Red Desert - Point of No Return by Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli Page B

Hassan Qabbani were active
in the station. And I didn’t trust Hassan.
    I had always looked at
him with suspicion. I knew it was a prejudice and my opinion about
him was different for a while but then, when Dennis died, I had
started to think he had something to do with his disease, as well
as with what happened to Michelle. I perceived a certain falsity in
his look. I started to stay as far as possible from him. I spent
hours and hours working in the greenhouse and avoided touching the
NASA food portions, because Hassan handled our meals. I preferred
to eat the products I had cultivated with my hands and after a
day’s work I went back to my quarters, always locking my door.
    “Anna, what’s going
on? Where are you going?” Hassan’s stirred-up voice said via the
radio, some minutes after I had left the station. I just ignored
him, but he continued for a while. “Whatever you are thinking,
please, come back and let’s talk. If you go on, you’ll die.”
Another suicide would decree the definitive failure of the mission.
That was his only real concern, not my well-being. “I’m coming to
get you!”
    Those words sounded
menacing and I switched off the radio in reply, then I disconnected
the transponder. That way he couldn’t keep tracking me, if he lost
sight of me. The station was almost at the edge of the horizon
behind me, when I saw his vehicle moving in my direction. He had
used up some of the time to refuel it, but now he was on his
way.
    I stepped on the gas.
The flat terrain allowed me to travel at maximum speed, but the
same applied to his rover. By moving so fast, I made myself even
more visible from a distance, because I lifted a cloud of dust.
There were no heights to hide me.
    The chase went on for
an hour or so, during which time his vehicle seemed to come closer.
I realised he would catch me sooner or later, if he didn’t decide
to stop. But Hassan wasn’t the kind of person who gave up.
    When I had left, the
air was quite clear and the sky was clear, but as I penetrated the
planum the wind became stronger, raising the thin dust that covered
the terrain everywhere. Soon I was facing a dense cloud, made even
darker by the poor light at that time of the day. I decided not to
turn on the headlights, but to stop and let the dust envelop me.
This way I would disappear from Hassan’s sight. Perhaps he would
decide against following me in the storm.
    The atmosphere was
charged with static electricity and from time to time I glimpsed a
flash. I would have been scared in normal conditions. The storm
might have lasted for hours, halting my progress. I was in the
widest of the plains, but it wasn’t free of obstacles. If I had
gone on blindly, I would’ve risked damaging the rover and ending
this last journey well before its time.
    I took the opportunity
to eat. I had brought with me the quantity of food needed for at
least two and a half days. If I had to die, I resolved to do it
with a full stomach.
    Two hours had passed,
before the visibility improved at last. I turned on the engine
again and started to move forward. There was no trace of Hassan
behind me. I found myself hoping he’d had an accident while
attempting to reach me, but I knew him well enough to know he had
gone back to safety. Whatever his intention was, it couldn’t rival
his instinct for self-preservation. With a sigh loaded with fatigue
I tried to dispel that hint of malice, the result of my anger, but
the truth was that I needed to go on, to avoid the temptation of
giving up.
    While travelling and
admiring the landscape surrounding me, more than once I fancied
taking some pictures but realised how silly that was. I should wait
to overtake the area we already knew and then send some images to
Earth, to let people admire from close up places that no human eye
had ever seen directly before. I wanted to share my experience in
the best way, because it might have been the last time.
    A camera installed on
the top of my rover was recording