~
Later, when the water starts getting cold, I dry off and put on the best pair of panties that Maya had given me, and nothing else. I sneak through the house and office, looking around to make sure nobody else is around. Adrian is lying on his lounge chair still, facing the water. Quietly, I slip around and onto my chair too, and lay back. Then he snored!
‘Dammit! He’s impossible!’
Oh well, I put my hands behind my head, just like he has his, and enjoy the feeling of being more clean than ever before. Then I focus on the wonderful feeling of the hot sun on my naked skin. I haven’t done this since back when I lived alone in the cabin, but I love it. It’s really a good feeling… Just as I am drifting off to sleep, Adrian literally tips his lounge chair over jumping up.
“What is it?” I ask, startled.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Just lying here enjoying the sun silly, the same as you are!” I can’t help but grin a little, but I don’t budge. His eyes roam all over my body, his look of panic quickly changing to one of appreciation.
“Ok,” he says, with a squeaky voice, picks up his lounger and lies back down.
For the next hour or better I torture the poor guy by acting totally oblivious to the fact that he can’t keep his eyes off my breasts, then I get up and say, “Let’s walk around the property some and just look at it. We should get to know it like the back of our hands.”
“Are you gonna go… like that?”
I laugh out loud, “Silly boy, this is our place now, and nobody can see us from the road. We can do whatever we want here, and I like feeling the sun on my bare breasts! It makes me feel… tingly sorta, all over. C’mon!” I shake my head, take his hand and pull him up. “Let’s go!”
“Grab your gun,” he reminds me, and we head out to the far side of the parking lot to see what’s past the path we’d ran down so fast before. We come to some kind of wire cages, raised up off the ground. As we near them, to get a better look, several large white rabbits scamper off in front of us. “They had rabbits, and turned them loose!” he says. “Awesome!”
3
Adrian:
‘Crap! Now I’m in no hurry at all to move Sunny and Sofie over here, if she’s gonna run around like this! I’m having a lot of firsts with this girl. My first kiss, my first girlfriend, my first love and now my first time seeing boobs! I think she’s gotta be the coolest girl in the whole world!’
“You think those are pet rabbits, or meat rabbits?” she asks.
“They’re meat rabbits for sure. We had ‘em at h… ugh, in Michigan. Let’s see how many we can see around here. Maybe we should catch them and start us a herd! They’re something I know a lot about.”
“Why would someone just turn them loose like this?”
“They probably fed them with store-bought feed, and when they started running out of money to buy feed, they didn’t know what else to do. You’d be surprised at how many people don’t know how easy it is to forage for rabbits.”
“There’s more over there!” she said, pointing. She started to bend over to try to pick one up.
“Uh, don’t do that,” I warned. “They scratch pretty good, and you aren’t exactly protected from claws at the moment!”
“Ok, but won’t they run off somewhere?”
“Naw, they’re always trying to escape, but once they do, they’re usually afraid to go very far. There’s enough for them to eat right here for quite a while. They ain’t going nowhere.”
We keep walking the way we had been going, and see a few more of them. We dodge an unusually large spider web, compared to what we’re used to seeing, but we don’t see anyone home. “Banana spider,” she says, then locks up and grips my arm, letting me know to stop.
I look where she’s looking, and after a few seconds I see an ear twitch, then a tail swish at flying insects. ‘A deer!’ We stand still and watch the doe until she grazes her way out of sight. “It makes sense that she’d be right around where the rabbits are staying. They eat pretty much the same things,” I whisper to her. She’s got a really nice smile on her face, I notice, no doubt from seeing the doe. Then she tugs my hand, signaling for me to follow her. After only a couple more minutes of walking on a game trail of some sort, we find the fence on the other end of the property. “You know what? This is a really good fence. If it goes all the way to where it’s pretty wet, like the other end, I’ll bet these rabbits just stay inside of it. They don’t like swimming much more than a cat does,” I tell her. We follow it. It does. ‘Cool!’ “What we can do then, is catch the adult does and one, maybe two adult bucks for breeding. We’ll keep them in those wire cages. Then, after each litter is weaned, we’ll just turn them loose out here.”
“Is that what you did in Michigan?” she asks.
“No. Adam and I always wanted to, but Dad wouldn’t hear of it. We just had a whole bunch of cages. Here, we’ve got what we’ve got, and that’s it, but as you see, nobody is starving out here, which proves our theory.”
Following the water line back to the left towards the house, we’re seeing many kinds of plants that I don’t recognize. Sarah Mae is telling me which ones are good for what. Some, we can eat. Some are good for the stomach, and some, the bark is good for headaches if chewed. She grabs my arm again, more firmly than before and freezes. I look where she’s looking again, and there’s an alligator sunning itself about ten feet from us. She nodded to the left, jerked my hand, and off we ran, as fast as we could. When we stop, I asked her, “Why’d we do that? It wasn’t after us.”
“We always run first if we stumble up close on one, because if it makes the first move at us, we can’t outrun it!”
“Whoa! I didn’t know that!”
“Well, remember that, Mr. Rememberer,” she laughed.
~
Later, after dusk, we are back inside the house with just one lamp on for light. We just aren’t used to having every light on in the house. I’m gonna get cleaned up for bed now,” I tell her.
She’s looking at the washing machine and drying machine. “Do you know how to use these?” she asks.
“Nope. We had the same setup as we do at the homestead in Michigan. A wash-tub, wash-board and a clothes line. I bet Sunny will know how though. That sure would make life a bit easier, huh?”
She keeps poking around through things, investigating all that Ms. Sonja had left behind. “Everything they had is dependent on the electricity working,” she says, as I close the bathroom door.
“That’s why we’ve gotta keep it paid for somehow,” I answer, through the door. I head to bed after washing up, and holler, “Goodnight.” She doesn’t answer, so I figure she must be downstairs snooping through stuff down there. I’m laying here debating whether to get up and go check on her, because I can’t hear a thing, when she slides under the covers beside me…
4
Sarah Mae:
We woke up right about daylight this morning like usual, had our coffee and a bite to eat, and then headed straight for the kayaks. “These are huge compared to the ones at the homestead,” I say.
“Yeah, they may take some getting used to, but the color blends in well, and I bet they’re more stable out in the ocean.”
“I’m not so sure about taking these out where there’s waves, but I’ve never seen the ocean yet,” I admit.
“I hear waves aren’t bad, if you hit them head-on, but if you let them hit you in the side, you’re gonna roll over,” he tells me.
‘There’s alligators here in the river, and there’s sharks out in the ocean, so I ain’t taking no chances of rolling over,’ I think. The holder for fishing poles that goes from right beside me on the right, up under the front of the kayak also works perfect for my rifle. Adrian is already out in the middle of the waterway when I shove away from shore at the launch. I glide up behind him and say, “This is really mucky and yucky compared to the river. I’d hate to roll over in this crap!”
“No doubt,” he says, �
�look over there.” Where he’s pointing, there are several gator snouts poking just above the murk. “You can’t even see their bodies in this. No wonder they like to hunt water birds in here.”
We slip quietly past them while the sun rises higher in the sky. More and more sounds surround us. Most I recognize, but there are definitely a few that I’m curious about. Flying insects begin coming out in swarms. Luckily, none of them bother with us. I remember while Mom and Dad paddled and poled our way to the cabin that they were inundated by mosquitos and biting flies, but it was like I was invisible to them. We had marveled at that. Anyplace there is a dry spot or something floating, there is at least one turtle on it. Some are covered with them. All shapes and sizes, just like everywhere in the Glades. I often wondered when I was small, just how many turtles there are here. I realize now that I don’t know numbers high enough to possibly count how many!
The waterway turns to the right, and we come across the abandoned boat from the attackers we’d killed. How we’d missed seeing it yesterday on our walk, I don’t know. “We need to decide what to do with that soon,” I tell Adrian quietly.
“Yeah, leaving it there is no good. We at least need to move it somewhere else,” he agrees. “We should keep that in mind as we go.”
The waterway curves back to the left, pretty much the same way it had been going before it took this jog. “I wonder what the purpose of doing that while dredging was?” I ask, thinking out loud.
“Probably the same reason as the drive at the homestead,” he answered, “to limit visibility. Look!” he pointed.
Ahead, the man-made waterway made a ‘T’ into a larger, natural one. We know from the map that the river to the homestead will be to the right. We know that Sunny’s place is marked as location 7, we made the bridge location 8, and we know that there is a location 6 to the left from here, but Sunny hadn’t known what it was. “We’re way ahead of schedule it looks like Sarah Mae,” he says, “wanna sneak over to location 6 and see what it is? It shouldn’t be too far from here.”
“Sure,” I say, “but we need to be extra quiet and slow. No telling what or who may be there.” I didn’t want to tell him how noisy he is in a kayak, but I needed to let him know to try harder. I take the lead, hoping that doesn’t hurt his man-pride, but it needed to be done. The waterway curves to the right as far ahead as we can see, so I guide us over to the right side, close to the edge. I turn to him and put my finger to my lips, signaling for quiet, and move ahead at a crawl. What we’d seen, we discovered, was the first of the small openings, or ponds that are all connected up by this waterway which we had seen on the map. Now I wish I could remember how many of them there were before it comes to location 6. “Adrian,” I whisper, “how many of these ponds were on the map before location 6?”
He looks down and to the right, and then whispers, “Four.”
“Are you sure?” He shakes his head yes. I lead us directly across the middle of this one, and the next two, going very slow and quietly. At the fourth opening, I lead us around the right edge. Suddenly, we can hear voices ahead and to the right of us. We stop where we are and just listen. They aren’t on the same waterway that we are; they’re too far away to the right. I whisper to Adrian, “Was there another waterway or river near this one?” He shakes his head yes again, and points out towards the direct that the voices are coming from. We can make out three different adult male heirloom voices. It sounds like they’re giving directions to someone to ‘hurry up and get it loaded.’ Then there are scraping sounds of something heavy on metal, like maybe a boat. Sure enough, after a couple of minutes of listening, an outboard motor starts up and begins moving away further yet to our right. Now we can only hear one voice barking orders. “Two of whoever it is out there must have left in a boat going towards the river,” I whisper to him. He shakes his head yes again. I look around us at the edge. Just ahead I see more brush than sawgrass, so I’m thinking there’s at least some semi-solid ground. “You stay here and be super still and quiet,” I whisper to him, I’m gonna get out and sneak over that way and see what I can see.” He makes a face, looks down, then shakes his head yes again.
After stalking the voice for a few minutes, staying very low to the ground, lower than the height of the grass, and using all of my stealth skills Dad had taught me, I get very close. I can hear the occasional direction being given by a male that sounds like a black heirloom. Listening, and not moving, I am sure I can hear the voices of hybrid kids talking quietly, or singing. That’s it; singing. I make my way to a thick clump of brush, putting it directly between me and the heirloom voice. Slowly I stand up behind the brush. I was right. There’s a heavy black man sitting in a chair, with a shotgun across his lap, facing away from me. Out beyond him are several hybrid kids tending to a very small fire under some sort of copper colored contraption. Now I can smell the smoke, and something else that stinks. There’s a long copper colored pipe that comes out of the top of whatever the fire is heating, and goes into a big glass container. I don’t know what this is. I’ve never seen anything like this before. Past this one, there are two more contraptions just like the first one, each with several hybrid kids tending them.
I hear hybrid girls’ voices to the right of the man in the chair. There’s a shack there camouflaged really well, but the wisp of smoke coming out of the chimney gives it away to me. Studying it for a moment, I figure out that what I am seeing is bars over the windows! ‘Holy shit! I gotta get out of here,’ I think.
I make my way back to where Adrian waits. He looks super relieved to see me. I put my finger to my lips again, making sure he sees it, then slip back into my kayak, and lead the way back out the way we had come here.
Not until we reach the “T” in the waterway, do I stop and tell Adrian what I’d seen. He can tell I’m scared, I’m sure. Then I start paddling for Sunny’s place at a quick pace…
5
Adrian:
Once we got to the river, it was about the same distance upstream to the bridge as it is from the bridge down the road to the new place. ‘We really need to come up with a name for it,’ I think. Then it’s just a short distance to Sunny’s. We pull up to her dock, and Donald opens the door to greet us.
“Hey Adrian! Hey Sarah Mae!” The dork acts like he hasn’t seen us in a month or something. ‘Jeez!’
“Hello Donald,” Sarah Mae hollers. “Let’s carry these behind the cabin Adrian. We can leave these two here, and walk back to the kayak base camp.”
“That’s it!” I say, excitedly.
“What’s it?” Donald asks.
“We can call the new place Base Camp!”
“Ooh! I like that,” says Sara Mae.
We tell the others what’s gone on with us since they’d seen us; well, most of it anyhow. Donald likes the idea of having a rabbit herd. He’d eaten rabbit at our place in Michigan and really liked it. When we get to the part about what we’d done this morning, Sarah Mae describes what she’d seen in detail.
When she tells about the contraptions, Sunny says, “That’s a still! They’s makin’ Shine there. You know, booze! You’d better be careful, and stay away from there. It’s highly illegal, what they doin’, and they won’t take kindly to no kids knowin’ where they are. They might shoot y’all.”
“Well that’s just it,” Sarah Mae told them, “they have at least a dozen hybrid kids there, as prisoners. The big black man was watching over the boys tending the stills, as you call them Sunny, with an old double barreled shotgun. The girls were inside a shack that had bars on the windows, cooking something and singing.”
“Well dat part ain’t illegal. Remember, they passed the law sayin’ hybrids is property…” Sunny began.
“Not around these parts we’re not. Nobody is gonna make slaves out of our kind while I’m alive!” I huffed. ‘Really? Did I really just say our kind? I sound like Dad!’ “I have to think on this, but we have to do something about it.”
Maya says, “Well nothing exciting happened
at the homestead. It’s been awful quiet with just the two of us there.”
“Hey Sunny? Do you know how to operate an electric powered washing machine and drying machine?” Sarah Mae asked.
“Sure child, why?”
“I do too,” Maya added. “It’s easy.”
“Well, there is one of each at Base Camp, but we don’t know what to do with them. Can we all walk over there, and learn how to use them?”
“Sure!” Sunny and Maya say at the same time. “We’ll even bring some laundry to demonstrate with,” Maya says, winking at Sunny. Do you think it’s safe to walk the road in the daylight now Adrian?”
“Yeah, we’ll have to start sometime. We just wanna be careful about anyone seeing us coming out of this road to the highway,” I tell them all. “Besides Sunny, I think you’re gonna really like this place,” I made sure to add.
~
When we get back to base camp, all six of us walking, we see three hybrid kids sitting on the steps going up to the office. They see four of us carrying weapons, so they all put their hands up. “Can we help you?” I ask. Donald moves up beside me. ‘Good move Donald! You’re learning.’
“Hi,” says the girl, who is older than the two boys. “Steve and Tom said if we could find Adrian, he’d help us. Are one of you him?”
“I am,” I say. “Did anyone see you come back here?”
“No. We haven’t seen anyone all day. Not even a car.”
“That’s good,” I say, “and yes, we’ll help you. Let’s all go upstairs, and we’ll talk.”
“Would you kids like something to eat, and drink?” Sarah Mae asks them. “Follow me into the kitchen, and we’ll get you something!”
Everyone except Donald and I go inside. “We need to figure out a way to free those kids Sarah Mae found, Donald.”
THE TRIBE 2 (GENETIC APOCALYPSE - THE TRIBE) Page 2
