Echoes

Echoes

Oasis

1. Oasis

The wind was whistling through the trees overhead as she stretched out over the cool ground, arms splayed to her sides. The evening dew dampened the waves of her hair. She could hear it all. The sounds of the birds in the trees, the small animals danced over ground, the water running over the smooth rocks. Above all these little noises, she could hear him near her, his breath moved in and out of his chest, his heart thudded in his ribcage. She could hear him wake. He rustled around a bit, attempting to retrieve a few more minutes of lost sleep. He muttered a vulgarity under his breath and rolled over. "Morning… Er… Evening," he mumbled, his voice in his sleeping bag.

She turned her head towards his noise. "You look…" She thought for a moment trying to sound what she thought was normal, "horrible." She laughed as he attempted to tame his hair.

He grumbled again, something about SpagBol, and stretched his limbs out over his head and deep within his sleeping bag.

"Hungry?"

"Depends on what you plan on feeding me."

I trifled through the backpack David had packed back in the Ruins. A few dehydrated meals were left, four SpagBols, ThaiPad, and CurryNoods. "ThaiPad?"

He groaned, "How about something more… organic?" He combed his fingers through his wild hair, then down the back of his neck to discover a tight muscle. Sleeping on rocks for the last few weeks had put comfort in a whole new perspective.

She threw a few fallen leaves and twigs in his direction, "How's that?"

He smirked and grabbed the backpack. "Fine. PadThai it is."

They had to stop every day, it seemed, for David to rest. Tally, on the other hand, could go days without sleep and often took catnaps while David gave in to sleep. It had slowed them down quite a bit, and Tally often thought about carrying him on her back while he slept. Their destination was only a day's ride away, and they had been traveling for two and a half weeks already. She was anxious to get there and find out all about the city of Echo.

"Tell me about the visitors again," she asked. She knew all about the visitors by heart the first time he had told her, but she enjoyed hearing him say the words. It allowed her time to think and bask in his voice.

"Again?" He paused from filling the purifier in the stream near their campsite, to look at her.

"Yes."

He finished filling the purifier and turned back to where she was seated. "Well, my mother said that they came during the night to the Smoke. All I know, is that they were there when I woke up the following morning…" The purifier pinged in mid-conversation. "This was back in the days when she and my father use to live in the Smoke. She says it was about six or seven years ago. They had run into a few runaways a few miles back on the trail…" He mixed up a pack of PadThai in the purifier and continued with his story, "They asked my parents for advice on where to hide their camp. My father told them about an island hidden in the forests and rocky landscape of the western coasts. The area he referred to was completely water locked, like an island. I remember when he first told me about it, he referred to it as an oasis. He told me how my mother and he found the place when they were searching for a site for the Smoke. My mother decided it was too far from their home city..."

"What did they look like?"

"Seriously, don't you have, like, photographic memory?

"Auditory," she corrected him.

"Whatever…" He turned away, blowing on his meal.

"So are you going too tell me about them or not?"

"Fine. Well, they were weird. It's hard to explain. Kind of serene and quiet. They looked just like their personalities, like their features made them that way. It was… just… something I'd never seen, even in the years following. They seemed to have had some sort of surgery, but they of course didn't have the lesions since they were also doctors and scientists." He was quiet for a moment, as if pondering something. The silence stretched on until she could bear it no more.

"What?" she growled, under her breath.

"Sorry," he mumbled sarcastically, giving her an odd expression. As if to say, politeness is socially acceptable, even in the wilderness. "I was just thinking, until your impatience cut in, about the fifth person. I think it was a child or a teenager, but… she wasn't ugly. In fact she didn't look like the others at all."

"So?"

"Just…" he shoved a steaming spoonful in his mouth. He had forgotten, yet again, how hot food came out of purifiers. He spat it back onto the spoon, huffing and puffing. "Nevermind," he muttered, blowing on the spoonful of nearly regurgitated food.