Suddenly she stopped in her tracks. There was a shadow on the road in front her, not her own. She looked up to see a guy standing practically in front of her. He was smiling. He was older. He was handsome. He also looked very, very different. And very lost.
Ashley did not feel nervous at all. She was out in the middle of nowhere — well, at least a mile from town. And this guy had literally popped up like magic. But she was okay, and she knew it.
"Well, hello," she said, her fingers suddenly twisting her long blond hair.
"Well, hello…" he replied. "I'm sorry if I startled you."
"I thought I was the one who startled you" she said sweetly.
He was wearing a very cool outfit. All black with the double-X logo of Sorcerer's Dick on his chest. They were Ashley's favorite band. Cool boots. Cool haircut. It had a military look to it And so did the guy, in a way.
He spoke again. He had a slight accent. "I'm having trouble with my vehicle."
"Well, I'm not a mechanic," she replied. "Unless you think I look like one?"
"Not in the least," he said with a smile. Great smile.
She began babbling: "Is your car broken down? Do you know what's wrong with it? A flat tire? The battery?"
The guy just shrugged.
"I'm not sure," he said. "I don't know much about how they work."
He was a real hunk, she decided. Movie star handsome. She told herself to stop playing with her hair.
"Where is it?" she asked.
He turned and pointed farther down the road. A white Firebird was pulled off onto the shoulder, nearly hidden by cornstalks.
She just shrugged and said: "I don't know much about cars, either. But I'll take a look at it."
They walked down the road in silence. Ashley began twisting her hair again. When they reached the car, the guy got inside and twisted the key, but nothing happened. The engine sputtered and then just died away.
Ashley looked at the guy.
"Did you run out of gas?" she asked him.
He looked back at her, pure incomprehension on his face.
"Did I run out of what?" he asked.
Hunter pushed the car the last mile into town. Ashley steered— or she tried to. It was hard to do with the motor not running.
He discovered that a gas station was a place where they put a hose in a hole at the back of your car and pumped that hole full of liquid fuel and then, apparently, sent you on your way.
They also had food at the gas station. Concoctions the likes of which Hunter had never seen. While Ashley was doing the pumping, he looked through the window at one of the station's replication devices. But it seemed to be merely heating the food as opposed to creating it.
His tank full, Ashley signaled that he should follow her into the station's store. Hunter froze for a moment though. He'd been on the road for nearly a day now; He, Tomm and Zarex had decided to split up early that morning and voted that Hunter take the car. Their plan was to keep a low profile and do a discrete recon of the planet. Hunter had avoided interacting with anyone until now. Though he'd ditched his cape and helmet, he was still wearing his combat suit with the double X across the chest. This didn't seem so out of place here, though. At least not so far.
He finally did step into the store. His eyes were nearly blinded by the onslaught of bright colors. The place was stuffed with items of food and drink, and everything seemed packaged in the loudest, more garish hues possible. Hunter took down one of the packages hanging from a thin line that stretched across the top of the store. He opened it to find two long, yellowish confections inside. Spongy texture. Extremely sweet, creamlike material in the middle. He took a bite.
It was delicious!
Ashley was standing next to a large counter, smiling weirdly at him. Very strange music was blaring from somewhere, and she was tapping her two-tone shoe to its beat. There was a large guy behind the counter. He had dirty hands and a dirty face. He was leering at Ashley out of the corner of his eye.
"Well?" Ashley said to Hunter. "Time to pay…"
Pay?
"For what?" he asked her.
"For what you just ate — and for the gas."
Hunter was confused. This was food and fuel.
"You mean you have to pay for this stuff?" he asked.
Ashley's home looked unlike anything Hunter had ever seen. Most dwellings in the Galaxy, both within the Fourth Empire and out, were based on a simple block design, with few windows, and constructed entirely of random reconfigured atoms put together by electron torches.
But this dwelling was different. It was irregular, its roof was angled with a peak. A long funnel made of red stone shot up through the roof; wisps of smoke were rising out of it. The house was surrounded by a white fence, made of short, pointed wooden spikes that would have a hard time keeping out even the weakest intruder. There were trees planted between the front of this gate and the dwellings' main entrance, and a short, green plant growth covered the ground in between the trees.
The dwelling itself had many, many windows. Each one had a small box hanging beneath it filled with multicolored vegetation. There were houses of nearly the exact same design on either side of this one. In fact, the entire road on both sides was covered with them. Some were hard to see because of the trees, though.
Ashley never once hesitated. She opened the front door with a key and invited him in.
"My parents are away," she said as a means of explanation.
Hunter stepped through the front door. In most places in the Galaxy, the interior of the home was made up of one main room with a few smaller ones around the periphery. In this place though, there were many rooms, all of them relatively the same size.
The room to his right had a table at its center with six wooden chairs around it. There were plates and glasses and cutlery set up, even though there was no meal in sight. She led him to a room at the rear of the dwelling. It was filled with instruments of cooking: pots, more utensils, glass storage bins stuffed with grains and other unidentifiable foods. An assembly of silver pipes made up the unnecessarily elaborate device for transporting water into the house. This room also held a table and chairs and a large white box that seemed cold and was giving off a whirring sound.
She told him to sit at the table, then took off her sweater and put her hair back in a ponytail. She retrieved two glasses from a compartment hanging over the water-retrieval device, then went to the big white box and opened its door. A wisp of cold air filled the room briefly as she took out a large brown glass container and screwed off a cap from its top.
"You're thirsty, I assume?" she asked him.
She poured out an amber liquid without waiting for a reply. He watched with some amazement as the liquid began to bubble and foam over the lip of his glass.
She filled her glass, drained it, filled it again, licked her lips, and looked across the table at him. He was still examining his glass closely; he had not yet attempted to taste it.
'Take a sip," she urged him.
Hunter raised his glass and gave the liquid inside a quick sniff. The aroma came back pungent but not totally alien to him.
He just shrugged. How bad could it be?
With that, he took a healthy drink. An instant later, he was spitting the liquid noisily back into the glass. Ashley laughed so hard, she almost fell off her chair.
Hunter thought he'd been poisoned. The liquid was the worst tasting thing that had ever passed his lips.
"What is this stuff?" he asked.
Ashley poured him another huge glass.
"Man, where are you from?" she said. "It's beer."