EXTINCTION WARRIOR

Chapter 3

Strands of Aana's gray hair are loose in the front. They hang in her face, out of her bun. She has her back to the table and stands at the stove in her kitchen frying doughnuts. She's got her apron with the big pockets on. It covers her favorite baggy blue sweatshirt and loose pants. She's humming along with one of Nuwa's greatest hits drifting in the warm, greasy air from their lightscreen in the wall. Nuwa is so plastic. I swear she's a gynoid! Her phony techno-vibe oozes through any lightscreen. Taata sits at the table across from me. He's in his favorite plaid shirt frayed at the cuffs.

All the lightscreens in their house are terrible. Every few seconds either Nuwa's face disappears or the sound drops. They haven't upgraded in forever. Aana and Taata are so old, they don't care. Dad's pretty sure it's because voles have been chewing the cables in their walls for years.

"Desert, huh? Never been to one and never will. Give me cold any day." Taata says, shaking his head.

"Deserts get cold at night. Really cold." I say.

"What'd you do?" He asks, chewing a piece of maktak - bowhead whale blubber. Taata calls it Eskimo chewing gum.

"Woka stepped on a massive spider hiding under the sand as soon as we entered level six."

Aana stops humming and turns toward us holding tongs. "Spiders are good mostly, but I don't like the creepy way they crawl with all those legs," and shakes her head with a frown.

Aana has the most expressive face. She can smile and laugh so hard one minute, and in the next glance have all the sadness, pain and suffering of indigenous people.

"Me neither, and this one had huge jaws, almost half its body. It tried to bite Woka's foot, but he kicked it in the mouth, and it crawled away. We got ten points for that."

"A good time." Taata chuckles, using his index fingers to push his mustache off his top lip.

"We could seethe oasis with palm trees up ahead and kept walking, but my bionic foot caught on something. I twisted around, and my butt landed on a cactus. Woka started laughing so hard, and then, out of nowhere, a black scorpion crawled from behind the cactus with pincers in attack mode, its tail hooked, ready to sting. He stopped laughing instantly."

"Another reason I like cold." Taata says, grinning, chewing hard, rubbing his chin stubble.

"With the cactus pricking my iqquuk, I reached out and grabbed the scorpion.Squirming, it was trying to sting me, and ended up stinging itself.We got twenty points for that!" I exclaim with a smile.

"Sounds fun, right Aana?" Taata asks, his eyes wide.

Aana turns from the stove,biting her lip into her tupiich, the tattooed lines on her chin.

"Twenty points is good."She nods, with the tongs in her hand, and turns back to the stove to lift the last doughnut from the pot.

"After that, we had to help a beetle as big as me bury a ball of dung."

"Hear that? What's more exciting than getting rid of anak?" Taata asks with a smirk.

"Ohhh...like when the village ran out of toilet paper!" Aana exclaims, chuckling. "The wind so bad that winter the supply plane couldn't land. No toilet paper for six whole weeks!" Aana laughs hard. Her eyes disappear into slits with her round cheeks pushed against them.

"Ewww....that's disgusting!" I say, and watch as she heads to the table with the platter.

She reaches over and puts the platter of warm doughnuts between me and Taata.