Dell (part 1 of 3)

Dell

"It's crazy, huh? How the world keeps going when yours grinds to a halt,"

Mara

There was a cold around him and he felt it come in waves from the nearby misting stream.  Above the cool atmosphere around his low dugout the sun slipped through and heated the trees.  It did not heat him though.  Neither did the cool breeze chill him as it seeped out and beyond his earthy bed.  There was all he was or felt between that breeze and his bed.  But there was also a girl kneeling next to him, now. “Dell, oh Dell.”  He had nothing left so when the girl came down to hold him he pushed her up and against the high side of the slope he was entrenched in.  Her knees were bent now and her back lay against the ground pushing up and out with each heavy breath.  Her tan was a solid bright brown and her figure was defined beneath a bright white tank top.  She was glowing.  He would have kissed her but the sting of losing his family kept him frozen in his atmosphere.

“There are things we need to do: get ready and go,” She said.  “Merol is bringing more here; it’s like nothing I’ve heard of. There’ll be a hundred of us here by tomorrow and four thousand by the week's end. Dell, four thousand!” she emphasized. Then Dell looked up at her offering nothing with his cold blank stare. She continued in an eager whisper, “Think, four thousand for your family.  And then we’re going, Merol says we have to go now.”  She put her hands under her head and held it up. “It’s crazy, huh?  How the world keeps going when yours grinds to a halt.” Dell turned away at that.

Then there was silence.  And there was anger and sorrow in Dell but there was mostly silence. “We’re going as emissaries to the gray people.  There will be mountains and the other side of the Pan-Atlantic. Won’t that be cool?” She sat up and began to rub his chest, “But you have to get up.  We don’t have to leave now but eventually we will.  Yea they’re gone but your dad is still out there.  And you have me.”  He could not have thanked her then but he was grateful so he sat up if not for him, then for her.  When he broke from that cool stasis he was laying in, he felt the sun warm his face.

“How did you hear about everything,” he asked Mara whose eyes went big as her sturdy, cool smile formed a frown.

“One of Merol’s men had said that Don had been killed so all of us except one or two moved to the forward rendezvous point,” she began softly.