She was the most beautiful thing I'd seen in years. Ever since the world went screwy and just fell apart, I'd begun to believe there wasn't anything beautiful left. It was a big pair of eyes peering over the edge of my driver's side window, asking if I had a passenger yet, that convinced me.
She was a tiny little thing. She might have been four foot eleven, with the curves to match a small frame. Her long, tawny blonde hair curled and waved out from under an aviator's cap and framed slate gray eyes a little too big for her face. She had a beautiful smile.
Me? I was a big girl. I'd been obese when everything ended. Most people assumed I'd be one of the first to go, I know, unable to outrun the natural disasters that destroyed civilization while I sat back and ate a Twinkie. I never could convince them I was a tough bitch who would do what it took to survive. So I'd thinned out a bit, but you just can't change the fact that your curves have curves. I'd chopped my hair off to make life easier, and I was the driver for the ambulance in the caravan. Most people thought I'd been a wannabe-boy before everything, but nobody really asked. Political conviction and propriety flew out the window when people got excited about keeping the human race alive. I didn't like men. I'd suffered for that, one of the reasons I'd chopped my hair off. But girls like her didn't go for a woman like me. Back in the old days, it would have made me laugh to think of her even considering it. I think she saw security with me somehow.
We'd been heading into the Dust Bowl, away from the coastline. Our resident cartographer, a college dropout, was completely convinced that there was a low point where we could still punch through the earth to the water table to get an oasis going around a well.
