The After/Life (The After/Life Odyssey) Read Online Free Page A

uniform (grey with a wide black line across the chest and three red stripes on the left shoulder, showing that she was already in the third year of her studies), basic stuff, really, but somehow she made it look striking. I still don’t know what it was about her that made her so special. But something there was. Everyone noticed it and she stood out in a place where, after such a long time of communal life, all the people seemed to look and act the same. As she came closer, I felt the blood rushing into my head… still I could not look away... from her eyes - grey with a slight upward tilt... from her hair – cut shoulder length and pitch black... from her features – sharp but with that little hint of vulnerability that would make you forgive her everything and anything (or so I thought). Above all, you couldn’t help but be mesmerized by the way she moved – the quiet grace and this strange inner radiance, which would light up any place she was in, even down here - in the catacombs of tomorrow…
    The School was a small place and you were prone to run into each once in awhile. This was probably just one of those times. Except it was not. This time, she did not just pass by me. Instead, she came and sat opposite me, looking straight into my eyes.
    ”Hello Nad,” she said.
”Hi Suzannah.”
”You come here often. Why?”
    Always the direct question. That is how she was. No small talk, no false pretenses and positively no way to lie to those eyes – beautiful, dangerous with an evasive little spark burning deep inside the grey abyss. Just the fact that I saw her that way pretty much spelled out that there weren’t really any defenses I could put up against her – simply put: a recipe for disaster.
    ”I don’t know. I think I’m just hoping that, well, that one day I may…”
”Actually hear something?”
”Well, yes, I know it is crazy but…”
”I don’t think it is crazy. I think what’s crazy is the way we have locked ourselves down here and are pretending that everything is perfectly fine.”
”I don’t see us having many other options.”
”How long is the radiation contamination period?”
”Well, assessments vary but the general consensus is that we just don’t know because we don’t know the magnitude of the impact.”
”And, amazingly, our knowledge loving little community simply settled for the answer “we don’t know” and moved on.”
    I had never seen her like this. Her grey eyes were burning and her cheeks were bright red and her lips were slightly trebling.
    ”Do you think we will ever get out?” she asked.
”I don’t know if there is any “out” left but I sure hope so. You know, all these years, I have been thinking about that ship I once saw in your father’s shipyard…”
”Orpheus?”
”You remember?”
”Of course I do. You know I cried the day my dad took me down to the port and I saw it there with that ugly hole at its side. I made him promise that he would get it repaired as soon as he could and would take me out to sail…”
”Into the maroon colored horizon…”
    We were silent for awhile. It wasn’t a bad silence though and for the first time ever I did not feel like a complete fool next to her. She kept looking at me with her deep grey eyes and I knew just then and there that I was simply and most definitely and most hopelessly in love with her. Some time later she shook her head a little and was back to her usual self. We talked for several hours that day and, to my amazement, it was very easy to talk to her and we laughed and we joked and we remembered things that were no more and we talked about things that were and it was good. And when I walked her to the female Student quarters she stopped by the door and turned around and looked into my eyes and gave me a kiss – my first ever. And that is how it all started…
     

Chapter VIII
    For me, the days and months that followed were a period of blissful numbness – a semi conscious