Surface: Doomed Planet

Excerpt 6: The Man In Silver

Having two tasks done and satisfied that a third was underway, I turned my attention to the supply stash in the back of the garage. There were cans spilling out of boxes, bottles of water scattered all over the floor and the boxes themselves weren't stacked like the should be. For starters, I picked up all the stray cans of food and bottles of water and then emptied all the boxes, separating the contents of each one into other boxes depending on what they were, Canned food, dehydrated, liquids, what have you. When that was done, I stacked the medical chest and boxes of ammo along with the survivors bags and the two gas cans against the opposite wall. I moved all of the random scrap and spare parts from upstairs and in the garage to the pile out back, which I also sorted, just to kill that little bit of extra time till nightfall because sitting on my tail would just be a waste. Once everything was sorted, I went inside to see what Chy and Sonya had been up too while I was working on sorting our resources. They didn't just get the place clean, they made it shine. Chy, Sonya and about six other people had cleaned the tower from top to bottom and gotten rid of all the trash in some unseen incinerator. There were two guys in the back near a custodian's closet who were just finishing putting things away.

"Wow", I whistled walking through the hallways, up to Sonya and Chy, "girls the place looks amazing."

"Thanks", Chy smiled, "never claimed to be a neat freak, at least over anything but my guns. Felling better love?"

"Not really", I said, ",my chest hurts like hell."

"Cracked ribs", Sonya said, "I had a few of those once. I was always tiny and small and fragile and weak when I was growing up."

"You were that one huh?", I asked.

Sonya smiled, "yep, fell off the monkey bars at school once and landed the side of the sand box, cracked nearly all of them."

"Ouch", I said.

"Yep", she smiled.

"What's next on the hit list?", Chy asked.

"The Pharmacy", I said, "seems like we still got a while before sunset, so for now, we wait."

And wait we did. Chy and I took to the top of the Life Guard tower's Balcony, spending the remaining 12 hours till sunset either asleep, or starring out over the amazing landscape, until the sun finally set, revealing something I could look at for hours. The water in the bay area where the beach took on an amazing blue tinted glow, allowing us to see the thousands of fish and enormous coral reef in the area. The glow was enough in of itself, but that, combined with the remnants of a Supernova and a huge nebula that the planet itself had to be in, it was one of the most amazing thing's I had ever seen.

"Wow", I said quietly, "I thought Ios could put on a show."

"It's amazing isn't it?", Chy said, "that's pretty close to what was over my head every night during Basic Training."

I pulled Chy close to me, "it will be over my head every night once this mess is done with. At this point, I'd be glad to have the problems of running a planet over what I got now."

Chy smiled, "yep me too. We should get going."

"Right", I said sitting up and stretching out, "the pharmacy."

'Did you forget?", Chy asked.

"Kinda", I said standing up.

I walked back into the room where Chy had been staying, grabbed my gear and then headed downstairs to the Ford, where I found Allen, Mike and Alcatraz ready and waiting.

"Just couldn't wait to get going huh?", I asked.

"Nope", Allen said, "been stuck in a lab for the past few months, it's nice to finally be able to get out and fight."