The Bridge Between Us

Her heart felt like it was going to jump out of her chest!

The air was thick with the remnants of the last two years. She could feel it scraping in her lungs as she pushed through the rubble under her feet.

She kept her head down, her long black hair tied under her hood, only looking up to get her bearings through the unrecognizable city streets. In the not so far distance was the hazy outline of what remained of the Eiffel Tower. It had survived most of the initial attacks but its twisted metal and jagged edges only served to remind her that romance was a dead concept.

Romance. She could faintly remember the butterflies.

Love. Love was what kept her going .

She clutched at her locket with the memories falling like tears in her brain.

She was determined to meet her fate, keep that promise she had made to herself and to him.

Claude was only 21 when she had met him at the Eiffel Tower for their first date. It had been his idea. She had thought it was “too much”. She would have preferred to slowly climb the rungs of dating: first date, coffee. Second date, dinner at a fancy restaurant and then, only then, if she felt butterflies, a romantic day at the Tower.

But she had already felt the butterflies from the very first moment he had spoken to her.

Claude had walked into her café just over four years ago. He had met her shy gaze with the most enticing grey eyes she had ever seen in her life!

He ordered his espresso and asked her if she would available after her shift.

She wouldn’t usually respond to men’s advances at work, but she couldn’t resist. There was something so intriguing about him.

She wasn’t a “fall head-over-heels” kind of girl and she never believed in the concept of “love at first sight”. But she was falling, butterflies were fluttering, and all she could say was,“Maybe”.

Then she quickly added that she might have time, that she would have to check her schedule, but that he could come back after her shift and she would let him know then.

Oh, the memories of when time actually meant something, when you could look forward to a day or time, when everyone had a watch, alarm clock and calendar on their phone.

Now, post-Global Destruction, the satellites sat dark in the debris-filled space above and everyone wore an analog watch and counted the days down to nothing.

Time .

There was nothing that could stop her from this meeting. This day. At the Bridge.

She would not be late.

There was no time left. It was now or never.

She walked briskly.

She clutched the locket that had become as much a part of her as the man who stole her heart four years earlier !

Isabelle pushed the heart-shaped locket further down into her bosom. She didn’t want to draw unnecessary attention to her most precious belonging, her only reason for surviving.

This would be the last time she was ever going to wear it.

She was almost there. Her heart beat in her ears.

Isabelle turned the dark corner of a demolished building and there rose above her .. the Pont des Art. The bridge of lovers’ hopes and dreams.

The moment she had been waiting for, exactly two years to the day, was finally here, just a few steps away.

Her breath caught in her throat.

She barely recognized the bridge and its surroundings. Gone were the romance and dreams of her memories, replaced with daunting armed guards at the city’s river crossing. Their razor-sharp vision goggles shining iridescently in the dusk.

She quickly thought back to that fateful night two years earlier.

“Claude,” she breathed his name in as much as she said it aloud.

“Claude, will I ever see you again? Will I ever feel your arms around me again? I don’t want to let you go! Please, please, promise me that you will come back for me and for her!”

“I promise you, Izzy, with my whole being, I will be here! I will take you somewhere far away from here, somewhere safe where we can have our life again and our family. I love you more than you will ever know, more than I could ever show you!”

He leaned down ever so slowly, not to let the moment escape from them and he whispered to her, “Two years and we will be together forever.”

Now she was here, two years to that day, and all she could see was the destruction around her and the ruins of where she had spent those last moments with him.

She had the locket, she had the key. She only needed her soulmate and their lock on the bridge to their future.

She moved slowly forward, with her head down, her fiery eyes leapt to the bridge and could see the emerald lock that held their destiny. Isabelle was so close to her dreams and yet the nightmare was far from over.

This was the moment, their last chance to escape this hell and to have a life beyond. Her hand moved to the locket and she knew she was going home.