by James Axler
“THIS WAY!” The sec man pointed down a long, wide hallway that had several doors and ended at another corridor. When Krysty hesitated, he gave her a hard push from behind that nearly sent her sprawling.
She regained her balance and continued slowly, familiarizing herself with her surroundings so she wouldn’t lose her bearings in what seemed like a maze of doors and hallways. The rough treatment aside, the sec men seemed a little too casual about guarding her, slinging their longblasters over their shoulders instead of keeping them trained on her. Krysty considered spinning, slamming the heel of her hand into the nose of the one behind her and taking his blaster, but she doubted she’d be able to do much after that. Even if she could chill the sec man in front of her before he chilled her, she had no idea where she was in the building, and she’d need an escape route.
“Second door on the left is your room,” the sec man behind her said.
The first sec man opened the door for her, then stepped back to let her enter the room.
There was a bed at the far end, and a large window covered by steel bars overlooked the common area in front of the main building. Closer to the door were two large, comfortable-looking chairs and several pieces of furniture with doors and shelves that could be used for storage.
The sec man who’d been behind her followed her into the room and switched on the lights. Krysty was startled for a moment by the light from the electric bulb, but retained her composure.
“There’s running water, too,” the sec man said.
Running water and a hot bath would be nice, Krysty thought. She was on her way to the bathroom to try the faucets there when she heard the door close behind her.
And the lock snicked into place.
She spun on her heel to find the sec man standing in front of the door, a grin on his face.
“What do you want?” Krysty asked.
“There’s two kinds of breeders on Fox Farm,” he began. “Smarts and stupes.”
“Is that right?”
The sec man nodded. “The stupes put up a fight and wind up in the basement for nine months chained to the wall.”
“And the smart ones?”
“They rut with anyone who wants to, sec men especially.” He unslung his longblaster and pointed it at Krysty.
“Sec men like you?” Krysty asked.
“I knew you were a smart one,” the sec man said, replacing the longblaster on his shoulder.
“What do you want me to do?”
“You can suck my cock for a start,” he said. “My friend’s, too.”
“Sure.” Krysty better understood the predark theory now. If she cooperated with the sec man, he’d put himself in a vulnerable position. Already the man had his blaster over his shoulder instead of in his hands and pointed at her head.
“Well, all right.”
She walked to the bed, sat on the edge and beckoned him with a curl of her right index finger. The sec man joined her, undoing his belt, which held a hunting knife and several boxes of ammo, and unbuttoning his pants.
“Let me see it,” Krysty ordered, feigning breathlessness.
Without hesitation the man let his pants fall, allowing his erection to bob and waver in front of her like a flagpole in the wind.
“Do you like it, bitch?”
“Uh-huh,” Krysty answered.
She reached out with her hands, taking hold of his cock with her left hand and hefting his scrotum in her right. “What’s my reward for doing this?” she asked.
“For starters, you won’t get beat as bad as others do.”
“Oh, that sounds fair.”
“You bet.”
And that’s when Krysty simultaneously squeezed and twisted her hands as if she were wringing water from a damp towel.
The sec man let out a yelp, his body snapping straight and unable to move.
Krysty gave him another hard twist, the force of it lifting him onto his toes. Sweat began to bead on his forehead, and tears leaked from his eyes. She let go of his scrotum and reached down with her right hand to pull his knife from its sheath. It was a four-inch hunting knife with a serrated edge on one side and a straight-edge on the other. She came up with the knife quickly, slashing it from right to left, slicing off the tip of the sec man’s cock.
He screamed.
She let go, pushed him away with a hard shove and slid the knife under the bed.
He stumbled backward, then reached down between his legs to grab hold of his severed member. He tried to staunch the flow of blood with his hands, but it still flowed freely through his fingers and down the insides of his legs.
“Rad-blasted slut!” the sec man screamed, holding himself with one hand and trying to pull up his pants with the other. He finally let go of his pants and brought around his longblaster.
The door burst open and a second sec man entered the room. “Put it down!” he said.
“But she cut me.”
A third sec man entered the room. Krysty recognized him as the sec chief named Grundwold. “Did she reach into your pants and pull it out for you, too?” the sec chief demanded.
“He was going to hurt me,” Krysty said. “Mebbe even chill me. I was only defending myself.”
The sec chief looked at his two sec men with contempt. “Get out of here, before the baron hears about this.” He pushed the bleeding man in the direction of the door.
“But—”
“Never mind,” Grundwold said. “Or mebbe you want to explain to the baron what just happened here.”
The two sec men left without another word. Once outside the room, the injured one grunted and groaned his way down the hall.
Grundwold stopped in the doorway before he left the room. “You try and relax, mebbe get some sleep. The baron wants you looking your best.”
“That’s kind of him.”
The sec chief nodded and left the room, closing the door behind him.
Krysty fished under the bed for the knife. She wiped off the blood and slipped it into her boot.
Who knew? Mebbe it would come in handy.
RYAN WAS HAVING troubles of his own.
Although he was doing his best to do the job that was required of him and be as inconspicuous as possible while doing it, the addition of a new slave was bound to attract attention.
“Are you spoken for?” asked an older woman with scraggly brown hair. She was obviously several months’ pregnant and wasn’t too concerned about concealing the fact, or she would have felt the need to cover her bloated breasts, which rested on her distended belly like eggs in a frying pan.
“Yes, I am,” Ryan said, taking a bite out of a fresh peach.
“Who?” the woman wanted to know. “You just arrived. How could you—?”
“You can’t rut with him,” a second woman said. She was younger by about ten years, rake thin and without child. “That’s not your choice to make. You’re already heavy.”
“But I want him,” the pregnant one said. “He’s strong and handsome. Maybe even a little mysterious.”
“But if the baron catches you rutting without permission while you’re already heavy, he’ll chain you up until you birth.”
“Who’s going to know? Who’ll tell the baron? You?”
The younger woman just smiled.
“Why, you bitch,” said the older one. She threw her fist forward and caught the other woman flush in the nose. Blood began to drain from one of the younger woman’s nostrils, but that wasn’t stopping the older woman from trying to hit her again.
The young woman dropped to the ground and took the older one’s legs out from under her with a spinning leg trip. The older woman fell on her rear, and her enlarged breasts seemed to bounce and jiggle for the longest time. The younger woman was about to give her a hard kick in the abdomen when another slave came by to break up the fight.
“That’s enough, both of you!” he shouted, giving the smaller woman a stiff kick in the legs.
“Hey,” Ryan called out, jumping down fr
om the tree.
“You stay out of this, One-eye.”
He gave each of the women another kick in the legs, and they finally stopped clawing at each other.
Ryan wasn’t impressed.
He was a big man, well muscled with a body covered with scars, including several around his neck. There were leathery stripes of healed-over flesh down and across his back, likely the result of dozens, maybe even hundreds of lashes inflicted by sec men over the years. He had short-cropped hair and a full beard, and in many ways he reminded Ryan a bit of Major Gregori Zimyanin, which gave Ryan all the more reason to stop the man from beating the two women.
“Your next kick will be your last,” Ryan said calmly, his fists clenched by his side.
The big man ignored Ryan’s comment and pulled the two women apart.
The women were done fighting, but still eyed each other warily.
“Beth,” he said to the older woman, “you know you can’t rut until you’ve birthed the child. If you need to rut, it can be arranged. I could even see to it personally.” He helped her off the ground and sent her on her way.
Then he turned to the other woman. “And I swear, if you had hurt Beth’s offspring in any way, you wouldn’t have been rutting with anybody, not the one-eye, and not anybody for a long, long time.”
“But I wanted him tonight, Andy,” she said, looking up at Ryan with something like fire in her eyes.
“There’ll be plenty of time to rut with the one-eyed dog later,” Andy said. “He’s not going anywhere.”
The young woman still didn’t seem satisfied, but she stomped off without further protest.
When she was gone, Andy turned to face Ryan. “This is my work detail, One-eye. I keep the peace here any way I see fit, including giving breeders a kick when they got it coming.”
“What are the sec men for?”
“To make sure no one tries to escape. As long as our group makes our quotas, they don’t give a shit what goes on between us.”
Ryan stepped forward, halving the distance between them. “Including when one of you gets chilled?”
Without warning, Andy threw a punch at Ryan’s head. He dodged the blow and struck Andy’s head with his left elbow. There was a definite crack of bone on impact, and Andy fell to the ground, dazed and unable to get up.
Ryan broke a branch off a nearby tree and was about to run the jagged edge of it through Andy’s ribs, when a sec man fired a round at Ryan. The bullet zinged past the one-eyed man’s head and slammed into the peach tree behind him, sending splinters in every direction.
“Leave him alone!” a sec man shouted as he walked over to where Ryan stood over the prone Andy. “Get back to work!”
Ryan tossed aside the branch and stepped away from the still groaning Andy.
The sec man helped Andy to his feet, and although the big man didn’t say anything, the look in his eyes told Ryan that it wasn’t over between them.
Only beginning.
Chapter Fifteen
“What’s your name?” J.B. asked the young woman Jak had brought out of the weeds.
“Clarissa,” she answered.
She was probably in her early twenties and had dirty blond hair that was all in a tangle. Her clothes were pretty worn-out, with large tears in both her T-shirt and pants. And although dirty, her skin was clean of any signs of rad sickness. She looked pretty much like a norm, but one could never tell in the Deathlands.
“Why were you throwing rocks at us?”
“It wasn’t just me throwing rocks,” she stated. “There were muties out there, too, you know.”
“All right, then, why were you and the muties throwing rocks?”
“To get your food.”
“But we don’t have any food,” Dean said.
“You’ve got more than we have, and that’s enough. We watched you eat and wanted some of your food.”
“And you were going to get it by throwing rocks?”
“I thought we could scare you off. You know, force you to leave a few crumbs behind.”
“With rocks?”
Clarissa shrugged. “We’re hungry. We’ll try anything to get some food.”
“We?” J.B. asked.
“Me and the muties.”
“You’re with the muties.”
“Always.”
J.B. just looked at her, trying to figure out the woman. She didn’t seem afraid or even worried about what the friends might do to her. And she was definitely a norm, but instead of living with other norms she seemed to be living with, maybe even leading the muties.
Very strange.
“I wonder if you and your mutie friends might still be hungry?” Doc asked.
“We’re always hungry.”
“Well, perhaps we can make a trade.”
J.B. wasn’t sure what Doc had in mind, but he seemed to have a plan.
“Trade for what?” She eyed him suspiciously.
“For some information.”
“About?”
“The area around here. And about Fox Farm.”
“Sure,” she said. “What have you got to trade?”
Doc smiled. “This bag of fruit.”
Without a word, Clarissa took the bag from Doc and began pitching peaches, pears and apples into the nearby weeds. The muties there began to feed. She took a few of the fruits for herself, turned back to face Doc and J.B. and said, “Ask away.”
J.B. moved in closer. “Three of our friends went missing last night, and we found a sec man from Fox Farm dead in one of the rooms of the hotel we were staying in.”
“Are your missing friends women?”
“Two of them are.”
Clarissa nodded. “They took the women for breeding. Not sure why they’d take a man, though. They’ve got more of them than they need on the farm.”
“For breeding? I don’t understand.”
“Fox Farm grows food. Best around for miles—hell, it’s the only food around for miles. See, Baron Fox knows all about electricity, so he came out here a few years ago with the idea of using the power from the falls to start his own little barony. With the electricity he was able to rework the soil and bring in freshwater from the bottom of the lake. But the more he grows on the farm, the less there seems to be for anyone on the outside. The land here’s good for growing, but any time we’ve tried to plant something the weeds grow so fast everything gets choked off. That’s why the baron has so many slaves working for him. They spend most of their time pulling weeds.”
“Slaves?” Dean repeated.
“Sure, that’s why there’s an electric fence all the way around the farm. It keeps animals and muties out of the orchards, but it doesn’t let anyone out, either.”
“We thought as much about the fence,” J.B. said, nodding.
“Uh, excuse me, dear lady,” Doc interjected. “But you mentioned something about breeding.”
She took another bite of an apple, eating slowly now that she’d eaten a few fruits and had sated some of her hunger. “One of the reasons they grow a lot of fruit is for trade. They supply a few big eastern villes with fresh produce, so the farm is well stocked with everything like linen and soap, sugar and clothes.”
“Blasters?” J.B. asked.
Clarissa laughed. “All kinds. Maybe a few grens—I can’t be sure since I don’t know a lot about weapons. There’s a lot of them, though, I know that.”
“What about the breeding?” Doc repeated, looking a little frustrated.
“Well, the other reason they grow so much food is to feed the slaves. See, they all work hard pulling weeds and picking fruit, and at night they rut. All night, every night.”
“What does she mean by rut?” Dean asked.
“Rut,” Doc answered, “is a vulgar term meaning to have sexual relations, especially intercourse.”
“That’s right, rut,” Clarissa said. “Baron Fox trades in fruit and vegetables, but he also trades in slaves and babies.”
“Babies?” Dean seemed
confused.
“Since everyone is rutting every night, the women are getting heavy all the time. And since most of the offspring are norms, they are worth a lot to couples in the eastern villes who can’t have kids of their own because of rad sickness or whatever.”
“So that’s how he’s been able to become so rich,” J.B. concluded.
“An offspring a few months old can net him a new blaster. Ten or twelve of them is good enough for a wag in perfect running order. He’s got convoys heading east every month or so. Last few months he’s been shipping every other week. There’s even couples that have heard about the operation and make the trip to the falls just to see him. He usually gets their wag, so the smart ones bring two.”
J.B. thought about Mildred. “What happens to women on the farm who don’t want to rut?”
“They all do eventually. The baron doesn’t care if you want to or not, and I think he even likes it when the women put up a fight. The ones who resist usually get beaten for starters. Then the baron will deny them food and water for days, and contact with all other people for months…just about anything a person needs to survive. Most of the women succumb, some don’t, but even the holdouts get heavy in the end. They wind up chained to a wall in the baron’s dungeon where they are force-bred until they’re made heavy.
“But even when you get heavy, the punishment isn’t over. Willing breeders don’t rut when they’re heavy if they don’t want to, but the ones who resist can be rutted by anyone—sec men usually—right up until they birth. It’s no wonder that after they’ve delivered an offspring, the women are only too happy and willing to rut like the rest of them.”
Everyone was silent for several moments.
“It would seem to me that we must try to rescue Ryan, Krysty and Mildred as soon as possible,” Doc pondered, “or our friends won’t be the same when they come out.”
“My thoughts exactly,” J.B. said.
“I have question,” Jak stated.
“What is it?” Clarissa asked.
“If baron takes women, why you here?”
It was a good question. All four of the friends looked to Clarissa for an answer.
