Cynthia Bunn by And Keep Us From Our Castles

Author:And Keep Us From Our Castles
Format: epub
Published: 2013-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

"Yes?" She had taken off for the city at a lope, and he was already forty meters behind her. They had to shout.

"Get some pills."

"What?"

"Pills."

She ran back to him. "Pills? I thought you’d given up on that."

"Not those. Sleeping pills."

"No, Ray. Don’t ask that of me."

"Just in case I need them."

"Or incase you want to give up and die?"

"That’s my decision."

"Then get your own pills."

"Lind-"

"Damn you! I thought you wanted to live."

"I do. But when I reach the point where I can’t run anymore, I want to die decently, not of anoxia. Not in madness."

She stated at him, wild and unhappy., then tuned to run toward Denver.

He got to his feet slowly. It was a warm spring, too warm, despite the shade provided by the halo. The next circle, less than a centimeter away on the map, was fifteen kilometers distant. As fast as possible, he walked toward it.

She was not there the next morning . He waited the full hour, another half hour, fifteen minutes more. Slipped from the canteen, rested, and waited. At nine-fifty he left.

April twenty-fourth. The third circle. She did not come.

Neither did he see her on the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth. The fifteen kilometers between meeting points were getting longer. He did no east during those days, his stomach could not tolerate food. It was psychosomatic, he repeated to himself, the result of the square death-shadow hounding him. But the mental assurances did no good, and the acid pain in his belly continued.

The evening of April twenty sixth caught him far from shelter in one of the sudden hailstorms of the plains. He sat thought it, head bent forwards as he stared at the ground while hailstones pummeled and bruised his back. Later he found it difficult to stand and straighten his spine, but he kept going across the land, arriving only twenty minutes late at the sixth meeting point. And waited, knowing Lind was not the type of person to arrive on time and leave in anger or desperation because he wasn’t there promptly.

Optimism supported that waiting. It near-died as he consulted the map again, checking the location of the one remaining circle. "If I don’t come out within a week," she’d told him, "don’t wait for me. Assume something happened to keep me in the city."

After six days he was certain something had happened: her own decision to stay. She hadn’t wanted to remain with him two months earlier. She didn’t want to watch him die. Now she had returned to a normal life, studies, research, writing, probably trying to wipe out memories of him. He hoped-sincerely hoped-she would succeed.

Eternal optimist. He had disdained the common escape of suicide, chosen by so many sentenced criminals within hours of the trial. He’d lived longer than the others, walked farther, clung to life as through he didn’t know he’d already lost it, forfeited to six plastic walls. He continued his circular path around Denver.

The last day of the allotted week. He was no longer expected to

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.