job fixing solar arrays mainly consisted of just swapping out modules.

In that moment, Lisa realized that she was as helpless as that blond woman in heels she had helped out a few months ago. The woman's car simply had a flat tire but she had no idea how to change it, and so Lisa had gladly changed it for her if only for the chance to feel smug. Now, she was the dumb bimbo stuck in the desert with no clue how to fix her only means of escape. And it pissed her off.

She tried for hours to figure out what was wrong with the truck, only to end up shocking herself twice. By the time the sun was setting she figured that her only option was to walk back to Reno, since that was the nearest bit of civilization. It was then that she realized how utterly, stupidly unprepared she was. She had no extra water or food, no radio (just a cellphone with no bars), no sunglasses, no hat; she didn't even have a towel to wrap around her head. She did, however, remember to bring her gun, and so she took a moment to feel really, really stupid. But she wasn't too worried. She knew that a person could survive three days without water, and Reno was only sixty miles away. At three miles an hour she could travel sixty miles in two nights. No problem.

By the middle of the next day Lisa realized that she was quite possibly fucked.

She had walked all night and tried to sleep through the blistering heat of the day, but even in the shade of a solar array she found that it was just too hot to sleep. And she was thirsty. So thirsty that it felt as if her mouth was filled with sand, and every breath seemed only to rob her of more and more moisture until her very lungs felt as if they would disintegrate for lack of water. She tried licking her arms to recover her sweat, she considered drinking her own blood if only for the sensation of moisture in her mouth, and she would have drunk her own urine if she could only figure out how to do it since she didn't have a bottle. And finally, she simply laid down and made herself ready for death.

She knew that whoever found her would think that she was the dumbest fucking idiot who had ever lived, and maybe she was. But she would at least die as nobly as possible. No screaming or crying, no regrets. She wouldn't shoot herself since she didn't want people thinking that she had gotten herself into this predicament on purpose, but also because it seemed nobler, somehow. She raised her middle finger to heaven, cursed the god whom her mother had tried to make her worship, and closed her eyes and waited for death.

Then, after what seemed like only a moment, she felt a splash of water on her face. Without thinking she quickly drank deeply, only to encounter a fleshly object which tasted horrible. As her eyes shot open, she found herself mouth-to-mouth with a horse.