9.
 As Taxi watched, the men lugged out huge pots and set them on the barbecue stands. The people brought their plates and spoons to be filled and then took them to the benches to eat. As Taxi watched, she ate ravenously at some tack moistened with spit and water. Within the hour, the men went back into the fields and the women cleaned up.
Taxi, meanwhile, worked her way, crawling across sandy soil, to the precious cars. Damn the smell of that food. It was wonderful, but if she and Sam had a couple of functioning helium drive bottles, they could not only stoke up their hummer for another 25 years, but buy enough coins to keep them in food for the rest of their lives.
Wow, she thought as she crawled into the former parking lot behind the buildings. This place looked as though nobody had been near it in decades. Stuff grew here, so it wasn’t radiation-deadly. She wished she had a spore counter, but that was back in the hummer. No time. Carefully, she pulled at the door handle for a sedan. The handle came off in her hand, but the door stayed shut — locked. “Damn!” She had to get inside to see if she could get a reading on the bottle under the hood. It was important to do this quickly. If the bottles were dead, she had to get off this weird fucking turf in one piece. Suddenly Sam meant a great deal to her. He always did, but never this achingly. He had accused her of being reckless, and he was right. She wasn’t worried about herself so much as about him. What would he do without her? How would he get by?
At last she found a sedan door that opened. Inside was a musty smell. The floor had rusted away, and a rat jumped out of the seat and scampered away. Good — rats mean life. She leaned inside, ignoring the large furry black spider that waltzed into a hole in the back seat. She brushed the dust off the dash until she found the glass dial marked He. It was blank. She rubbed it with her fingertip as if the warmth would bring it to life. Nothing. The helium drive bottles were designed to go to sleep when not in use; solar batteries warmed the indicator array that told the status of the helium drive bottle itself.
She got out and rubbed her hand in the debris atop the car. Loose soil flaked away, exposing more of the green preservative. Ah! She climbed up on the seat, leaned over the roof, and with both hands brushed the soil away. Using her knife, she pried at the green rubbery coating. Presently, a bit of it came loose. It was a thick substance, like latex, and flexible in the warm sun. Underneath was glass. She recognized the powdery amber stripes in the glass as belonging to a brand of solar panel. “Yes!”
She climbed back into the car and checked the He indicator again. It glowed faintly — so faintly one couldn’t tell if it was because of light leaking in somehow, or because of the sun powering up the test lines. She climbed back on top, prying with her knife. When she got a full panel exposed, she jumped down. She just had time to glimpse the powerful amber indicator light glowing in the car, when she noticed she had company. She whirled, pulling her knife out.
And faced several women.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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