Silver Umbrellas

Fourteen-- Charity

Butterflies. Lots and lots of butterflies. Her hand noticeably tightened its grip on her uncle's coat, and he looked down at her to see if she was alright.

"What is it, Alice?" he asked.

"... I'm scared for you," was her whispery answer.

The glass cockpit dome was held in both his hands, leaving Alice the task of carrying the umbrella for the both of them. The trip had been a tiring one, but hopefully they would be returning with an abundance of water and food for the four of them to share.

Finland did his best to smile at her and seem unperturbed in the slightest. "You don't have to worry, Alice. I'll be fine. And if something goes wrong, we'll just run back to the shack and start looking elsewhere for food and water."

The way he said it made it sound so easy, and yet that wasn't true at all. "But..." she started to protest, then fell silent when she knew her words would fall on figuratively deaf ears. They had to do this. It was dangerous, but so was living in a world where acid fell from the sky in torrents. All Alice could do was tighten her grip even more, as if that would persuade him to not have any contact at all with those men in front of the Costco Wholesale store.

If his hands had been free, he would have tried to hug her and comfort her that way. Unfortunately he couldn't, so he settled for pecking the top of her head and striding forward bravely. His hands were bracing the dome from inside, over his head, and pushing the sturdy glass in either direction so it wouldn't fall and expose him to the drizzle overhead. It was an awkward way to hold the dome, but at least it kept his hands from being burned.

Alice and Tino were stopped behind the Office Depot, the same one they had used to scope out the Costco the day before. "Make sure you stay out of sight, Alice," he reminded her needlessly.

She still nodded nevertheless, her eyebrows knitted together with worry. "Please be careful, Uncle Tino...!"

"I will," he promised, and stepped out from under the umbrella, the cockpit braced over his head. It was an effective makeshift umbrella if there ever was one.

As he walked away, a thought flitted across Alice's mind, and it made her heart stop dead for a beat. With his hands up at either side of his head, keeping the cockpit from falling, Uncle Tino looked a lot like someone surrendering to the police, whose guns were trained on him with intent to kill. It took a lot of effort to keep her exclamation inside rather than let it out like she dearly wanted to. This plan was giving her second thoughts in a big way.

'Please be okay. Please come back soon' Alice prayed silently, not trusting herself to open her mouth and speak it aloud.

Tino, too, had butterflies in his belly as he made his way toward the Costco Wholesale's front entrance. The same two men were sitting there again, just as they had been the day before, and their guns were accompanying them. The sight of them reminded Tino of his own gun, hidden inside his flight jacket.

After a moment of concentration, he stepped fully into view and greeted the two men, whose surprise was far too obvious to be mistaken as anything else. Tino's accent hadn't quite vanished, but it was just light enough to hint at foreign origins. "Hello? Can you help me?"

"Holy shit," the guard on the left muttered as he and his buddy rose to their feet. They looked to be about the same age, in their late twenties at most. The one who spoke had dirty blond hair that hung past his ears in rather greasy waves, and the other's brown hair was trimmed neatly and kept short. "Where'd you come from?"

 Finland hurried over and stepped beneath the concrete awning in front of the entrance, then set down his cockpit dome while trying to look exhausted. "I-I'm sorry, it's just that, well, my plane crashed not far from here and my navigator and I are out of food. Can you help us, please?"