Page 34 of Factory Controller

Her declaration fills my heart with joy. Heather wants me, I want her. What could be better? Other than not fleeing for our lives, of course.

Why shouldn’t I be smitten with Heather? She’s beautiful, brave, and smart. A lot of people would have broken down in hysterics during our travails, but not Heather.

She’s just the woman to crack my heart open again. After ten long years, I feel like I’m coming back to life. Funny, I wasn’t convinced we were going to make it out alive. Not completely.

Now, there’s no way in hell I’m going to let us get killed. For the first time in what feels like forever, I’m invested in the future. Looking forward to it, even.

I just have to stay alive long enough to get there.

HEATHER

After a miserable night of half-dozing on Trent’s shoulder, dawn broke at last. Trent forages for some edible nuts, which do little other than remind me of how long it has been since I had a proper meal.

I keep silent about my grumbling belly. Despite my repeating myself that nuts are highly nutritious and will help sustain me through our arduous march, I do feel lightheaded.

What keeps me going is Trent’s fantasy about a hotel room. It clings to my mind. If I’m being honest with myself, it’s not the air conditioning, or freedom from bugs, or even relief from the threat of death which I find the most compelling about his hotel room fantasy. It’s the idea of being there with Trent.

I’m still coming to terms with my feelings for him, but there’s already enough sparks for me to know we’d be great in bed together. There are other considerations, of course, but it’s too early and I’m too tired to worry about them at the moment.

Dawn brings with it a pervasive heat. We’re in the midst of what Trent laughingly calls the ‘dry’ season, but I’ve never felt this thick of humidity in my life. The vegetation rotting on the forest floor steeps in the steamy heat, creating an aerial tea which leaves a perpetual bad taste in my mouth.

The heat doesn’t seem to bother the bugs. They swarm about us as we march along the riverbank. Black flies similar to a common house fly, but far more aggressive, keep landing on our bare skin, seeking to drink our sweat. They don’t bite, but they’re irritating and persistent.

Mosquitoes don’t harass us as much, because of the unguent we applied to our skin, but some of them overcome even that barrier. I’m terrified of a botfly implanting a larva in my skin, and not too scared to admit it.

“We’ve taken far too many dunks in the river for that to be a concern as of yet. I’d be more worried about the night wasps.”

“The what?”

“Wasps as long as your finger. They’re not lethal, not even in a swarm, but the pain they inflict is second only to the tarantula hawk wasp. Their nests are really easy to miss until you’ve already bumped into them.”

“Great. As if I didn’t have enough to be worried about. Can’t we move out of the tree line and walk by the riverbank?”

“We can, if you don’t mind getting shot in the back by the mercenaries. They could be watching the waterline, and we’d be sitting ducks without any cover.”

I mutter under my breath and endure the heat, and the bugs, and the humidity. If night wasps are in my future, there’s not much I can do about it and just keep marching.

I start to wonder about myself and Trent as an item. How would we work? The chemistry is off the charts, or at least I think it is. I’d like to hope we could make a go of it. If nothing else, he’s tall enough I could wear the sleaziest stiletto heel and not have to worry about impugning his manhood. It may be silly for me, that’s something.

Daydreaming about us as a couple, I pull a frond to the side and walk smack dab into a sponge-white pear-shaped object, surrounded by buzzing yellow and black forms.

The night wasps! Oh God, I walked right into a nest of them! I run screaming from the scene, flailing my arms about.

“Heather, wait,” Trent cries out, but I leave him in my dust. I stumble through the forest for more than a hundred feet, expecting to feel the pain of a sting at any moment. I collapse against the smooth bark of a towering tree, struggling to get my breath back.

“Heather!” Trent crashes through the brush to my side. “Heather, why didn’t you stop?”

“Because of the night wasps, you jerk,” I snap back at him. “I walked right into a nest of them.”

“Oh.” Trent’s face twitches, then turns red, then splits open wide as guffaws spew out into the air. Tears stream from his eyes, so great is his mirth.

“What’s so funny?”

“Those were—” he struggles to catch his breath enough to speak amid his nigh hysterical laughter. “Those weren’t night wasps. They were angel bees.”

“Angel bees?”

“Stingless bees. They don’t even bite like their nastier cousins. They’re harmless, which is why they have the name angel bee. Or maybe it’s because they look like angels, I forget which.”

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