curious.
“Not out there,” she said. She searched the shelves. She didn’t find what she was looking for right away.
“What’s your name?” I called.
“Emma.” After a few moments she extended the legs of the exo-stilts to get a better view of the place. She turned in a slow circle, spotted what she was looking for and made for the back of the little store. She retrieved a first aid kit hanging on the wall by the customer’s chemical toilet and returned to my side in a few long strides. The exo-stilts hissed as Emma returned to close to normal height.
“Those stilts make you quite the runner, don’t they?” my father asked.
“If they didn’t, I wouldn’t be here. Barely made it as it was. You two got names?”
“I’m Steve Bolelli. This is my son, Dante.”
“What is your function in the beautiful town of Marfa?” she asked.
“I’m in the demolition business,” my father said. “Once I’m done, Dante lays cable and buries batteries under the ground I blow up.”
She said nothing as she searched the kit. She came up with two small canisters that were stuck together. Each canister fed one nozzle.
I held out my injured hand and held my breath. She aimed the nozzle carefully and sprayed the medicine, first through the palm and then through the back of my hand.
I squeezed my eyes tight against the sting.
“Does it hurt?”
“Nah,” I said. But my teeth were gritted.
“Of course, it hurts,” my father said. “The anti-biotic stings as it cleans. That’s how you know it’s still working.”
“Ouch!” I felt pressure, expanding at the edge of the wound.
“That’s the filling agent,” Dad said. “It’ll pass in a moment once the foam has filled the hole. Just like expanding insulation foam fills the spaces in a wall.”
I winced harder. “You sure?”
My father looked down at his own body. Without his cy-suit, there would be much less of him. “Not my first rodeo.”
“What’s a rodeo?” Emma asked.
“Never mind.”
The pain eased. I gave the woman a grateful nod. “Where did you come from, Emma?”
“Artesia.”
“Domers up that way,” my father said.
Emma nodded as she went through the rest of the items in the first aid kit, apparently evaluating their usefulness. “Yes. We were Domers, anyway. The last biodome complex in New Mexico isn’t there anymore. ”
Her sensory vest was all pockets and she dropped what she wanted to keep in a new pocket each time. Neither I nor my father thought to stop her from scavenging. I noted that after she put an item in a pocket, she patted it and said the name of the item aloud to memorize where each thing was stored: “cardio-stim…epi-pen…diarrhea med…burn gel…airway pack…scissors…”
“What happened in Artesia?” Dad asked.
“It started with a shatter storm. Dome 3 went down first. That’s where I was. Tomatoes.”
I’d never been in a shatter storm. I asked what it was like.
“It’s just like a regular storm,” Emma said, “but times twenty. It’s like whoever is in charge decided to park thunder and lightning right over your roof. At first you think it’s so intense it’s got to stop soon. Earthquakes can be intense but they don’t last long. You figure the same for the storm. Instead it gets worse. You feel the thunder rumble through your whole body and the lightning keeps flashing in bolts. Chains and bolts of lightning tore up #3 within the first few minutes. It went on for hours, though. We had twelve domes in Artesia and eight of them went down in one night. We lost every apple and fig orchard.”
My father put his back to the rear wall and slid until he was sitting on the floor. The tiny green lights in the cy-suit at his shoulder and hip flashed orange and then went dim. He was preserving battery life. I wondered how long we’d be trapped in the store.
As the howl of the civil defense sirens rose and fell in the distance, Emma told us what happened in Artesia. The noise almost