Envelopment

by Bernard Wilkerson

Eva felt her muscles strengthen with all the exercise. She ran. She worked out in the makeshift gym. She didn’t know what else to do, and it gave her an opportunity to observe the alien soldiers. She still didn’t know when the Lord Admiral would return.

  At night, she looked at her hair in the mirror of her ornate bathroom and wondered if she should try to find some bleach. The sun in Sunny California continued to hide behind thick cloud cover.

  Feeling naked without any kind of weapon, she smuggled a steak knife from dinner one evening. She got it back to her room and hid it under the mattress. She felt something else while her hand tucked the knife into its new home, and she withdrew a tiny cigarette case that must have been hidden there and forgotten decades ago.

  She opened the gold box. It felt valuable. It contained only a single cigarette, with room for three or four more. Not a smoker, the habit held no interest for her, she closed the case and almost returned it to its spot when she had an idea.

  She looked around for a pen and, finding one, pulled the cigarette out of the case. She unraveled it carefully, dumping the tobacco out into the case and wrote a note in as tiny a script as she could manage on the inside of the paper. She folded it back up around as much of the tobacco as she could stuff into it and licked the paper shut like she’d seen people do in the movies. It tasted old and dusty.

  She put the case back where she found it. It would have to wait for her morning run.

  She put on her sports bra and neon pink shorts the next morning. No one noticed anything else when she wore that outfit.

  She tucked the cigarette case in her bra and looked in the mirror. The soldiers might not notice a lot of things, but they’d see something extra in her bra. She took it out again.

  The liner in her shorts didn’t look trustworthy, didn’t look like it could hold the case while she ran, so she reluctantly took her shorts off and pulled on a pair of underwear. Long distance running in regular underwear led to rashes, but she didn’t feel like she had a choice. It was going to be the best way to carry the case, and the case was the best way to communicate with Juan.

  She pulled her shorts back on and hid the cigarette case in the underwear.

  She could still see it plain as day, and she told herself she was crazy for taking such a risk. But the Hrwang wouldn’t notice. Not when she wore the sports bra without a shirt over it.

  A drone might be another issue. One often followed her when she ran. Did it record her actions? Would she be able to lose it somehow so she could drop the case off?

  She simply ran out of her room, down the stairs, and out her usual path north of Hearst Castle, waving at the Lieutenant Grenadier and other soldiers as she sprinted past them, and no one said anything.

  A drone quickly departed from the group that circled overhead and followed her, like others had before. The ubiquitous things hovered around like flies on dead meat.

  She followed the trail that led to the boulder where she’d found the crushed orchid. The case quickly worked its way into the most obnoxious spot possible, digging into the inside of her leg with each step. She had to be running funny. She certainly ran slower than she normally did and she hoped the drone didn’t notice.

  Even out of sight of the Castle and the troops that guarded it, she didn’t dare reach inside her shorts and adjust or pull the case out. She didn’t know how intelligent the drone was that followed her, or if it recorded what she did or even provided a live feed somewhere, but she couldn’t take the risk.

  A soldier had referred to them as dumb drones in her presence. He explained that the tiny gray aircraft always accompanied the larger Hrwang craft as escorts and scouts, extra eyes and ears, but they didn’t have AIs in them like the larger craft.

  But they acted pretty independently as far as Eva could tell. They may not have been officially intelligent, like the AIs, but she’d been impressed when she observed them.

  Drones always hovered closely around the Lord Admiral when he was outside. When Eva first met the Hrwang commander, she wondered why he had no security with him, but she quickly learned that the drones were his security.

  She had to be on her guard around them.

  Eventually, she reached the large boulder on the trailside where Juan had left the orchid. By now the case felt like it was wedged between her legs, digging into each side painfully with each step. The boulder couldn’t have come a moment too soon. She stopped at it, pretending to catch her breath. She moved slowly behind it, but the drone following her just moved higher up and over so it could observe her.

  She waved at it.

  As she moved around the boulder, she recognized that the drone would just keep moving with her to keep her in its line of sight. In desperation, she had an idea.

  She pulled her shorts and underwear down and squatted like she had to go to the bathroom. The drone moved away to a discreet distance, out of view.

  She grinned relief.

  She pulled the case out from her underwear that now sat around her ankles and quickly stashed the metal box under the side of the boulder. It wasn’t visible to someone who wasn’t looking, but if a person, Hrwang or human, came to look for it, they’d find it.

  She stood, pulled her underwear and shorts back up, and continued jogging. The absence of the case felt better, and she could focus on running hard. The drone kept up effortlessly.

  That evening she went running again, pretending again to relieve herself behind the boulder to get the drone to move away. The cigarette case still lay where she hid it. Disappointed, she told herself to be patient.

  Although the drone didn’t watch her the second time, someone else did.

  “What if she’s just going to the bathroom?” Juan asked Mark. Mark had propped himself against an outcropping, holding a telescope with his one hand. There wasn’t enough of his left arm remaining to attach a prosthetic to without extensive molding and, given the disaster that had befallen the Earth, that kind of treatment wouldn’t be available for a long time.

  “Man, she has a nice...” Mark started to say until Juan pulled the telescope away from his face.

  “Hey,” Mark cried.

  “Hey,” Juan replied. “We’re here to support her, not ogle her.”

  Mark laughed at him and put the telescope back up to his eye. They were about two miles from her location.

  “Okay, she’s done. We give her about a half an hour and then see if she left us any presents,” Mark said.

  “I want to support her, not check out her scat.”

  Mark hit him with the telescope.

  The next morning, Eva ran the same way again, ran to the same place again, and followed the same procedure to get the drone to back off. She put her hand in the case’s hiding spot, trying not to get her hopes up too high.

  The case was gone.

  In its place lay a small, felt bag. She opened it quickly and it contained pills. Relieved, she closed it back up and stuffed it in her shorts. They were certainly birth control pills, which meant Director Marceline approved her mission, or would at least support it through Juan. She wondered where Mark was and hoped maybe he was helping also, if he felt better. She looked up and the drone still hovered at a polite distance, out of sight. She waved toward the mountains and mouthed, “Thank you.”

  Juan waved back and Mark smacked him with his only hand.

 

 

 

 

 

  57