by Pixie Unger
I just nodded silently. I felt completely raw by that point. The thing was still attached to my stomach; my clothes had soaked up the wet from my shower, then dried uncomfortably over the night. I was still a bit damp and I regretted trying to get clean. Maybe they were right about humans being dirty.
“Can I have something to drink?” I rasped.
Tybalt looked worried, but he nodded and led me into the kitchen. He found a cup and ran me some water. Everyone in the place was still staring at me like a specimen from a zoo.
Fair enough, I supposed. I tried to keep my eyes down and avoid looking at any of them.
“Other take you to breakfast today,” Tybalt explained.
“Who?”
“Other,” he repeated. “Not me, not Romeo, not Iago. Other.”
“Oh. Other,” I repeated. That had to be the one who spoke some English, but not well. Someone snickered. I didn’t really like that, but had no idea how to address it. Tybalt nodded behind me, so I turned and peered up at, well, Other. Where Tybalt’s key identifying features were the cut through his eyebrow and the slightly different sized tusks, and Romeo’s was the weird scarring on his face, Other was missing part of one of his ears, almost like it had been clipped to be extra pointy. He also had a series of bar piercings down that side of his neck. It was weird-looking and I didn’t find it particularly attractive, but he definitely stood out.
I swallowed and vaguely nodded a hello. He copied the gesture then nodded to the door. He led, and I followed.
I ended up standing in line at the cafeteria and getting real food rations with the orcs. We sat in silence. As I was trying, again, to eat without a knife, someone behind me said, “Other,” and snickered again.
“MacBeth. If I get to name you, I’m calling you Mac,” I announced. It was a spur of the moment decision, but I wasn’t happy leaving him as Other.
“MacBeth is bad,” he mumbled, not looking at me.
I wondered how he knew that. “MacBeth was the name of a play. I liked that story when I read it in school, the same as the stories that named the others.”
I looked up from my tray to find him watching me intently. I shifted uncomfortably and looked down again.
“Like ruum?” he rumbled.
Honestly, I wondered, are any of them tenors? Was there a vocal range lower than bass? Because if there was, they were all there.
“Yes,” I agreed, “I like having a room.”
He shook his head. “Like thaf ruum?”
I went very still for a moment as I considered how to answer that. “It wasn’t easy for you to get me my own room. I am not going to complain,” I explained slowly, taking care to say each word without blurring it into the next.
“Hmm.” His murmur was so deep it was almost at the limits of my hearing.
“Does my voice hurt your ears?” I concentrated on still speaking slowly without doing a bad Captain Kirk impression.
He frowned and shook his head.
“Can you hear all of my vocal range? Um. All of the sounds I make?”
Nod. “Like bir-dah-sah.”
I blinked. “Like birds?”
Nod. Then he made little fluttering motions with his hands.
“Oh,” I didn’t really know what else to say to that.
After breakfast, Mac took me up to one of the classrooms way back on the second floor. All the student desks were cleared out of the room, and Mac had a table set up where the teacher desk should be. There was a couch under the window. There weren’t any other orcs around, but Mac settled in to work at the table. I looked around for a book.
“Mac?” I waited for him to figure out that was his name and look up before I continued. “What should I be doing?”
He frowned, then shrugged.
I swallowed. “Could I try to find the library and find something to read?”
He shook his head. “Rah-un ah-way.”
I pressed my lips together. Yeah, I thought, I should run away. But my more immediate concern was, “I won’t run away if you keep feeding me and not hurting me.” And take this thing off my belly, I added in the privacy of my own head.
He grunted and started picking up things off the table. He handed me an armful before gathering the rest. Then he led me through the building ending in the library, where he took over one of the tables there and waved me off toward the books.
The selection wasn’t great. This library had clearly been censored by the staff at some point. What there was in the fiction section was fluffy young adult books, nothing political, and the non-fiction section was about mostly twenty years out of date. That left the magazine section. I sat in one of the arm chairs and flipped through a decorating magazine on the basis that it had to be better than the teen celebrity gossip rags.
It was and it wasn’t. The houses were still beautiful, but it was a painful reminder of the world we had lost. The tips for maximizing your storage were not particularly helpful at this time.
I dropped the magazine on the floor and pulled my knees up into the chair. As much as I tried to explain the idea of humans needing a group, I didn’t really understand what it would be like to be kept as a pet.
I scrunched up as small as I could and eventually fell asleep in the sunshine.
----
I woke to someone calling my name. I panicked and sat up when I realized it was an orc. Then tried to relax again when I recognized Tybalt.
“I’m up,” I mumbled.
He just stood patiently as I wiped the sleep from my eyes and tried to subtly check for drool.
“Eat now.”
“Where’s Mac?”
Tybalt frowned.
I rolled my eyes. “Other,” I prompted.
“Have work.”
“Oh. Okay. Do you have work?”
“Have food now,” he insisted.
I nodded and went to pick up the magazine off the floor but it was already gone. “Damn.”
“What?”
“I left something on the floor. I was going to put it back but it’s gone.” I looked over at the magazine shelves; it wasn’t there either. “Oh well, I don’t know what I can do about it now, other than apologize if I find out who had to clean up after me.”
I scratched at my stomach, then shuddered at the feeling of the nutrition bag between my hand and my skin. It bothered me in a way that clothing never did. Tybalt was still watching me intently, so I stood up to follow.
We went back through the school to eat lunch in the cafeteria. I just kept my head down. I was poking at something that looked like mashed potatoes but probably wasn’t when I heard orcs at the other table laughing about Mac.
“Tybalt, what are they saying?”
Tybalt shrugged. “Wondering you picked name MacBeth.”
I still didn’t look up. “I like the name Mac.”
Tybalt hummed politely.
“Does it mean something embarrassing in your language?”
“MacBeth was bad in your … language.”
I nodded slowly.
Someone from the other table shouted over, “Pick me! I handsome!”
Tybalt tensed.
“Is that dipshit important?” I asked softly.
Tybalt shook his head. There was a moment where the only sound was Tybalt laughing under his breath, then the rest of the group joined in.
The rando sitting next to me, nudged me hard enough to almost push me over. “You name him ‘dipshit’?”
I shook my head. “I’m not even going to waste a name on him.” There were several exclamations that seemed to be the orc equivalent of “Whoa!” “I like the name Mac,” I repeated, louder this time. “What does it matter what a weak and pathetic human calls him?”
Tybalt gave me a shy smile that looked completely out of place on his monstrous face. I smiled a little before I hunched back over my lunch.
That afternoon, Tybalt slowly and patiently taught me how to use the orc port-a-potties as a shower. You had to switch it to shower be
fore you went in, otherwise the non-slip floor couldn’t engage over the drain. I made sure I focused on the cubical we were working on and not the orcs randomly coming out of the other ones naked, only to vaguely cover themselves by holding their dirty clothes in front of their dicks.
Or not, as the mood struck them.
“What about towels?” I finally asked.
Tybalt tilted his head and considered this. He ended up just shrugging.
“I don’t like being cold and wet, but I don’t like trying to put dry clothes on when I’m wet either. Humans use towels to—”
“I know,” he interrupted.
“I take it that orcs don’t?”
He shrugged. “Extra work. We don’t get cold.”
“Do orc women just walk out of the showers naked, too?” That made him look sharply at me. Him and every orc within earshot. The intensity of that attention made me want to run or squirm or, at the very least, change the subject. “Show me the soap drawer,” I deflected.
----
There was another night in the garage, and then Romeo and Iago took me for breakfast. I ended up sitting on the couch in Mac’s room instead of going back to the library. Tybalt took me for lunch, then for a walk that was a couple of laps around the street circling the school yard. It was a long loop, it had to be a couple of miles altogether. Me, him, and a selection of heavily-armed orcs in what appeared to be riot gear.
Supper was once again with all four of them. I ended up back in the garage shortly after, where I laid on the mattress and stared at the ceiling for a while. Then I got up and tried to sneak down the hallway to the room where my four slept.
Apparently, I was really good at sneaking, because I got an eyeful of Tybalt sitting on the bed, his head tipped back, eyes closed, holding Mac’s bobbing head in his lap. I froze, then turned to run back the way I came. Unfortunately, someone came out of one of the other rooms and blocked my path.
“Want?” It was definitely a question, and he nodded back at the room where Tybalt and Mac were busy.
I tensed. “No, I do not want to give you a blow job!” I hissed.
His brow wrinkled in concentration. I tried to edge around him.
He tried again, “You want?” Then he pointed at his mouth drawing my attention to the three scars on his jaw and licked his lips before pointing at my crotch.
“No!” I didn’t even hesitate in my reply. The mental image of that didn’t have time to form before my denial, it came afterwards.
The orc, however, just shrugged, apparently completely unoffended. “What want then?”
I had been about to beg for a towel and a shower, but I wasn’t going to tell this guy that. I shrugged and tried again to step around him. This time he let me. I bolted back to the garage and pulled the door tightly closed behind me. I leaned against it and stared at the rafters, trying to process what I had just witnessed.
Not a slave, not a sex object, so what was I? The only thing left that came to mind was a pet.
There was a knock on my door. I jumped at the sound, but I didn’t open the door.
There was another knock, followed by “Mina?”
I opened the door to find a worried-looking Iago. I didn’t say anything.
“Are you alright?”
I nodded.
“Did you need something?”
I swallowed. “I was going to ask for a towel so I could have a wash before bed, but I don’t want to be naked around … any of you.”
His nose twitched and his nostrils flared a little. I started to close the door.
“Come with me,” he said just before the door closed.
“Where are we going?” I asked through the narrow gap in the door.
“To get a towel.”
I ended up back in the girls locker room with a towel and a clean cover all. The nutrition pouch was reduced to just a leathery flap. I wondered, as I was climbing under the water, if that would be absorbed, too. I poked at it and gave it a tug. It was a little bit loose and that was a whole other layer of horrifying. If I pulled it off, was I going to have a hole into my abdomen behind it?
I ignored it and tried to wash the rest of me.
As I bent forward to wash my feet, it crumpled, then fell off when I stood up. The skin underneath was bleached white and wet looking. I carefully washed that, too.
Eventually, I ended up sitting on a bench, wrapped in a towel, looking at a square foot of something that looked like a piece of leather or one of those scobies people used to use to make kombucha.
I shuddered, just glad it wasn’t attached anymore.
I toweled off and got dressed and left it in the shower to go ask Iago what I was supposed to do with it. He came in and picked it up. It was floppy and gross and he took it back to the medbay.
It went into one bin and my dirty laundry went into a bag.
Iago and the medic had a long conversation that I couldn’t understand before I was taken back to the garage.
I thanked him politely, expecting him to stay on the house side of the door, but instead he followed me inside.
“It’s cold in here and it smells bad,” he announced.
I stared at my feet. He was right, of course, but I didn’t want to lose the privacy the space allowed.
“Come this way,” he ordered as he turned and went back into the house.
He walked into what had been the master bedroom and had a long conversation with the six orcs bunked down in there. He looked at them as he talked, but they kept looking at me.
“Iago? I don’t want to make trouble,” I whispered as softly as I could.
That made all seven focus sharply on me. I ducked my head and hunched in on myself a little, trying to be as non-threatening as I could. I shouldn’t still be here! I had learned a lot of things about them. The medical device wasn’t on me anymore. I should be planning my escape.
“If they give you this room and take the garage, will you spend time with them?” Iago asked.
I tensed. I was pretty sure one of them was the guy who had propositioned me earlier that night. “What do they want me to do?” I whispered.
“Help them teach the other humans how to wash,” he suggested.
“I don’t want to be naked in front of all the other humans either. And I don’t know if they will listen to me, now that I’m not living with them anymore.”
“Try!” Yeah. That was Mr. “Want?” from earlier.
“If you just let me go back to live with them—”
Even the six who were being kicked out of their room thought that was a non-starter.
I clenched my teeth and tried to think of a diplomatic way to frame what I wanted to say. I wasn’t sure there was one, so I went with straightforward instead.
“No.” They blinked at me in varying degrees of disbelief. I sighed. “I’m not bothered by living in the garage enough to want to owe anyone favours to move out. It already bothers me that four of you own me; I don’t want to make it ten.” I turned and went back to the garage then, closing the door behind me.
It was cold and it smelled like a garage. I would rather have been in my tent in the school yard and much rather have been in my tree house by the river or the abandoned building I had lived in before that. I didn’t have those options just now, so I was making do with what I had. I just needed to think. Staying here and playing pet wasn’t my goal. I had information about how they worked now, it would be easier to avoid them in the future.
I was half-suspecting that our little tour around the neighbourhood was supposed to be some great show of strength, but instead I had been able to spot a few likely candidates for exits. They had told me they had something going on “for families” by the river, but if I stuck to the burnt out houses, I should have a clear run out of town, then I could follow the abandoned train tracks east. The iron rails had been dug up years ago, but the path was still there if you knew where to look.
I just needed to get out of here.
And hope I wasn�
�t stuck with some hidden GPS tag.
Argh.
Fuck.
Okay. The only way to find out if I had been GPS tagged was to get out of here and find someplace to hide for a couple of months to see if they came after me.
I wondered, again, how I had let myself end up in this position.
I was prepared to blame the lack of nutrients we hadn’t discovered yet, because I should have hopped the fence weeks ago.
Still, I had learned how their camps were organized. How their barracks worked. How their showers worked. I realized maybe the issue was less about willful cruelty and more a case of neglect. The food thing was weird. They ate better than we did, which was no surprise. Except that they kept telling me that the human food rations were balanced. I didn’t know what to think about that when we were all hungry and had lost weight.
Mind you, human nutrition seemed more like wishful thinking rather than science. Every time a great study was released it contradicted something that had been revealed as truth five or ten years before. And it would inevitably be proven wrong if you waited a couple of years. Or it would turn out that the study had secret funding from a food industry. Were the orcs basing their meal planning on our science? Or worse, our diet books? Because I was prepared to believe that was the problem.
I was starting to nod off, despite myself. I felt like I was still awake when I had a dream where Mac came into the garage and made love to my body with his mouth. When I woke up, I was left frustrated in so many ways.
That night was full of uneasy dreams of orc hands touching me. I wasn’t dreaming of being groped, it was more sensual than that. In the way that dreams make no sense upon waking, I was somewhere warm and dark and being caressed by large grey hands belonging to unseen figures. In the cold light of morning, I could rationally process how it wasn’t real. The four didn’t touch me. Ever. I could maybe recall Tybalt having his hand on my back once, but even that didn’t feel like a real memory.
They had certainly reacted the one time I had touched him.
Yet they weren’t above catching me by my clothes. Romeo had grabbed the back of my shirt to keep me from leaving. But that wasn’t exactly the same as grabbing my arm. I didn’t understand what they were doing or why. I had no idea what they wanted, and I was too afraid to ask. Nonetheless, I couldn’t deny that they seemed to be working to make my life better.
