It's Time to Run Again

The year is 2051.

"I know you can run very fast. When I say go, run until you reach that beige house," she tells her six-year-old daughter and ten-year-old son. "I'm right behind you. Just don't stop."

As she says GO, they run, and she follows them. A bullet misses her ear. She hears the whooshing sound, and when she is about ten feet away from the house, another one hits the ground near her right foot. Whoever is shooting at them is not a professional. Or it is the smog in the air that makes it hard to target them.

Fortunately, the house is not locked, and Adam, her son, has opened the door for Jill and her.

She is panting, and her heart is hammering in her ears. She has never run with flying bullets chasing her. She sits down, hugging and pushing their faces into her breasts. Their faces are red after all the effort.

"How long do we have to keep running, Mom?" Jill whispers. "I'm tired."

"We have to go seventy more kilometers. Am I right, Mom?" Adam says.

"Yes, we've come thirty kilometers but we've to go seventy more," her mobile is warning about the low battery. The good thing is that the internet signals are strong. A beam of sunlight enters the window and makes a hazy spot on the floor near them. She places her mobile on the floor, face down, in that spot. Its backside is all photocells to charge it.

The children are unwilling to accept that their father was shot at their house. They had barely escaped themselves. When they left the house, she had her mobile in her hand. They only had time to grab their masks.

"When will we reach our ship?" Adam asks. The spaceship is scheduled for liftoff on Thursday, and it's Tuesday today.

"Will dad be there? I miss him," Jill says.

"Say, we travel five kilometers in an hour, rest for an hour and then move again. If we do that and sleep for seven hours at night, we can reach the Dustjar Port in thirty-three hours. So, we'll be there twelve hours before the launch," she has been calculating the time in her head.

"If we could only move away from these nasty snipers," she fears they can come at any time, raid the house. So, she chooses not to stay at one place for too long. She looks for a basement and finds it. She takes the kids downstairs and asks them to sleep on a bunker bed.

She searches the house for a backpack and food to eat, just like she has searched every house so far. Unlike other places, she finds a backpack, and the refrigerator is full of food items. She grabs as much as she can carry. She knows she is going to need the food soon. She also finds a handgun under the bed, but the gun has only two bullets in it.

The owners of the house had probably left a day or two ago. The electricity is on. Most of the people have been preparing for months to leave the planet.

After one hour, her mobile is 40% charged. She tries and fails again to order a flying taxi to her location. Then she glances at her messages. Her sister Evelyn is perhaps too far out in the solar system as she has not replied even after seven hours.

Tears flood her eyes when she thinks about Jake, her husband. The attack was so sudden. The raiders wanted their tickets. They must have gotten them from Jake's bag after killing him. But the idiots didn't know they were useless for them. The tickets were biometrically linked to the four of them. Or perhaps, the raiders knew how to hack into the tickets. Anyway, she has to reach the port to get the new tickets. She has already reported the theft and blocked the old ones.

She comes to the basement and sits near her kids. Like little kittens, they sleep. They are tired, and the clean air of the house is comforting. However, she can not sleep. She has a lot on her mind.

She believes the sniper is to the left of the house. They have to run to the right toward the barn. It's the only way to get as far away from him as possible in a short time. They could correct their route as they had the mobile to show them the right direction. But if its battery dies, they'll have to wait until they can find a way to recharge it.

"We have to keep moving. Eat these cookies and wear your masks," She wakes them up. Adam and Jill come to the ground floor with her.

She moves closer to the window to observe where the sniper may be hiding. There is a water tower for the fields  -- about fifty feet high. A windmill stands a hundred meters to the right of the water tower. If they run straight to the barn, the sniper can target them easily. But they have to move from the house to put some distance between them and the sniper.

"Adam, Jill, listen carefully. When we get out of the house, we have to run in a zigzag. If we ran straight, the bad guys would shoot us. Right? Run in a zigzag."

She finds the gun in her backpack, aims at the water tower, and fires it. Then they run. She wants the sniper to think they have a weapon too. They run in a zigzag toward the barn. She can discern the outline of a greenhouse some hundred meters away. Only one bullet hits the ground two feet to the left as she zigzags her way to the barn door.

'The long wait and then the sudden movement has surprised the sniper,' she thinks.

As she enters the barn, panting and out of breath, she has to quickly aim her gun at the guy inside the barn. He has a gun pointed at her.

"Drop your weapon," he orders.

"No, you drop your gun," Clara yells at the top of her voice, ready to shoot. He is probably a friend of the sniper. He was waiting for them in the barn.

To her surprise, the guy throws his gun down. He raises his hands above his head.

"Please, don't shoot," he begs, looking at the kids and the pretty woman in her thirties. "I didn't have a bullet in the gun. You can check it if you like."

"Who are you?" Clara asks, inching toward the gun on the ground. It is empty and has been 3d-printed in a hurry. It would not have worked even if he had a bullet.

"I'm Jacob, a math professor. Believe me, it was the first time I printed a gun. These are desperate times," he stutters.

"Okay," Clara hesitantly lowers her gun. "By the way, I do have a bullet in this one, and it works just fine."

"I never thought I'd see anything like this in my life," Jacob is in his fifties. "After all the progress of the last two centuries, thieves and murderers are going to inherit this planet."

"I don't know who is more wrong," Clara sits on a bale of hay. Jill and Adam sit near her. Jacob, the professor, is standing twenty feet away.

"I have a ticket but I must reach the port in two hours. It's twenty kilometers to the south. And these snipers have pinned me in this barn for the last four hours. I'm too frightened to go out. One bullet almost hit me when I ran from the greenhouse to this place."

Clara stares at him. He looks like a decent guy. He doesn't know he has to run in a zigzag as the snipers are on the water tower or the windmill.

"You can not go that way. The snipers are right in front of you. They'll definitely shoot you," Clara says.

"It's useless anyway. I can't travel another twenty kilometers in the two hours I have," the professor says. "I'm stuck with these criminals for the rest of my life."

"I don't know who is worse," Clara says. "The industrialists who did not stop when global warming became a threat or the politicians who did not care. Or the people who eat meat and use cheap energy that made the planet unlivable."

"But that doesn't matter," Jacob says. "You must have been six or seven when corona virus hit the planet and we faced the dystopian reality for the first time. I was twenty two. We couldn't believe it. And now, look at the fires in the forests and the smog that was not expected until the 2200s is here  --  fifty years too soon."

"We are willing to leave the planet but we can't leave the habit of meat-eating or quit using the harmful types of energy. That's the reason things are so horrible," she says, holding her gun, and thinking about Jake.

"I'm sorry. You see, I'm a theoretical person. I could not believe my eyes when it all started," Jacob says.

"Neither could I," Clara remarks. Silence follows, and she looks at her mobile. "Forty-five hours to launch," She listens to a voice message from her spaceship app.

"Can I ask about your profession?" Jacob says.

"I'm a soft architect. We design houses," she says. "My husband was a game developer."

"You must be rich then," Jacob says. "Just don't mind what I say, I'm probably going to die, trying to escape this barn," Jacob says.

"I know how you are feeling," Clara says. "But we have to try." She really knows what he means. She can choose to think like him. She'd be too afraid to move out of the barn if Jill and Adam were not with her. For them, she had to be brave and make bold decisions. She would have shot Jacob if he had threatened her kids.

Clara sees a plastic bag and puts it on a scarecrow -- made with a wooden stick frame and old clothes filled with straw. She pushes the scarecrow slightly out of the barn door, and a bullet hits it in the head. One of the snipers is aiming at the barn door.

"What can we do now?" Clara asks Jacob.

"Can you tell me the time your spaceship is scheduled for liftoff?" Jacob asks his own question.

"In forty-five hours and we have to trek seventy kilometers," Clara replies.

"Would they be able to accommodate me?" Jacob asks. "Assuming you agree to take me with you."

"I think, yes. If you come with us, I can give my husband's ticket to you," Clara answers.

"Then I'm coming with you," Jacob feels relief. "Thank you."

"First, we have to get out of this barn," Clara says. She has to act. She does not know what is going to happen next. She has no idea what dangers she may face tomorrow, but she keeps repeating to herself: "Inaction is not going to get me anywhere."

"We have to distract the sniper," Jacob says.

"How do you propose we do that?" Clara asks.

They keep thinking and brainstorming, but they come up with no workable solution. The sun is setting now. Soon, it'll be dark. The kids have fallen asleep again after fifteen hours of running. Clara does not want to wake them up until she has a plan.

Clara opens a news channel on her mobile for a minute. "Amid reports of disorder and mayhem, in an unexpected move, the government and the military has decided to leave the planet first," the newscaster says. "Some say it's a move to establish the new colony on a better planet for the country."

Then an analyst appears on the screen, "I fear, as the legal structure vanishes, criminals and bad characters will do whatever they want to do. Most of the spaceships don't disallow criminals for the long journey. The government is not willing to interfere in the passenger policies of thousands of spaceship makers." Nothing she doesn't already know. She puts the mobile into sleep mode to not waste the battery.

"We can run toward the greenhouse in the cover of darkness," Jacob suggests.

"Don't even think that," she says. "My father was in the military and he had many sniper rifles. None of the damned things comes without night vision. The sniper can see us in the dark."

"Maybe he is tired, or bored, or not looking," Jacob tries to be an optimist.

"No. I don't think we can rely on that," Clara says. "These sniper hobbyists have never played with live people before. I don't think they are going to miss the fun for anything."

"It's hard to believe how an ordinary guy with a gun can become such a monster," Jacob says.

"They have nothing better to do," Clara says. "No purpose, no hope."

"If you don't have a purpose in your life," Jacob philosophizes. "You tend to do meaningless things as if they have some meaning."

She knew the race started when the UN announced leaving the Earth was the only way to save human lives. The people started acting crazy fast to move to the recently found Goldilocks planets in the galaxy.

When different space agencies and private space companies made the designs of their spaceships open-source, anybody could 3d-print a ship. Anybody who had access to materials and large 3d printing facilities -- to print the oversized parts -- could build a spaceship.

Clara sees Adam and Jill waking up after four hours. She is tired and wants to sleep. But she needs to move away from this barn first.

"What's that, Mom?" Jill hears a hooting sound and sees two birds, perched up near the window in the barn ceiling.

"It's an owl, a barn owl," Clara tells Jill, who has seen the bird for the first time.

"If you fire at the owls, they'll fly out of the window, it'll distract the sniper, and we can run toward the greenhouse," Jacob proposes.

"Hmm. Nice idea. But remember that we have to run in a zigzag or the sniper will hit us for sure. He can predict our path from that distance. Make your turns more unpredictable. Right?"

Clara waits until Jill and Adam are completely ready. She gives them a cookie each and some water. She knows they can run fast and, therefore, are hard to target. She knows she is bigger than them and makes a bigger target.

"Time to run," she tells the kids.

"Again?" Jill says.

"When I fire, start running toward the greenhouse," she says. "Don't stop, no matter what happens and don't fall down, the field is uneven and muddy to the greenhouse. Right?"

She fires toward the owls, and they fly out of the window. The sniper gets confused but manages to hit one of them in the wing.

They run.

They move in a zigzag pattern. Adam is leading the pack, then it's Jill and Clara. As they move close to the greenhouse, Clara loses her balance and falls down.

Jacob hurries to pick her up. He gets her to her feet quickly, and she runs again. But that one second is enough for the sniper. His bullet hits Jacob right in the center of his back.

When they reach the greenhouse, they have no idea that Jacob is no longer behind them.

When Jacob does not enter after a second, Clara knows that he has been hit. But she can not go out to check how badly he is hit, or where the bullet has hit him. She feels a pain in her chest.

She can never forget how he stopped to help her get up even when he knew what it meant. Perhaps he did not wish the kids to lose their mom. Anyway, he was tall, heavy, old, and slow  --  a bigger and easier target for the untrained sniper.

Clara's hands shake uncontrollably. Tears flow out of her eyes. She does not know whether she is crying for Jacob, her husband Jake, or the cruelty of some people.

Her resolve that she has to move weakens. But what choice does she have? She can not fight the attackers or the snipers. Her kids are just kids.

She is shaken by frightening thoughts:'What if Jacob was not behind her? What would Jill and Adam do without her?' She tries to pull herself together.

Two hours go by after they reach the greenhouse. A thick fog descends all around them, bringing visibility to zero.

She is no longer afraid of wild animals, the smelly mud, or the cold. She decides to move in the fog, guided by her mobile. The three of them start walking and running, holding hands. They stop only when they hear something.

They have to move out of the range of the snipers before the fog clears.

-----------------

Thanks for images by Albrecht Fietz, David Mark, mohamed Hassan, OpenClipart-Vectors, Gordon Johnson, OpenClipart-Vectors, and S. Hermann & F. Richter from Pixabay