38

It's stabbing cold. Helena of Troy's nose runs and her face hurts. She wakes up in a silvery chamber, covered in a shower of frost spat out of slits. Below and above her, cold, slimy masses. She blinks to clear her eyes, and before her eyes is defined the face of a man with long eyelashes, a small nose, pink hair, and lips that promised to be soft as peach skin. Despite the obvious mannerism, Helena might have whistled at him and called him handsome? If he were alive.

In one motion she brushes the carcasses off her, which fall from the countertop to the floor. Sitting on other stiffs, the Spaniard strokes her head and recognises the remains of the warriors from the coliseum. She is slow to put her head in order, so she doesn't notice when Nestor enters the fridge, equipped with face mask, latex gloves, tweezers in one hand, and a saw in the other. The doctor looks equally dumbfounded.

Astronaut and Amazon come out of the freezer and take the chairs in the consulting room. Nestor disliked the Spaniard, first of all, because she looks more like a bull than a human being. But the sense of chivalry and education that his parents had instilled in him prompted him to invite her to tea.

Nestor explains that he paid small change to a handful of slave boys to bring him the corpses from the coliseum, hoping to find something valuable. He is not talking about gems or precious metals, but organs to sell, or even knowledge (nothing teaches more about anatomy and biology than the body itself). She thought a brute like that would never understand him, and might even be offended, especially when she discovered that he came from the coven known as the Spanish Matriarchy. But Helena shakes off those labels by being attentive and respectful. The woman's calm countenance doesn't compute with the huge, scarred hands holding the cup of camomile tea.

Hearing that Helena ended up in exile for not conforming to a radical stance, Nestor turns from displeasure to quiet respect mixed with empathy. He too was expelled from his nation, the difference being that his exile was a mechanical failure, and Helena's was an ideological or even spiritual failure when the matriarchy's beliefs border on the fundamentalist.

What began as a polite ten-minute maximum chat turns into two hours of constant conversation. Nestor expounds his broad worldview, and Helena hers, just as broad, though less eloquent because of the disparity in profession. Helena's intelligence was still intact, just a little battered by the life she had taken, and as if eager to make up for lost time, the Amazon does not stop firing questions at Nestor. He answers without fail, though he looks increasingly nervous. Helena adds comments like: "Wow, really?" or "That would have helped me that time...".

At one point, the giant asks if Nestor can hire her as an assistant or apprentice. The astronaut is speechless until he calms down and asks why.

"It would be nice to have a change of scenery, to try new experiences. Does it bother you?"

"Not at all" He shakes his head slowly, and adjusts the frame of his glasses with his hand. "I just... I didn't expect to find that kind of curiosity in these parts"

"Do you accept?"

The doctor nods. Helena smiles a smile that makes Nestor's breath catch, because a grimace two hours ago would have seemed savage, now it seems like the most beautiful landscape in the world. He curses under his breath as he realises that his chest hurts.

An explosion lights up the windows. The glass jumps on both of them. Nestor and Helena are thrown to the ground, the dots of glass bouncing off their bodies, fortunately without cutting. They stay down, hands over their heads, as the bullets whiz by and the bangs echo, sometimes close, sometimes far away, generating aftershocks on the ground.

The bombardment ends. The screams and curses persist in a growing chaos. Nestor looks out of the glassless window, and discovers that the tattoo shop next door to his clinic has turned into a smoking crater.

"Fuck!" he mutters.

"Joder..." Helena says as she stands next to him and observes.

The river is in turmoil, and Nestor doesn't want to get splashed. Now his chest hurts for different reasons. He asks Helena for a moment and, with a snakeskin saddlebag under his arm, obtained from a safe, runs to find one of his old patients, an off-road vehicle salesman with sensitive haemorrhoids.

Nestor moves among the rabid slaves breaking cages and slaughtering their masters, and tries to pass as unnoticed as possible. Luckily for him, the liberating breezes have not yet reached their climax in that part of the settlement. He arrives at the shop, and negotiates a 4x4 with the salesman, who at that moment is also packing his bags to flee. Nestor hands over the saddlebag full of opals, and the seller hands him the keys. But when he turns around, the back of his neck is stabbed by the saddlebag. Nestor bites the dust.

In the dome, there are rules against such "predatory attitudes", punishable by decapitation. Outside, anything goes. But inside, neither Achu nor Shura accept that rules are broken or the economy is tarnished. In that sense, the slave system works. Scams are rare when the victims have all the right in the world to bust your head off, or ask the leader to cut it off. But now with anarchy ruling, who would notice this betrayal?

The vendor raises his saddlebag to finish Nestor off, but a pair of strong, thick, Iberian hands reach out from both sides of his head, grab him, and twist his neck.

Helena, worried by the increasing intensity of the commotion, decided to go after the doctor. Her intuition saved Nestor from a terrible fate.

She opens the van, retrieves the saddlebag from the dead man's hands, throws it into the rear seats, and then loads the squat doctor, placing him gently in the passenger seat. Helena drives back to the clinic, and with Nestor's instructions, gathers and packs what she needs to quickly leave and get away from the Thunderdome for good.

"Helena..."

"Aha...?"

"Thank you"

The Amazon nods.

Together they escaped Australia and crossed the world to settle in the New Confederate States of America, seeking the dream in Nestor's homeland. The astronaut founded a clinic, and the Amazon began her university studies, eager to compare herself academically with her beloved, a goal she more than achieved... Yes, Helena and Nestor fell in love, and within a year they were officially married. They had three children, and when they grew up they all found out, more by chance than anything else, that both their mum and dad knew the Lancastrian. A fact that filled their heads with fantasies, because Nestor conspired with the chain breaker to overthrow the evil Deathmask (when he said they only had a chat, and not a very pleasant one) and his mother fought against the blue lion himself (when she said she could not face him).

The above versions of the story were encouraged by one of the sons, an aspiring writer, who managed to reap small successes by selling idealistic accounts of the Divine War. Innocent creative freedoms, he said... A little seasoning to spice up the stories of history. And with that mentality the aspirant exclaimed: I will be the next Jesus A. Olivo! The siblings looked at him with condescension.

Helena and Nestor were too busy with their own lives to think about a fleeting encounter from decades past, much less to notice that during the flight, a stiff was missing from the freezer in the clinic. The absence of a white ghost.