"I tried waking her once," Anders will say.
-
I tried to wake her. I tried. ... I didn't know what else to do, but I didn't know how to do it. I didn't know how it was that I even woke up. It wasn't supposed to happen. But it was when I unhooked myself from the bed and held my breath to have a look around...some people were dead. Not a lot, perhaps, maybe ten percent of them. I recognized all of their names engraved on the beds, though their bodies were bloated, faces curled into themselves. Panic took me. I swam back to Eve and started to unhook her before I'd even gotten oxygen. I almost passed out while holding the tubes connecting her to life.
Fuck me. Oh my God, fuck me, fuck me...
I felt scared to try again after I was breathing normally. But I had to. She could die. And then...and then I'd be alone. I climbed around her sleeping body trying to figure out how the machine worked, stopping to admire her and crying too often. It was so hopeless...ahem. I had no idea how it worked. All I knew was which tube contained the drug my tube stopped feeding me. So I disconnected it.
The drug kept coming, filling the water around me like a cloud, blinding me even further. There was a red flashing through the cloud, and an alarm muted. I slashed through the cloud, and I could see her eyelids fluttering slightly over a white eye. Then they shot open, facing me.
"Eve," I said, "Eve! Eve, Eve, O Eve--" I held her, and I assumed she was trembling in confusion and, well, joy. I told her how much I loved her, how much I'd missed her. I praised God, knew He was real. Everything was sliding, clicking back into place, how it should be.
I was so happy. My tears clogged my breathing mask. Everything was right again, everything was going to be okay.
But...she wasn't hearing me. She wasn't seeing me. She was seizing.
"Eve. Eve? Oh my God, oh my fuck!"
Fuck me.
I, uh, made sure everything was alright and she was safe, and I didn't try again after that.
YOU ARE READING
Pale Fragments
Science FictionAn alien Robot came to me before she left to die. She sang to me the stories of how her ancient world and species ended, how she was created to travel through Time, how (in the far future) she met an essential boy named Anders, how she named herself...
