Chapter 6

The wind howled across the hot, dead landscape. The wind was always howling. Even amidst the burnt out buildings, there was little protection from it. Something large with metal edges rolled over her – a piece of sheet metal, probably torn from a billboard, or maybe it was once the sleek skin of a flitter. She didn't know. She didn't care. What she noticed was that it hurt when it struck her.

Awake now, Tabatha felt her body renewing itself where the metal had gouged into her back. She took a deep breath of hot, steamy air. It was incredibly humid. That was probably because most of the oceans had evaporated by now.

She looked around, trying to remember where she was – how she got here. There had been a trial, or the mockery of one. She'd been found guilty of abandoning her family and taking the only protection they had away from them.

She hadn't even known she could be charged with something like that. But with the strange judicial system on the little artificial world where she'd spent only a few days, a person could be charged with negligence and lack of responsibility – especially if it could be demonstrated to have caused damage to property or the death of one or more individuals.

By bringing her husband, the Chairman of Tomlin Security, into the future with her, she'd inadvertently caused the deaths of everyone in his entire family, even the immortal 'goddesses' Béla and her daughter, Lisa.

Tabatha's accuser, the justice and local goddess, Elaine, had even tried to have the death penalty reinstated specifically for this case. The justices who heard the case, Bard Jeffrey and the Goddess Jolene, were the only justices who had ever sentenced someone to death for their crimes.

But they didn't sentence her to death. Instead, they did something much worse. They exiled her – to Earth, to live out the rest of her days in planetary isolation. Her husband, Jake Hedron, had not been permitted to share her exile. He was still in New Eden.

'Get up!' she heard in her mind. 'Get moving! You have much to do!'

Tabatha moaned wearily. This was her third month in exile. She didn't know how she kept track of the days, but something in her mind always let her know what day it was. She was alone on a dead world, and she knew it was Tuesday, not Wednesday. She didn't know what year it was, but she didn't care.

The voice had been driving her for over a month now. It had shown her where she could find caches of stored food. Not all the food was contaminated by radiation or age. Canned goods were the safest. Even if the cans were radioactive, her body handled radioactivity the same as it did the fierce burning rays of the sun. Too much would make her sick, but at night she would recover.

Water was scarce here. Even so, she didn't want to leave this spot. There was enough food stored nearby to last for several years. She could put together collectors to catch water from the fierce thunderstorms that swept over her every other day or so.

'Get up!' the voice told her again. 'You are almost here!'

'Where?' she cast out with her mind. Instantly, she shrieked and grabbed her head, rolling on the ground in her agony. The 'goddesses' had done something to her, inside her mind, so she couldn't use her abilities. Then, immediately after her sentencing, they had surrounded her and sent her here. She could no longer teleport. If she wanted to go anywhere, she had to walk – not that there was anywhere to go – on this hot, dead world...

She couldn't even use telepathy to communicate with the voice in her head. She realized that it was probably imaginary, anyway – a delusion of her madness and her unwillingness to be the only living creature on an entire planet that had once contained twelve billion of her kind. Of course, that had been before the plagues and the wars – before the final end of days.

Sobbing, but not crying – she had no tears left for crying, Tabatha staggered to her feet and looked around. She didn't know why she'd fallen asleep outside. Perhaps she'd been afraid of the wind blowing a wall down on her or something.

Then she remembered. Something had struck her in the head, knocking her to the ground. She looked around. There was debris everywhere – no telling what the object might have been. The fierce wind carried whatever it could pick up and tossed it where it would.

Tabatha walked unsteadily into the building where she'd discovered the stash of canned goods a few days ago. She'd found an old rotted backpack just before dark yesterday and planned to fill it before she continued on. The longer she stayed here, the louder the voice in her head insisted that she continue wherever it wanted her to go.

Filling the pack, she threw it over her shoulder, only to have the rotted material come apart and spew the cans out on the ground behind her. She turned and stood staring at them for a few minutes, then turned and walked unsteadily away, leaving them all behind.

There was an elevated expressway about a mile off in the distance. It looked like it was intended for ground vehicles. There was a long gouge in the ground that the expressway went over. It looked vaguely familiar, somehow. She tried to imagine the scene teaming with humanity and with the great gouge filled with river water.

A sharp warning pain triggered in her head. She stopped trying to imagine what the view in front of her had once looked like. Whatever the justices had put into her head also prevented her from creating images she could use for teleporting. They definitely didn't want her to escape.

The expressway was farther away than she'd originally estimated. It took her 'til midmorning to reach it. She was glad it was overcast. The clouds held the heat in, but kept the worst of the sun's rays off her. Her bare skin was burning black anyway, but it didn't matter. At night, it always healed.

As she staggered on, she wondered how many years she would survive in this desolate world. Killing herself simply wasn't an option. She couldn't do herself so much harm that she wouldn't recover. 'There's no hurry ... I'll die soon enough... '

Tabatha climbed up the steep, bare-earth embankment until finally she was standing on the expressway. It was long and straight and twelve lanes wide. She didn't see any vehicles on it at all. She wasn't too surprised. The wind and the violent storms probably blew them all away. The few vehicles she had found were completely destroyed and rusted away, having spent dozens of years exposed to this wild weather.

Up here on the expressway, there wasn't much protection from the constant wind. Her bare flesh received a continuous barrage of dust, sand and dirt as it whipped by her. She didn't mind, though. The pain from the constant abrasion kept her awake and thinking. It did dry her out more, however, under her arms and breasts, and especially between her legs. She used that pain also, as her skin cracked and bled, to keep her awake and alert. Not that there was anything she needed to be alert for, except the odd pieces of buildings and scraps of sheet metal that the wind carried with it.