Cynophobia

☠₃₄☠

 "Are you alright?" Cairo asked. I was staying up in the cockpit as his co-pilot now.

"I'll be fine, I just miss him," I sighed. Rags was like my father-figure during the apocalypse. He always protected and gave me the answers to the questions I had. It hurt losing him again, but I knew that he felt no pain. Like he said, he was never alive. I can't believe that I felt bonded with a machine that was just programmed to say those kinds of things.

"He helped us out a lot," Cairo said trying to cheer me up. "Thanks to him, we're on this plane right now. All of us."

"Have you ever even been to the island?" I questioned. "Whats it like?"

He laid back in his chair, the plane driving safely on autopilot until we landed. "Once when I was little. It was the one time my uncle agreed to leave the cabin. It was because he lost a bet to my father. Its about the size of a football field, it had a cabin on it. The cabin is pretty nice, it has three rooms. Although its probably crawling with spiders right now."

I shuddered. I hated the thought of spiders crawling on me as I slept.

"What happens once you figure out how to deactivate the Couriers and attack function?" Cairo asked. "Are we actually going to go back?"

"Can we really live on an island by ourselves for the rest of our lives?"

He shrugged. "Why not. Its going to be chaotic for the next few decades. There must be other groups of stragglers out there, they're all going to fight for power. Humans are greedy, those who have been leading won't just back down and merge into another group."

I raised an eyebrow. "Funny coming from you. You hated Vincent."

"You didn't? He was a psychopath that let his feelings get ahead of thinking straight, of course I hate him. I don't want to get shot in the leg just because he stubbed his toe," he retorted.

I stared at him for a bit. Cairo was a strong and clever leader, but he could also be a good friend. He was very comforting when it was just the two of us. I would feel dumb if I was just mistaking his extra attention towards me as sympathy. I had always admired him, but I didn't feel like pursuing a relationship. We were in the middle of an apocalypse, I didn't want to be distracted. But now, we had all the time in the world.

"You seemed jealous," I said stretching, trying to hide my smile. "Me staying in his cabin, the 'kiss' that drugged him."

I tried to search his face for a reaction, but he revealed none. "It would be harder to travel if you got pregnant."

I jolted upward and let out an offended huff. "You're mean."

"You're curious," he replied meeting my gaze.

Part of me knew that he knew why I was asking, the other part wanted to play dumb and pretend to sleep. "Good night, Leader."

"We're less than an hour away from the island, Cynthia," he said putting emphasis on my full name. "If you can handle running away from Cynoids for nearly three months you can handle staying awake for a little longer."

I would be kept busy on the island. But a side project I wanted to do included attempting to contact my mother and grandparents in Japan. I understood why she left, I only wished she had tried harder to stop my father from doing what he did.

"What are we going to do with ourselves?" I asked. "Normal feels foreign to me at this point."

Cairo raised a brow. "I think we will adjust just fine. There's enough dehydrated food to last us years, we can always fish when that runs out. We aren't strangers to providing for ourselves. The hardest decision right now is who has to bunk in the same room or on the couch. And I already have dibs on the master bedroom."