THE END

Chapter 3

For the next two days we hide, living off those granola bars and the powdered milk. We camp out under the bridge and take a break, for the first time in two years. Most of the time is spent being idle and just thinking.

I wonder how we'll get off of Earth now that we aren't being evacuated. Earth has so much pollution that the last few months have been a bit hard to breath. The oxygen levels are extremely low- to the point of being dangerous. We need to get out fast.

In the meantime we wait. At the end of the two days, we still haven't been found. I had worried that they could still find us without our trackers, but Neil's right. We no longer exist.

So after we take a break, we go at top speed to the Optillar; the place they take you to be evacuated. It's like a giant airport, but instead of planes there are spaceships and the likes. To get there we have to travel about 70 miles on foot. It'll take us around a week.

We start going as fast as we can, but as the days go on we slow down, getting exhausted the farther we go. "Neil," I said one day as he helps me over a tall, old fashioned railroad track that's been rusted over, and down into the rim of a canal with cracked cement and ducks living in it. "How do you think we'll do it? We'll have to steal someone's ID, I suppose. Two people scheduled to be taken to the same planet. Hopefully Jupiter. And we can't get caught."

"Yeah. And if we can manage that-" He coughed. The air was particularly thin today. "We'll still have to worry about stealing a pod."

The officers evacuate people in little pods that are shot up into space, built especially so they can withstand the atmosphere without burning up. And the pods are self programmed to go to a certain planet. There are old legends that say the pods are the remnants of automobiles, these things people drove around in more than a millennia ago, and that the pods are alive.

There are stories of them going off track, of people getting lost in space and their pods running out of oxygen, killing the people inside, almost as if it were on purpose. But I don't think that's true. The stories were mostly made to scare kids into staying at home and not trying to run off. Like we are now.

We swim across the canal and climb up the other side, only to realize that there's a ravine. "How do we get across?"

"We'll have to climb down and then climb back up the other side. There's no way we could just make it across." He said.

I cough a few times and wish we wouldn't have to. With the air this thin, walking is hard enough. Climbing is just gonna be a pain in the ass.

"Well," he says, tying a rope around his waist and another around mine, "Here goes nothing." He attaches the ropes to a pipe on the side of the canal, tugs on it to test its strength, and then drops down into the ravine.

My heart drops as I see him plummet, but he quickly rights himself and keeps climbing downward. The ravine is maybe fifty feet deep. Not too bad. "Come on!" He calls, reaching the bottom and beginning to untie himself.

I pause at the edge. The wind whips my dark brown hair into my face and I look around. I've never been particularly afraid of heights, but I don't really like the idea of falling headfirst into a ravine to my possible death with only a rope to catch me.

I take a deep breath and jump lightly. The wind tears through my hair and I can't see. I wait for the rope to catch me but it doesn't. I fall and fall. How long is this rope?

Finally it does catch me, but with the impact of my body, the rope snaps. And I'm still 15 or 20 feet off the ground. With sharp rocks below. That's the kind of fall that would surely break your back, if it didn't kill you.

I scream, knowing it doesn't do any good, and I seem to fall faster every second. I hear Neil shouting something, and it seems like everything is in slow motion. I feel a slight pressure as I hit the ground, and then everything goes black.

.........

The next thing I know is pain. The light burns my eyelids and I can't feel my back. I hear words coming from somewhere, but they all blur together. My head aches and I can't move. As the memory of falling comes flooding back to me, I realize what happened and wonder if I'm paralyzed. I'm pretty damn lucky to have survived that at all.

My head is resting on something soft, and after a while I realize that someone's arm is around me. Neil, I suppose. Soon I realize Neil is talking, and I try to listen. It takes all of my effort not to black out again; I'm not even going to try to open my eyes. "Please wake up, please." He says. His voice sounds choked. Oh Neil,  I wanted to say. Don't cry over me. I'll be okay. But I couldn't speak. So I just listened.

"Please, I'll do anything. What will it take for you to come back to me? Just tell me. Tell me!" His voice cracks. "You're all I have left in the world." It's then that I realized I could still easily die. I might not make it through this. Then go to another world. Go to Jupiter and find your family. I want to tell him. Even if I can't do it with you.

"I love you." He says. I always knew he did, and he knows I love him too, but neither of us has said it out loud before. We don't pay attention to formalities much; we both think actions are better than words. But to hear him say it made me choke up. I'm too weary even to cry, but I make a tremendous effort to open my eyes for him. I had to keep living for him. The darkness threatened to overtake me. I felt myself losing consciousness.

I blacked out again for God knows how long, and I thought I was dying. But eventually I woke up again, and the pain settled in. My back was on fire, to the point where I could barely breathe.

I crack open an eye just a little. "Cecily?" He chokes out, holding me closer. "Cecily!" He gasps as I open both eyes all the way. "You're alive! You're alive!" As if pulled out of a trance, he lets go of me and asks frantically, "What do you need? Do you want water? I have some old Advil in my bag that might still work. Though it's probably a century old. Where does it hurt? Can you feel your legs?" I took his hand, silently telling him to calm down, and then I pointed to the water bottle he was holding. He held it to my lips and let me drink, although most of it just spilled down my face. I had a hard time swallowing.

When I got enough down, the first words I whispered were, "I love you too." My voice cracks from the pain. His eyebrows raised in surprise and he blushed but otherwise he didn't acknowledge it. "And stop worrying so much, I'll be okay." He blushed harder.

"Can you feel your legs? Is your back broken?" He said, running a hand through his dirty blonde hair.

I try to wiggle my toes and realize I regained some feeling in my legs. Okay, so I'm not paralyzed. "I think my back is broken." I said, trying not to show how much pain I was in. "But I can feel my feet."

He let out a sigh of relief. "A broken back will heal. Being paralyzed won't. We have to get you out of this ravine though, we need to get help."

"We can't." I said, my voice cracking. "First of all I don't know how we'd possibly get out. I sure can't climb. Second of all, we can't get help or they'd realize we're still alive. Remember, we don't exist. They would try to evacuate us if they found us. And besides all that, who do we get help from?" I said. "Think about it. We haven't passed a soul since before we camped under that bridge. There is no one left."

"There's got to be someone."

"If anyone is left on Earth they're hiding like we are, or they're the people we're hiding from. There's no help coming."

"Well what do you suppose we do then?" He asked, his voice rising. "You can't die down here!"

I laughed without humor, "I'm not sure I have a say in the matter."