The Dark Cloud

Chapter Three

The run was formally announced by Paulo the next day at the community breakfast in the Food Hut. He treated it as a fun and trivial event. But everyone knew this was just a front for the visitors, Saima and Joe. They had been there a day and had already marked themselves as beyond saving. With Joe's addiction to technology and world events and Saima's insistent questions about the children's education and their isolation and work schedule, future community members they were not.

A week's preparation was allowed and had to be somehow fitted in around their regular assignments. Everyone had to take part unless they were under twelve, over seventy or infirm in some way (although this last one was often frowned upon by the other members for weakness was not tolerated in Serenidad). It was to be a grueling seven-mile race across the mountains via a particularly precarious track. It reached past the limits of the community's purview and, hence, was often so overgrown, there was no track visible at all. It would be all too easy to step on a violin spider or trip a vine, sending yourself hurtling over a two hundred metre drop. And if you didn't complete the run in the allotted time, you would be deemed to have not given your all for the community and would be exiled down the mountain. Even if you made the trek down to civilsation alive, you would be without any earthly connections to anyone and left to the evil designs of the systemites. You would likely not survive for very long.

Annie found herself on goat assignment which was good as it was relatively inexhausting. If she were on building duty, she doubted she would be able to put in her runs.

And she needed the practice!

While she considered herself relatively fit with all the long distance walking she had to do, Annie never really had much cause to run. Life at this altitude often made the air thin and during the wintertime, the burning sun could be punishing. Then there was the terrain. Everyone was instructed to run barefoot to harden the soles of the feet and this inevitably led to sprains and cuts. But there could be no excuse. In seven days, all would run despite their condition.

Three days out, Annie had managed a full mile along a particularly steep track before she was forced to stop. She was running with a contingent of other spaewives whom she was steadily getting to know after their nightly communions. There was Maya, with her dark, straight hair and no-nonsense demeanour. She was nineteen and already marking herself out as a leader of sorts. She sprinted up the path ahead of a small group: Rachel, thirty-five and one of the only other Americans in Serenidad, Jagoda, the skinny fifty-year-old Polish lawyer who left Warsaw ten years earlier with the express intention of joining the idyllic mountain community and Nilma, their Indian dentist who, like the women just ahead of her, was unreasonably fit.

Annie and Celia bought up the rear of the group and were dropping away fast when Celia called for them to quit. Annie was only too happy to oblige. Her lungs were screaming. It was like someone had lit a flaming torch inside her chest. Then there were her legs and feet. She literally thought her shins were about to snap and the pain in her ankles was so severe, she thought they might spontaneously break too. As soon as the others had disappeared through the dense foliage ahead, both girls allowed themselves to collapse, their limbs flopping like a ragdoll's.

After what must have been several minutes of desperate breathing, Celia managed to say, "This is worse than last time. Old Mister Felix has really lost it."

Annie momentarily forgot her fatigue and shot an admonishing look at her fellow spaewife. "Stop it. You can't say such things. Our director's a miracle. Sent to us from the stars."

"Yeah, well no interdimensional being is worth this shit." She said this with no hint of her usual irony, just an exhausted honesty. Then she reached up the back of her dress and removed a small package seemingly taped to her lower back.