In the machine, Glasses had tied a rope to his waist and the chair where Angela was bonded. He rightly guessed that the walking machine would cause him to slip and slide and would have fallen without his foolproof system.

The girl kept a sour expression distorting her face, but no amount of sliding or angry looks deterred him from trying to keep a conversation with her.

“So, where are you from?” Glasses asked. She grunted and turned away. “I see, don’t want to talk about it, huh? We’re all from a small town in the middle of nowhere. It was, well, a bit of a boring place to grow up.

“There was one factory in the whole place, and everyone’s families had at least one person working there, usually more. Helmet used to be one of the head honchos. Other than that, we had some local stores and stuff, but we were so far out that no one hardly had anything interesting stocked. Heck, the Wi-Fi was miserable, too,” Glasses stopped to chuckle as he contemplated how vital internet access used to be to him.

“Sounds like it was hell,” Angela grunted a halfhearted reply. Her brows furrowed after she spoke.

“I used to think so,” the young man replied as he stared into the empty fields. The conversation grew dry, and the only sound was the metal clanking from the giant machine. The young woman sighed.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“I was raised in the city, went to a big school, and spent all my free time shopping and the like.”

“That sounds exciting! I always dreamed of going to a big city; my family wasn’t one for crazy vacations. The best we ever got was a trip to Amish country. Some of the tastiest food I’d ever had, though.”

“You’ve never been to a city?”

“Well, not one intact. We’ve passed through a couple ruins on this journey of ours.”

The conversation grew silent again, and Glasses rubbed the back of his head. “Sorry,” he said, “that may have been a bit of a downer. We’re used to having conversations like that around here, so I forget what’s normal.”

“What is normal anymore?” Angela muttered while staring at her blanket-covered legs.

“Well, where were you headed before you ran into us?” he asked.

“Nowhere; I’m too busy trying to stay alive to have a destination,” she replied mockingly.

Glasses laughed.

“I can see that! We were aimless for the first year or so.”

“And you have a destination now?”

Glasses smiled.

“You probably haven’t heard, but there are stories about a city in the east that has been untouched by the Worms, the boy replied,” that’s what we call the aliens,” he added after seeing what looked like an expression of confusion.

“That sounds more like a fairy tale than a reasonable destination. Is it called El Dorado?”

“It would seem like that,” he replied with a laugh.

Angela rolled her red eyes and focused on the jeep. She rubbed her stomach under the blanket and shook her head.