She left as long a fuse as she could, lit it and pedaled like crazy back to her own bike. The first pop sounded as she climbed off and dashed back to her hiding place.
“What the fuck?” Paul said as he turned to the sound. “Get her inside.” Paul shoved Betsy towards the smaller man and ran towards the blasts while edging along the building across the street.
“Now,” Sabra hissed.
Betsy had no problem pushing the smaller man’s arm off her and followed it up with a strong knee to his groin. The man doubled over gasping, while Betsy ran to Sabra. They jumped on the bikes and rode off as the man finally managed to yelp, “Paul… Paul, Betsy’s taking off.”
Betsy gasped, “Follow me.”
Sabra followed her onto a small path at the side of the road leading through some trees. “I’m Sabra.”
“Betsy O’Conner, thanks. Paul’s probably going to get that big truck of his. If he figures out I took the trail, he’ll be on foot.” The trail wound through the woods and there were several small branches to it.
The women finally slowed down about an hour later and emerged on the side of a bridge leading over a small river. “I don’t know what the hell got into him. The first couple of days he was okay… I mean, all three of us were freaking out about what was going on, but he wasn’t all crazy about ordering me around and stuff.”
Sabra relayed what had happened with Mike. “Do you think it’s another affect of what happened?”
“I don’t know. I think it might be a good idea to avoid people for a while, though.”
CHAPTER II
Winter 2013
“Sabra, I need you to check on the guards at station three. They were due in half an hour ago. Betsy’s damn watch probably froze up again, but she should have reported back by now.” Irene was the confident fifty-year-old woman who led the band of two dozen refugees. Her steely eyes and dominance was never questioned, as she seemed to be the only one with any kind of a plan.
“Yes, maam.” Sabra shrugged into her parka and grabbed her long knife. The women did not bother with guns, as the noise would only attract attention. The men did not want them dead; they wanted them captured, so the girls knew they had to stay hidden and it was agreed the silence of a blade worked best. The girls trained daily for hours, twisting their bodies around hanging manikins and learning the moves to quickly slice throats and thrust deathly blows.
While Sabra left the old Arkansas farmhouse to walk to the corner of the southern cornfield, she thought about what had transpired over the past eight months. After she had met up with Betsy, the two women decided to head towards Oklahoma first to check on Sabrina’s family, and then move on to Arizona where Betsy was from.
They barely managed to get away from a band of four men who had chased them for days, promising to take care of them and help them. It was not difficult to figure out their true motives. By the time they had reached Arkansas, there were five women in their group, and all of them had stories about the irrational behavior of any men they had come across. It was a haphazard stroke of luck that they had run across Irene and the seven women traveling with her. Her take-charge attitude quickly had Sabra’s group joining her.
It took Irene a dismally short amount of time to convince Sabra and the others, that nothing waited for them back home. Sabra reluctantly admitted that she knew it the first day when she could not reach her parents on the phone. Her determination to go back to Oklahoma was based primarily on having no idea what else to do.
The women decided to spend the winter at the farmhouse. They had managed to stock plenty of food and there were already candles, canned goods and the rest of the resources they would need to be fairly comfortable throughout the cold months. There was even a large pile of chopped wood for the fireplace in the large living room where they all slept.
In the three months they had been there, there had only been two small groups of men come through. They were now lying in the ravine separating their homestead from the farm next door. The women were perplexed by the men’s almost cruel advances. At this point, any one of them would have welcomed the strong arms of a man to guide her through this, but the men were different now. It was difficult to explain what exactly had changed, but the men were a frightening species to be avoided.
Irene was the one who had suggested the ‘bug’ had altered the men somehow, and after Jocelyn, a doctor from Topeka, had joined their ranks, they managed to get a blood sample from a man right before he died. Five armed women accompanied Jocelyn to town, and with the aid of a powerful microscope at the hospital and a few other tests she could perform without the advantage of the long-ago relinquished electrical supply, she discovered their was a huge change in the dominant levels of the testosterone in the men that had survived.
The women’s long range plan was to head south to Florida when the weather warmed, and if they found no signs of civilization on the way, they were going to discuss rigging up a sailboat and actually trying their luck in another country. They figured South America might be a good place to start, as no one seemed to be looking their way with anger or fear when the outbreak happened. Of course, they did not know that one of the places the scientist’s wife absolutely had to visit was Chile.
Sabra stood behind the abandoned hay wagon and looked at the place where Betsy should be standing. Other than the drifting clouds of the light snow, there was nothing. Sabra felt the hair on her nape stiffen and she watched silently, feeling there was something wrong. A hand wrapped around her mouth and she instinctively reached for her knife when she heard Jocelyn say, “Ssh, quiet. Okay?” Sabra nodded and Jocelyn dropped her hand.
“Where’s Betsy?” Sabra asked.
“She’s down by the rock pile in the ravine. We figured Irene would be sending someone out for us, but they’ve blocked the way back to the farmhouse. I swear, when I saw you come walking up the field, I thought they were going to get you. I guess they were distracted by the activity at the house,” Jocelyn said.
“What are we going to do?” Sabra asked.
“Let’s get back to Betsy. I think her hiding place is better than where we’re at. All they have to do is send someone back this way and they’re going to find us.”
Sabra agreed with the doctor, and they crouched low and waddled until they made it to the culvert fifty feet away, where Betsy’s large brown eyes stared up at them. “Have they made it to the house?”
“No, but they’re close,” Jocelyn answered. She lowered her fur-lined hood and ran her fingers through her short-cropped blonde hair. “There’s no way to warn Irene without giving ourselves away. Shit, from what I could see, there’s about fifteen of them. We can’t fight that many.”
The women had been huddled in the cold for about half an hour when Sabra said, “Dammit, come on.” She began to quickly travel the length of the ravine.
“Sabra, what are you doing?” Betsy asked nervously. They were approaching the stretch of the trench that ran directly behind the farmhouse.
“We need to get to station two before the guards walk back in looking for their relief,” Sabra puffed. It was awkward trying to run in the cold bent over.
Jocelyn asked nervously, “What about one and four?”
“I don’t know how we can get to them without running out in the open,” Sabra replied.
Betsy added, “Jocelyn, I think the men came in closer to station four and that’s why they didn’t see us. They’ve probably already got them, and station one.”
Jocelyn reluctantly admitted Betsy was probably right, and they concentrated their efforts on trying to save the two sentries ahead of them. They managed to get there just as the girls were giving into their grumbling about their past due relief and had walked twenty feet towards the house.
The five women huddled in the ravine and listened to the painful screams and shrieks of the friends who had become their family. By morning it had stopped, and the women risked peeking up over the side of the gully and could barely make out the fo
rms of people moving across the field in the other direction.
It took another two hours of no sign of movement, before they nervously approached the house. They wished they had just run, instead. Lucy lay just outside the master bedroom door, naked and still holding onto the knife she had plunged into her own stomach.
Irene had been stripped and literally nailed to the wall by the fireplace with thick iron nails, like railroad spikes. The welts on her torso bespoke a brutal beating, and the blood running down her thighs had their minds wandering to the unspeakable acts that must have been done to their leader. Sabra gasped when she saw Irene’s head move. “Oh my god, she’s still alive.”
Jocelyn quickly ran up to her and checked her as best she could. Angie ran to the barn to get a pry bar to remove the nails. When they finally got her down from the wall and laid her on some quilts, Jocelyn worked quickly to seal the obvious wounds, and investigate the not so evident injuries.
Irene rasped, “Jos, Jos, is that you?” Sabra gripped Betsy’s arm to keep from shrieking when Irene opened her eyes and what looked back at them was an opaque cloud covering her steel gray irises.
Jocelyn’s hand trembled and she caressed the woman’s cheek. “Irene, it’s Jos. I’m here.”
Irene actually tried to smile. “We didn’t tell them. They kept asking if there were more and nobody said a word. I’m so proud of you girls for not getting caught.”
All five of them were silently crying and feeling guilty about what their friends were going through and what the brutes had done to Irene. Jocelyn studied her eyes and looked closely at the coated orbs. “Irene, is it wax?”
“Yes, it hurt like a bitch. I don’t suppose there’s anything we can do about it,” she suggested hopefully.
“I don’t know. I don’t want to try anything until I can read up on it. Optometry was not my specialty, and I don’t know if it’s burned you, or how much more damage I’ll do trying to remove it,” Jocelyn replied. “Is there anything else I need to know about?”
“I could probably use a good douche. I must have had ten pricks up inside of me.” She gave a little laugh. “Feast or famine, I guess.”
In the end, it was probably Irene’s attitude that helped her survive in relative comfort for another three days. Jocelyn never tried to get the wax out of her eyes, because whatever they had raped her with had cut her up so badly that the doctor could not stop the bleeding. They buried her beside Lucy and slowly walked west.
CHAPTER III
Summer 2014
Jocelyn had become the leader of the women after they had left the farmhouse. She was not thrilled about the responsibility, but the five women had voted, and with the exception of Jocelyn’s vote for Sabra, the rest of them had voted for the doctor.
The young women had made their way to Wyoming and had picked up no more stragglers along the way. Either there were bands of women hiding so successfully that their group never detected them, or they had been captured by the men.
Jocelyn spent hours on theory as to how the men had changed to have such a dominant nature, and eventually the other young women convinced her to stop obsessing over it. There was no way they knew of to change the situation, any more than they could turn back to wheels of time and undo the epidemic. Their pet saying about the drastic things they could not change was to toss back: “Deal with it.”
As unlikely a destination as Wyoming was, the girls decided the weather was not the greatest and most of the survivors would opt for the balmier locations. The cabins in the mountains were built to withstand the elements and already designed to support people without the benefits of electricity. There would be fireplaces, game and, best of all, acres of woods and mountains to hide in. It seemed like the perfect solution to them… and to the group of cowboys who had survived the epidemic and loved their mountains.
The women had barely made it to the foothills of the Rockies, when Emmy heard the horses and screamed. They were surrounded by flatland and sagebrush with no place to hide, and even as they formed a circle and faced out to the nine men with their knives drawn, they knew it was over for them.
Sabra’s green eyes darted from man to man as they ran their horses in a circle around them. She anxiously licked her lips and threw her long auburn braid over her shoulder as the panic set in. One man was not joining in the teasing play, and he slowly walked his big gray horse around the outside of the other riders. He stopped when he was directly across from Sabra, and her fearful green eyes met his piercing blue stare. “That one,” the man’s deep voice boomed, and he pointed to Sabrina.
Sabra gripped her knife tighter as she prepared to fight off whoever came in too close. The men riding around them picked up their pace, and as the terrified women watched the dust kicking up from the horses’ hooves, they had not seen what the riders were doing until it was too late. Ropes dropped over their heads and were tightened when they sunk below their breasts, pinning their arms to their sides and immediately rendering their weapons useless.
As they twisted and turned in panicked chaos, more ropes dropped over their heads, not stopping the descent until they reached their knees where they were pulled tight and the women toppled to the ground. Jocelyn hissed, “Try to hide your weapons.”
Sabra managed to work her long knife into the side waistband of her jeans, diagonally so that the tip was pricking the top of the opposite thigh. Angie was sobbing and apologizing, while Emmy and Betsy’s frightened voices tried to tell her it was all right to be scared. Jocelyn was trying to calmly give directions and all Sabra could do from her prone position, was to stare in terrified silence at the man on the gray horse.
The men dismounted and propped the bound women to a seated position. They kicked away knives from the three women who still grasped them because they were unable to bend their arms to get them hidden in time.
One of the men said, “Not a bad hunt, Taylor.”
The man on the gray horse dismounted, took off his cowboy hat and slapped it against his thigh to dislodge the dust before settling it back down on his long wavy jet-black hair. “No, Sam, not a bad hunt at all.”
“You sure you want that redhead? I think the blonde dikey-looking girl is the leader,” said one of the men who was watching Jocelyn.
“No, you can have her. The green eyed one is mine.” The tall man continued to walk towards Sabra, and her legs frantically back-pedaled into Betsy’s back. The man never stopped, and when he was in front of her, he reached down with one strong arm, grabbed the rope tightened under her breasts, and lifted her to her feet. There was a cruel lust in his blue eyes that made her gasp in fright as he studied her and said, “Yep, this one’s mine.”
With one hand gripping the rope under her breasts, he used the other one to grab her braid, and he yanked her head back until Sabra was staring into the face looming over her. He smiled and leaned down to whisper in her ear, “If I have to take that knife out of the front of your pants, I’ll be using it on one of your friends.”
The dam broke open and Sabra’s tears began to fall. She slid her hand over to the hilt of her knife and slowly pulled the ten-inch length out of her jeans. In a last futile effort to save herself, she tried to twist her wrist to stab him. With her arms pinned, there was no strength behind the move and he just laughed as he batted it away. “That has earned you your first punishment.”
“Owners, get them secured,” he ordered.
Owners? What the fuck? Sabra saw various cowboys walk up to her friends, and the frightening tall man in front of her took a piece of leather that a man had retrieved from the saddlepack of the gray horse. The blue eyed man, Taylor, wrapped the piece of leather around Sabra’s throat and tied the laces in the back.
Jocelyn was using her no nonsense voice on the man who was attending her, Angie was still sobbing, and Emmy and Betsy were cursing. Sabra was silent. Apparently, the man who was in charge of the renegades had focused on her, and he scared the shit out of her.
Taylor laced wrist cuffs aroun
d her pinned arms and roughly pulled them to her back, causing rope burns as they scraped along the line until he managed to lace them together. He removed the lassos, and her paralytic silence was finally broken as she began to kick out at him. “Get away from me you bastard.” She attempted to run with her hands bound behind her, but she had made it less than three feet when he hooked an arm around her.
He leaned down and said with almost a breathy arousal, “That has earned you your second punishment.”
Sabra was dragged over to his horse. Angie had finally stopped wailing, and when Sabra turned to look at her, she saw some kind of leather gag strapped onto her face. Her attention was diverted by the cowboy when he clipped a long leather lead onto the ring on the front of her collar. He clipped the other end to a ring embedded into the back of his saddle and mounted his horse.
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