Michael McCollum - Who Will Guard the Guardians

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2024-11-24 0 0 26.22KB 10 页 5.9玖币

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With

Catherine McCollum

Immortality must be purchased for a price.

Perhaps that price is too high.

The dream came again, once more full of greens and reds, and children's faces. There were

hundreds of them! Some wore ugly, teasing, taunting, hating faces. Others were beautiful. Their

peaches-and-cream complexions were split by broad smiles as the faces' tiny owners laughed and

shouted with joy. Others were indistinct faces, while still others stared at her with sad, longing

eyes...

Fria opened her eyes with a start, frightened to discover that she had not been sleeping after all. She was

lying in a large meadow of yellow wild flowers that had somehow escaped her goats and sheep. She had

been staring up at the cloud-strewn sky when she had drifted off to ... where? She shivered at the

thought. The doctors of so long ago had warned her about hallucinating. Hallucinations, they had told

her, would be the first sign of the impending end. When she began to see things that were not there, that

would be hard evidence that all human beings are mortal, even Fria and those like her.

Nothing, it seemed, is forever.

She sat up and then quickly got to her feet. For the first time in many minutes, she could again hear the

faint hum of wild bees and the quiet whisper of the wind blowing across the hillside. Exasperated, she

bent down to brush the yellow pollen from her long woolen skirt, before turning and starting up the trail

that led toward the top of her mountain. As she left the meadow, a dark shape burst from the

underbrush to trot beside her.

Her dog was a nameless mongrel of uncertain parentage, one of the periodic houseguests who drifted

into her life, stayed awhile, and then drifted out again. She sighed, and spoke for the first time in several

hours. The dog pricked up its ears at the sound.

"Hopefully it is too late for her to come tonight," Fria mused. "Help me gather in my sheep and I'll share

my supper with you!"

By the time she had penned the sheep, milked her two goats, and shooed the chickens back into the old

shed, there were three new dogs sitting in front of her stoop. They were thin and scraggly. One had half

its ear gone and was marked by the diagonal line of a long healed scar across its muzzle. The scar gave

the animal a mean look that the wagging of its tail belied.

Ever since the Destruction, dogs had not been kept much as pets. That unhappy time had apparently

severed the age-old bond forever. Any stray canine that wandered into the village at the foot of her

mountain was more likely than not to end up in the community stew pot. Save for the few relics like

herself, no one now alive remembered the time when dogs had been "man's best friend."

Fria noted with a pang that the collie mix among the strays was a pregnant bitch. She shivered beneath

her woolen shirt, hoping that they would be gone before the bitch's time came.

Inside the stone house, it was cold. It was always cold. She did not mind, for the cold was her

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Michael McCollum - Who Will Guard the Guardians

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