Free Ping - From the Apocalypse by Susan Lowry Page A

clean between his claws.
    “ When are you going to say something? Say Snowy! Snowy, Snowy, Snowy!”
    He waddled around the coffee table, stepping through his white-and-lime-marbled droppings, scattering shreds of paper which he tore from the shopping list she’d prepared for her trip into town tomorrow. But she was too sleepy to care.
    That’s when Ping hopped into her head .
    Th ey immediately began their struggle to communicate the more complex details. Ping was eager to find Kate, but learning to describe her location was a true test of Kate’s strength of will. Street names, towns and cities — how to express such things? She was doing something right though; Ping was beginning to get the feeling of hot sand and the taste of the ocean.
    I t was like painting a picture, Kate thought — with a good dose of innate talent and plenty of practice she could render a specific landscape as accurately as a photograph — but it would be challenging to find the location, unless the spectator had already been there or recognized it by some other means.
    But Kate and Ping were mere beginners, groping to discover the dynamics of something amazing — something, up until a very short while ago, they hadn’t even been aware they possessed. It was far too early in their learning to expect such photographic perfection. Still, what they were accomplishing was remarkable.
    Kate would have continued to believe that Ping and the boy were true miracles had it not been for what happened soon after her nap.
     

Chapter Fifteen
    Out on the Bench
    (April 17th, Year One, PA)
     
    Kate yawned, stretched, and reached for her bottle of water. The cottage air was sultry as it usually was in the afternoons.
    “ Time for a swim Snowy.”
    N udging him onto her finger she started over to his cage while glancing out the window at the ocean view. She kissed his beak, lifted him to the gate of his cage and he obediently stepped inside. “I'll be back in a while darling.”
    She headed to the kitchen cupboard and found a bag of caramel candies hidden behind some cans of soup, unwrapped one of them and plopped it in her mouth.
    “Yum!” she cried, exaggerating her rapture for Snowy's benefit; the chewy sweetness swathed her tongue.
    Maybe Ping would actually locate her one day, Kate thought as she pulled the front door open and squinted into the stark daylight — her sunglasses were with her diary, on the swing. Shielding her eyes with her hand, she gazed out at the beckoning waters enjoying the slight breeze wafting around her bikini. The complex scents trapped within the humid air of the wooden veranda made her sneeze.
    She pranced barefoot across the hot deck and down the three steps, while a blur of denim and dark hair slipped past her peripheral vision. Her feet hit the sand just as what she’d seen registered.
    She couldn’t look. The image of a man sitting on her swing had instantly transformed her from a malleable, breathing being, to a fragile glass sculpture which was about to be shattered. He had to be an illusion, another one of her desperate fantasies, but if he wasn’t…
    Th en, the deep voice. “I was surprised to find your car.”
    Her eyes were glued to the vast horizon — fixed by pure terror. If he was real — she would need to face the truth, that Ping and the boy were pathetic inventions of her subconscious mind. She didn’t want to know. And if he wasn’t real, this would be her proof that she was completely delusional — it would put an end to all of her recently acquired hopes, steal away her courage and destroy her will to go on.
    S he had finally pulled herself together after months of not knowing and a journey through hell affirming the worst of her fears. Her talks with invisible people were easier now, as was her ability to shut out the bloated corpses washing up on shore. The horrors surrounding her everywhere were almost imperceptible.
    These fantasies were all she had holding her together. They were the