by Pixie Unger
“Just a little awake. Not enough yet,” I agreed and yawned again.
He nuzzled the top of my head and hummed softly. “You want to keep them?” he asked.
I groaned. “I thought we had gotten past this. Yes!” I snapped. “I want to keep them.”
“Mmm hmm,” he almost purred his agreement. “They should sleep here. Tybalt is worried. Iago is always worried.”
I rolled over and propped myself up on my elbow to look at him. “The bed isn’t big enough for all of us,” I pointed out.
He nodded. “Yes. I have lots of turns. Tybalt needs a turn.” He watched me for a moment, then hurried to add, “Don’t have to sex, but should cuddle.”
That was when I realized I was frowning, and my brain unhelpfully supplied that I had stopped touching Iago again. All of them, really, since the attack. “Did they ask you to tell me that?”
His eyes widened and he shook his head. “No. We are worried you don’t want us. Orcs are too much trouble.”
I thought about that. “Everyone is too much trouble these days.”
Mac snickered for a moment before looking serious. “Bad happened and Erika is closer to her family, but you just … became alone.”
I wanted to protest that I wasn’t alone, but, in a way, he was right. I had shut them out instead of sharing my anxiety. “Was that what you meant when you said we needed to plan our home?”
He hugged me to his chest, smushing me a little. “You don’t like this house. You were afraid here.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. It wasn’t a bad house. It was a pretty standard 1970’s ranch. The orcs hadn’t done much of anything to it. The bedroom doors had been removed, then mine had been put back. My bathroom was new. Human furniture had been removed when I first got here and some had randomly been put back. It wasn’t anything fancy. It just sort of was there. Three bedrooms, two baths, an eat in kitchen and a living room all in what had to be about a thousand square feet.
I hadn’t ever been down to the basement and since I had a room, I hadn’t been out to the attached garage. I tried to stay in the common areas rather than hiding in my room and I liked one of the couches, but it wasn’t exactly homey.
“I might not like a different house either,” I hazarded, my voice muffled by his chest.
He made a disgruntled snort, then let me go and climbed out of bed. I turned my head not to stare. They might be completely unfazed by nudity, but I wasn’t used to having a naked orc standing next to the bed to stretch with his half-hard cock on full display. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Mac scratch his chest and look around for his pants.
“We find a house you like. Iago wants. You need to tell us what to look for, though.” He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment, then suggested, “Trees?”
I stretched, nearly bumping my hands on the headboard. I was warm and comfortable and not in a rush to get out of bed, even if my brain was definitely on now. “Yeah, I like trees.”
He nodded. “We go see fruit tree place today, if you want.”
That got me to sit up. “What fruit tree place?”
“Ooo-pick fruit tree place.”
That made me sit up. “Iago said it would need guards. Does that mean we can get a dog?”
Mac looked a little sick. “We can talk about it?”
I had the feeling that was him saying no without actually saying it. On the other hand, he hadn’t said no, so maybe I could talk him into it.
----
I took a page out of my journal.
No. That doesn’t actually explain what I did.
I made a big show of turning to a new page in my journal at breakfast that morning, while announcing that we needed a plan. In fact, I’m pretty sure I managed to pronounce it “A Plan,” with enough stress to imply the capital letters. At any rate, it made them sit up a little straighter and pay attention.
I opened with, “If the community needs an orchard and we’re going to be the ones running it, there are a few things we need to do that.” They blinked and stared at me, then three of them looked accusingly at Mac, who refused to take his eyes off of me. Part of me wondered if we were going to be running an orchard or if I had just jumped the gun, but I wasn’t going to back down then.
“Like what?” Iago asked.
“Well, to start with, it’s a little ways out of town, so we’re going to need to be able to cook for ourselves instead of getting food from the school cafeteria all the time,” I pointed out.
That seemed like a good place to start, but it turned out to be another example of cultural difference. They nodded their understanding, then promptly got the wrong idea.
“We need a cook,” Romeo rumbled.
I blinked and stared at him. “No,” I corrected gently. “We need to be able to cook for ourselves.” That just got me some awkward fidgeting in their seats. “If I have a stocked kitchen, I can teach you,” I offered.
Iago asked, “What is a stocked kitchen?”
“I’ll make a list,” I explained, wishing I could access the internet, since I was sure there were probably hundreds of websites out there of what you needed to get started. In my case, I started with a frying pan and a dutch oven, then added plates, cutlery, and kitchen knives.
“Chickens?” Tybalt suggested carefully.
I nodded and wrote that down, too. I was tempted to add a dairy cow, but what did I know about how to take care of a cow? I just knew that I was going to need some source of cooking fat. I wondered if there was going to be a usable house out there that we could take over, or if it was going to be weeks of building like we were doing for Miriam. That raised the question of what did I want in a house?
“What are orc houses like?” I asked.
They shrugged. “Different by who lives there,” Romeo offered. “Men’s houses are one room to sleep in. All the other rooms separate and shared.”
“Different buildings,” Iago supplied. “Like humans had places to go to eat. Orcs share a room and a washer. Go some place else to eat and another some place else to work. Lots of different small buildings.”
“Don’t you get cold and wet when you need to run to a different building to get food?” I asked.
He shrugged. “We don’t get cold and sick like humans. Plus, no food in the building where we sleep means not mice or bugs eating lost food.”
I thought of some of the disasters my mom had found in my brothers’ rooms growing up and understood that one completely. “What about women’s houses?”
“However they like,” Mac replied. “But cooking where you sleep is … not … how we do it.”
“Weird breathing food smells in your sleep,” Romeo added.
“Huh.” I honestly didn’t know what else to say to that. “So, if we were going to build an orc farm, what would that look like?”
“Mina,” Iago said gently, clearly preparing to call me an idiot. “We don’t want an orc house. We want your house.”
“That puts it all on me,” I pointed out. “And I don’t know how to make a house for the five of us.”
“One bedroom,” Tybalt mumbled. “We can share. We share a table. Can share a bed.”
That made me freeze. “Um!” I took a deep breath and tried to figure out how to explain my objection. “I don’t want three of you watching me having sex with the other.” I thought some more and added, “And I don’t want to have you waiting on the step for me to finish, either.”
“Sleeping room and sex room,” Mac teased. At least, I think he was joking. I wrote it on the list anyway.
“I want a bathtub.” It just came out. Somehow, that thought went from my brain to my mouth without my consciousness being aware that it was happening.
They nodded. I wrote it on my increasingly strange list.
“Can we go see if there even is a house?” I asked.
“There is no house,” Iago explained. “There is a big metal building where we can change the insides.”
“A barn?”
<
br /> He shook his head. “No animals.”
Nonetheless, I sat there with my brain shorting out. I was going to an orchard to live in a barn with a bunch of orcs. And, somehow, I was okay with that. “I want some animals,” I continued.
“Chickens,” Tybalt repeated, gesturing to my list.
“I want a dog.”
No one was happy with that idea.
“Dogs don’t like orcs,” Tybalt explained. “They bite.”
I wanted to object to that, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I could well imagine people setting their dogs on orcs. Or just running into little yappy dogs that had gone feral. Pets were complicated during a massive invasion. Honestly, the cat that I had fed while I was in hiding seemed to have survived mostly on being a vicious bastard. She probably didn’t need me feeding her, she could catch mice like nobody’s business, but there was something about sharing that kept me sane.
Still, if the farm had a barn, it might already have a feral cat population.
I was wondering about the psychology of wanting a pet as a sign of normalcy when I realized that the guys hadn’t said anything in a while. They were watching me, waiting for something. Okay, time to think fast.
“Jo was talking about having sheep so we can make clothes. Sheep need a sheepdog,” I pointed out, ignoring for the moment that I had no idea how to train or run a sheepdog.
Somehow that got them to switch from determined to worried.
“Farming fruit, not sheep,” Romeo reminded me.
“I wonder if we can do both,” I mused. They went back to waiting patiently. I gave up on the idea of a dog, for the moment, and went back to listing the things I would want in a house. A lot of the items on my list could be found in that warehouse of random things.
“I really need to see the house or plan the house or have some idea what the living arrangements will be like.” I sighed. “Where is Pin-it when I need it?”
Iago was thinking hard about that. “Moving houses? Is there a house you like?”
I blinked at him. “You’re going to move a house for me?”
He shrugged. “If you like. Or match the one you like.”
“We know how to build Miriam’s house now,” Tybalt pointed out. “Faster if you let us and Erika’s do it. Jo wants houses to make work for humans. You want a house to make food for humans. That’s different.”
I blinked at him. “I hadn’t thought of building Miriam a house as a make-work project.”
Mac slapped the back of Tybalt’s head and replied, “Bad choice of words.”
I looked hard at his excessively innocent face and didn’t believe it for a moment. Still, having an attached greenhouse and the built-in water filtration that came with it would be good. “Do you like that kind of house?”
“Everything has purpose,” Romeo explained his agreement.
That was a fair point, but it also argued for a wood stove for cooking and heating. Maybe an outdoor pizza oven thing for cooking in the summer. That I didn’t know how to find.
No. That wasn’t true. There was one at work, but I was hoping someone might still be using that one.
“I haven’t been into the garage since I slept there. Is there anything in it?” I asked. When they shook their heads, no, I added, “We should start looking for the things on the list and see how much stuff we need before we decide what kind of house. I think we will need a big stove, but I don’t know where I can get one and I don’t know how big it will be if we find one.” I thought some more. “Jo is really good at organizing. I wonder if she could ask around the camp about what things we would need.”
----
It didn’t feel any faster than building Miriam’s house. Her daughter was born days after they moved into their new house, and my family was still trying to figure out what we were doing.
There had been some careful trips out to the orchard. The property was lovely; the burnt-out farm house wasn’t. We had been able to harvest the fruit at the end of season and distribute it in camp before a shovel ever hit the dirt to start building a house for us.
I learned that part of the problem with orcs and dogs was probably that they couldn’t tell the difference between canids. I caught Tybalt trying to lure a coyote back to where we were picking apples the one day. I explained that it wasn’t a dog while he listened politely. I’m not sure he believed me, but I also explained that coyotes would eat the chickens he seemed so keen on. He frowned at the poor thing with a grim look of determination.
“That’s why we need a guard dog,” I pointed out. “To keep the coyotes away.”
“I’ll keep them away,” he growled under his breath, making Iago snicker.
My hoard in the garage was always changing. I would find something, then trade it for a better something, or give it away to someone who needed it sooner than I did. The guys rarely said anything about that, prepared to let me scavenge. The exception was the Piqua Ware.
I had found a box in a garage full of rusty iron pots and pans with the smile logo; Favorite Piqua Ware cast into the bottoms. I promptly dropped everything and spent a week scrubbing out the rust and reseasoning it. I was ridiculously proud of the find. Somehow, word got out; I must have developed a reputation for being a pushover, because some random woman asked for it.
She argued that her house was almost built and we hadn’t even broken ground on mine. That was a fair point, but I felt sick at the idea of giving it away. Iago heard her ask and came over to stand very close to me. He flat out told her no before she even got to the end of her ask.
“Excuse me!” she snapped. “I was asking Mina.”
“No,” he repeated, letting a bit more growl into his voice.
She gaped at him, then looked back at me. Iago stepped between us so she had to take a step back. As I looked around, the other orcs were watching the show more intently than I liked. However sexy the protective display was, it needed to stop now. I put my hand on his arm.
“I’m keeping those pans,” I mumbled without any confidence, “but I’ll keep an eye out for a set of cast iron for you, if you like.” She didn’t look pleased, but she left me alone anyway.
After she had left, Iago turned and gave me a worried look. “You worked hard on those. You love them.”
I nodded.
“You can keep some things, Mina. Don’t have to share everything,” he pointed out.
That was huge. For the last couple of years, I did have to share everything. There wasn’t enough of anything to go around. I had only survived because I fell in with a group of people who were all willing to share. None of us could have made it on our own. The idea of having things that were just mine was like a lost memory. It took me back to before they arrived. Even if it was only a mostly-filled day planner, a box of pencil crayons, and a set of pans, it was huge that they were mine.
The guys were mine too. Somehow they had fallen into the role of family.
I had worried about how the other humans would react when that story got back to the camp. It didn’t turn out how I was expecting.
----
Her name was Beth, but I didn’t know her. She had approached a random orc guard and asked to speak with me. My guys were being overly cautious, so we met in the classroom where Mac had been working the day I fell asleep in the library.
Beth politely introduced herself with a slight smile on her face. “I wanted to ask about those pans you found.”
“Yes?” I replied, cautiously.
“You found them in... number 16 Main Street, was it? In a cardboard box under an ugly green work bench made out of old kitchen cupboards?”
Shit.
“Yes?” I repeated, not liking where this was going one bit.
She grinned even harder. “Those were my grandmother’s! My asshole ex-husband took them for camping, then refused to give them back when we split up.”
“I’m not sure where you’re going with this,” I admitted.
Beth just laughed. “I’m not going to
try to get them off of you, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
I think I must have audibly sighed in relief, because my expression made her laugh harder.
“I just wanted to see them again. And I hear you’re looking for a wood stove?”
I nodded, cautiously happy to not be at imminent risk of losing my pans.
She nodded along with me. “Well, last time I checked, the stove to go with them was in an old farm house out on Highway 11. Three grid roads past Old Mill Road. It should still be pretty mouse proof. The farm was named Risken Pray. There was a big arch way at the driveway with the farm logo on it. Anything you find there— if you can use it, you take it.”
“Risken Pray?” I just had to ask.
Beth just rolled her eyes, “What can I say? Someone in the family had an unholy love of puns. When your last name is Risken, there are a lot of them to be made.”
----
Orc transport was weird. It took awhile to get me permission to travel in one, and no one seemed happy to have me there. My guys weren’t driving, but Iago seemed to know the three who were. I guess that made sense that if he was hunting, he would need some way to get around. It was weird being in a vehicle that needed three drivers.
When we got to the Risken Pray farm, I stayed in the vehicle with Mac and one of the drivers while the others checked to see if the property was safe. Mac’s reaction to that was interesting.
“I could go look,” he explained.
“No, you can’t,” the driver countered.
Mac snarled something I didn’t understand, then tried again. “I could go, but I stay here in case someone is hurt.”
“Medic stays with the transport,” the driver agreed.
“I’m not afraid,” Mac continued.
I looked between them. “Are you afraid?” I asked the driver.
“No!” he snapped.
“Alright.” I chose my next words with care. “I don’t understand why you’re telling me that.”
Mac relaxed, but the driver got more anxious. “I’m not afraid!” he echoed Mac’s earlier statement.
