by E A Lake
“Not anymore,” Liv answered, pulling her hair behind her head. “And men like Shaklin take advantage of the time we live in now. He’s got us trapped as slaves basically. If one of us tries to leave, he’ll find us and bring us back.
“He says he takes care of us, and I suppose he does. It’s the same with his wives. He’s taken in four women, three of them with children, and has made them all queens. Who knows what might have become of them if he hadn’t been so generous…as he calls it.”
“So, you take care of this place,” I started, trying to figure out my surroundings. “What do the others do?”
“Sasha helps serve meals and cleans otherwise,” Liv replied. “Sara watches the six children most of the time, her and another gal about our age. Morgan tends to anyone who’s sick or needs medical help. Someone’s always cutting themselves or getting hurt here and there. She also takes care of any sick animals.”
“And none of you…” How was I going to put it to the seemingly naive young woman? “None of you have to perform any other, more intimate duties at all?”
Liv blushed and looked away. “We’re not whores, if that’s what you’re asking.”
I reached to cover her hands with mine. “I was thinking more along the lines of a concubine; something like that. I wasn’t insinuating—”
“No offense taken,” she replied, gazing back at me. “A lot of new people wonder the same thing. Some of the other women are older. Two are in their sixties, another in her fifties. Most are somewhere between 30 and 40. Only one gal is younger than any of us; Charolette’s only 17 and she’s very pretty but really shy. She’s watched closely and guarded like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Shaklin’s told his men he’ll kill anyone who touches her.”
I couldn’t decide if this Shaklin fellow wore a white hat or a dark one. Whether he was good or evil wasn’t clear and nothing the women had said had swayed me one way or the other.
But I needed more background since I had none of my own. Fortunately, Liv had extra time on her hands.
CHAPTER NINE
“Why am I here?” I asked, which made Liv get up quickly from the table. “What am I after here outside of Terre Haute?”
“First off,” she answered, sounding somewhat distant. “We’re not in Terre Haute. We’re just south of Hymera. Terre Haute’s about 30 miles north of here.”
“Okay, why am I here?”
She shrugged and poured hot water from a kettle on the stove into a sink of dirty dishes. “Can’t really tell you.”
Well, that wasn’t helping. But something about the way she said the first word, ‘can’t’, sounded off to me.
“Can’t or won’t?”
She shrugged, scrubbing a dish with a blue plaid towel. “Morgan said you’d come to it eventually.” Her tone was noncommittal, like if I pushed hard enough, she might tell me. “Sara asked Morgan while you were still passed out from hitting your head on that rock out in the field, the one that gave you that concussion. She thinks she knows why you’re here. But we don’t know that for sure. So, Morgan said since we don’t know for sure, we shouldn’t plant any ideas in your head. She’s kinda the smart one; we usually just agree with whatever she thinks.”
“Does smart Morgan know when I might get my memory back?” I asked as sarcastically as possible. Liv smiled and shrugged, keeping at her duties. “You know, you’re awfully nice, but not much help.”
She turned and I noticed her twisting her lips. “Morgan says—”
I raised a hand to cut her off. “I get it, I get it.”
Standing as carefully as I could, I made my way to one of the rear windows of the small dwelling. Outside, it was sunny and the sky was a cloudless blue. Corn grew behind the place in a large field, maybe 20 yards back. The vibrant green told me the plants had received the proper amount of sun, heat and moisture. At least I remembered it was corn and what a healthy crop looked like.
So then why couldn’t I remember my past, my name?
I sighed and leaned against the window frame. “So, this is the apocalypse? I guess I expected it to look a lot bleaker and dismal. Maybe more grays and blacks.”
“It’s not so bad,” Liv answered from the sink. “Once you get used to not having all the old stuff, it’s kinda nice.”
Since I couldn’t recall much of the old stuff — maybe cars and computers still floated around my scrambled mind — I didn’t really know any better.
I went back to gazing at the scenery with a frown. Why was I here? Was Hymera the place I was from? Was I just wandering through and happened upon an unfortunate situation? What had I done for the past six years, in an apocalyptic setting no less? What did I do before any of it? Did I have a wife, maybe even some kids?
Nothing came to me. The harder I thought, the more my head hurt, so I decided to take a spot on the couch and rest until the others returned and would maybe answer some questions.
I felt Liv join me, letting out a large sigh as she sat. When I looked at her, I noticed her lips were drawn tightly, as if she were in thought and was about to say something.
“He’s a friend,” she whispered.
“Who?”
“Shaklin,” she answered. “Tony Shaklin is a friend. At least, he was a friend.”
Okay, though it was slow going, we were getting somewhere.
“Your friend?” I asked, pointing at Liv. She shook her head slightly. “One of the other girls’ friends?”
“No,” she answered quietly. “He was your friend.”
I shrugged and shot her a small grin. “I’ve never heard of Tony Shaklin before, Liv. That name doesn’t sound familiar one bit. Not even in the slightest.”
She stiffly nodded three times and then looked away. That was all I was getting, at the moment at least.
CHAPTER TEN
“She was stupid to tell you anything,” Morgan scolded, pacing in the small kitchen. “You need to figure this all out on your own. Otherwise, we might plant some false memory in that thick skull of yours and you’ll have everything all askew.”
She wasn’t happy, and that made it sound like she’d shrugged and walked away with an “okay” when I mentioned what I’d been told by Liv earlier.
“Where are Sara and Sasha?” Liv asked, stirring something on the wood cook stove. Man, it had turned hot in the tiny place when she threw in enough wood to make food with.
“Just tell me a little more about Shaklin,” I begged to the pair. “Just enough to jog my memory.”
“You knew him back in Terre Haute,” Morgan answered brusquely. “We all knew him and you back in Terre Haute.” She spun and faced Liv. “The others are held up in a family meeting. One of the kids got a scrape today from one of the dogs he has, so Shaklin’s chewing them all out. They should be here shortly.”
“He loves his kids?” I stated in question form. “That seems like a good sign.”
“But we’re slaves,” Morgan answered. “We’re also idiots for ever falling for such an obvious trap. Free food, clothing and shelter for an honest day’s work. The only part he left out was that the positions were permanent.”
“But that can change,” Liv added, sounding hopeful.
Morgan turned and stormed towards the younger woman. “It was supposed to…maybe. But it now appears it won’t; not for a while, at least.”
They had my interest with their cryptic talk. A plan might have been in the works; a plot for their escape from bondage. And me showing up and getting shot might have just spoiled everything.
“How did you all get here if everyone is from Terre Haute?” I asked, trying a new angle to lighten the conversation.
As Morgan opened her mouth to reply, I heard footsteps on the porch. I thought about running and hiding in the bedroom, but remembered what Liv had mentioned earlier. No men were allowed inside the perimeter of the yards surrounding the women’s quarters. The only way they were given access was with one of the guards and they were always announced loudly.
Sara
and Sasha came inside and closed the door quietly. Morgan and Sasha exchanged a curt look while Sara made her way to me.
“And how are you tonight, Quinn?” Sara asked in a sweet voice, joining me on the couch and taking my hands. “You were still sound asleep when I left this morning. I trust you slept well.”
I nodded as she squeezed my hands. “Yep, slept fine and had a good day.”
I thought she’d release my hands at that point, but she didn’t. I also noticed her brown eyes were focused tightly on mine. Did she have something else to ask?
“I thought about you all day,” she continued, still not letting go of my hands. “We even talked about you when we were alone with the youngest children. The other women send their best.”
I noticed Sasha leaning over the back of the couch, staring at her sister. “You can let go of him now, Sara. He’s fine and he’s not going anywhere.”
I saw the younger sister blush as she let go of my hands and rose. What was all that about?
“Dipshit told him about Shaklin today,” Morgan announced, still sounding severely pissed about the revelation.
But it didn’t seem to bother Sara. Or if it did, she didn’t let it show. “I’m sure Livy didn’t tell him all that much.”
“I only told him that Shaklin was an old friend from Terre Haute,” Liv replied, defending herself from Morgan’s harshness and glare. “That’s all I said.”
The four of them exchanged glances before any further discussion could happen. They seemed to nod in unison, as if they could read one another’s thoughts.
“How was your ass chewing?” Morgan asked of Sasha and Sara. “Ready for dinner, or did being too close to him make you lose your appetite?”
Sara seemed to ignore the statement. Sasha only shrugged. “What’s for dinner?” Sasha inquired.
Liv plopped a large kettle on the table and smiled, wiping sweat from her brow and pulling her hair behind her shoulders.
“Potato and carrot mash,” she replied.
“Same shit, different day,” Morgan grumbled.
Sara returned and helped me to my spot at the table, rubbing my back as we walked. “We eat a lot of the same thing every night, I’m afraid. But it beats staving.”
“Extra butter tonight,” Liv announced proudly. “Mrs. Walker had extra so she brought me some this morning. I think it tastes a little better with extra butter.”
It looked like potatoes and carrots squished together by a five-year-old who had a limited imagination when it came to meal prep. But it smelled good, and it tasted even better, extra butter and all.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“We were on vacation down in New Orleans,” Sasha explained while we ate. I’d asked again how four young women from 30 miles north of where we were had ended up in such an unlikely place. Morgan had acted like I had asked for her measurements, so Sasha gladly told the tale.
“The four of us,” she continued. “Sara and Liv were about to start at the University of Indiana and we decided to take a summer road trip. It was early August and we went down there because Liv’s dad lives there, so free rent.”
So far, everything had made sense. Four 20-somethings — two sisters and their best friends — off on an adventure.
“Then something happened?” I asked, cleaning up the last of the food from my plate. I noticed my question made all of them frown. The bad part must’ve been coming.
“We were on our way back after a couple of weeks,” Sara chimed in. “We’d gotten a late start and were driving late at night. We had about an hour left until home, when poof!”
Her story stopped there and I noticed her sad face.
“Poof?” I asked, not understanding that part or what she meant. Had the end actually arrived in the twinkle of an eye?
“The car stopped,” Morgan added. “All the lights went out and it just stopped. We coasted a few hundred feet, but it stopped working in the middle of the road.”
“I was sure we’d run out of gas,” Liv sadly said. “But then I noticed all the lights were gone. Not just the headlights, or the dashboard lights. All the lights in the area were gone.”
“How late was this?” I hoped something they’d say might jog my memory; not that anything had thus far.
“About three in the morning,” Liv answered, rising from her spot to clear the table.
“It was three-thirty,” Morgan snapped. “We’ve talked about this before, Liv. It wasn’t about three. It was three-thirty, because I’d just looked at my phone seconds before it happened.”
“And your phone went dead as well, you said earlier.” I just wanted the facts straight.
Morgan leaned forward on her elbows, resting her delicate chin on the tops off her hands.
“Everything went dead,” she answered with a dash of spite. “No phones, no cars, no computers, no electricity…no nothing.”
And that was the end of the good old days, they told me. Four women were left stranded on the highway in a locked yet dead vehicle waiting for enough light to travel safely by. Light that wouldn’t arrive for another three hours.
“We saw a few people wandering round,” Sasha continued. “Mostly they looked scared and stunned like we were. We found an older couple a few miles up the road and they took us in.”
“We’d planned to stay a few days with them,” Sara inserted. “Just until things came back to life, you know.” Her sad eyes moved from person to person at the table. “But then the roads weren’t safe anymore. Road bandits and wandering bunches of people who decided to take advantage of the situation. No government, no military, no law…no one to stop them from doing whatever they chose to do.”
“So, we stayed with them until spring.” Morgan picked up the story. She told it in a matter-of-fact kind of way while the others sounded so sad. “Things still weren’t good. Not safe for us to travel 40-some miles on foot. Then a man showed up, looking for help at a nearby large farm. We knew we couldn’t get home, so we decided to take him up on the offer.”
“They were real excited that Morgan had medical training,” Liv added, working in the last of the dishes at the sink. “At the beginning, he had the one wife and three small kids. And the wife was always worried the children were going to get sick and no one would be there to take care of them.
“The next summer, he added wife two and her two kids; they were something like six and eight. The girl was the older of the two. Wife three…” Liv peeked my direction. “She’s not very nice. I don’t even know what Shaklin sees in her. She doesn’t have any kids, thankfully.”
“He added his fourth wife last spring,” Morgan stated. “She’s younger, like us, and so pretty. She’s almost as good looking as number three. Not quite, but almost. And that’s what he sees in three, Liv. She’s beautiful and you know it.”
Liv stared at Morgan for a moment and finally nodded her agreement.
Well, I understood the players, how most of them had arrived, and a little of who was who in the pecking order. Now if I could just figure out how I knew the master of the manor, maybe I’d recall my past. But I was tired and that would have to wait for another sunrise.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The next morning, I awoke to discover both Morgan and Sasha beside me in bed. The sun was already up; they had to have overslept. I wondered how much trouble they’d be in when it was discovered that they were missing.
I listened for sounds of life anywhere in the house, but all was quiet. Apparently, Liv and Sara had overslept as well. I tried to recall if it was one person’s responsibility to wake the house. But for the life of me, I couldn’t remember the previous morning.
Sasha was faced away from me, the bones in her butt dug into my left side. She was wrapped in a worn red comforter and sleeping soundly still. On my right, Morgan was facing me with her long, thin, right arm draped over my bare chest. When I tried to remove it so I could to use the chamber pot, I noticed her green eyes flutter to life.
“Good morning,” I said softly. �
�I didn’t mean to wake you. But—”
Her arm wrapped all the way around my chest and she gave me a great hug, squeezing tighter than I thought was possible from such a thin woman. When she let go, she kissed my shoulder and sat up.
“Morning to you, too,” she said all happy-like.
Huh, she was a morning person. Go figure. Except she was also a cuddly morning person. One that gave strange men smooches on their bare skin in the morning kind of person. Odd.
“I think you overslept,” I whispered, nearly face to face with her. I noticed a small grin form on her pretty lips. “The sun’s up; shouldn’t all of you be up?”
“It’s Saturday,” she answered, tussling my hair. “They only have a skeleton crew on the weekends. We were all on last weekend, so we get the next two off.”
Okay, that explained why no one was up yet. The flirtatious behavior? Not so much.
“You hungry?” she moaned, stretching the sleep away. I nodded.
“Livy!” she shouted. “We’re hungry. Get those eggs going!”
I heard movement in the room next to us and felt Sasha stir beside me.
“Morning,” Sasha whispered, reaching around my ribs and giving me a gentle squeeze. My, they were friendly people in the morning.
I winced when she pulled too tightly. Remembering the wound just above my hip on my left side, I glanced down at it just as Morgan’s fingers reached for the bandage.
“That one’s not so bad,” she said, peeling back the covering so only she could see the bloody mess. “It looks like it’s healing okay. The one on your thigh was a mess though.” She pulled up the edge of my shorts, exposing a bloody wrapping.
“I’ll take a good look at them when we bathe tonight,” Morgan sighed. “As long as your head heals properly, I don’t think these other two will be of much concern after another couple of weeks.”
