Brown, Berengaria - Future Revealed [Embrace the Future 2] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour)
Page 1
Embrace the Future 2
Future Revealed
Ruby, Pagan, and Koby are lonely, missing the community they left and the friendship of the people from the valley. As they collect supplies for winter, they decide to get extra and visit the valley, taking them some food and maybe animals to help them.
But first they have to hide from a group of motorcyclists looking to raid settlements for food and women. The trio’s next stop is an abandoned farm, where they find some useful things, including some animals and a truck to transport them back to their warehouse home.
They stay in the warehouse during winter, but once the weather becomes warm again they finish planning their trip to the village, adding a high-sided utility trailer to their vehicles to transport fuel for the people.
Danger is everywhere in this lawless world with food so scarce. Will they even survive the journey?
Genre: Futuristic, Ménage a Trois/Quatre, Science Fiction
Length: 20,564 words
FUTURE REVEALED
Embrace the Future 2
Berengaria Brown
MENAGE AMOUR
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
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A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK
IMPRINT: Ménage Amour
FUTURE REVEALED
Copyright © 2012 by Berengaria Brown
E-book ISBN: 978-1-61926-865-4
First E-book Publication: July 2012
Cover design by Harris Channing
All cover art and logo copyright © 2012 by Siren Publishing, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
PUBLISHER
Siren Publishing, Inc.
www.SirenPublishing.com
Letter to Readers
Dear Readers,
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Regarding E-book Piracy
This book is copyrighted intellectual property. No other individual or group has resale rights, auction rights, membership rights, sharing rights, or any kind of rights to sell or to give away a copy of this book.
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This is Berengaria Brown’s livelihood. It’s fair and simple. Please respect Ms. Brown’s right to earn a living from her work.
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DEDICATION
For B. Come on, woman, be bold. Step out of your safe little jail and claim the future!
FUTURE REVEALED
Embrace the Future 2
BERENGARIA BROWN
Copyright © 2012
Chapter One
Ruby rested on her heels, her hands on her hips, stretching her back, then sank onto her butt and extended her legs out in front of her, lifting her arms to the ceiling and rolling her shoulders. Hell, she was stiff. Deliberately she clenched and released the muscles in her legs, arms, and shoulders, rolling her head from side to side, and curling and stretching her back. Caring for the vegetables was backbreaking work, but if she wanted to eat, she didn’t have any other choice than to do the hard yards.
If we were living in a community, there’d be more people to do the work.
Yeah, smart-ass, but they’d eat the food, too, so we’d have more work to do.
But at least I could talk to them while I was working!
Sure she had Koby and Pagan to talk to, and she loved them both with all her heart, but the truth was, she was lonely. She craved other people the way she craved chocolate. Koby and Pagan were wonderful and caring, but they were only two, and she needed a community around her. Her loneliness was made worse because, for a few brief days, she’d had the group from the village to talk to, and she’d loved talking girl stuff with Adena and Zuri. Also, she knew the men had enjoyed sharing with the village men. The evenings around the fire just chatting about anything and everything had been the highlight of the past month. Hell, the past year! Apart from the awesome orgasms Pagan and Koby gave her night after night. They were spectacular, too. If only she could have the two men and a community, life would be perfect.
But their own community had hated it when the three of them had announced their intention to bond, and the only solution was to leave. The spiteful comments and hateful looks were unending and soul destroying. Especially from people she’d always thought of as her friends, women she’d grown up with. Plus they’d found the huge building and had all their crops under the one roof instead of having to move from apartment to apartment or plant outdoors and wonder if the winds would come again and poison everything. Although Zuri’s people grew all their crops outside in the ground and had no trouble with illness. Zuri had said no one had died from the bad winds in a decade or longer. So could they live with Zuri? After all, she was part of a threesome arrangement with Tau and Udo.
Ruby stood up and shrugged. She’d talk to Koby and Pagan again. They’d discussed the idea in general terms. Likely it was time now to consider it seriously. She really was lonely, and the work was hard. Although the crops there grew very well, and the ones at Zuri’s village weren’t so good, which was why her people were scavenging for food and how they’d come to meet. Dammit, there was always a negative to consider!
* * * *
Koby flicked the switch for the generator to start. He and Pagan had worked on it until it was very nearly silent, but they still only used it for an hour or so at a time and on occasions like then, when they needed to bring their supplies up in the elevator. When possible, they carried everything up the four flights of stairs, but that day they had a big trolley both of them could hardly push, it was so laden with food. Winter was nearly there, and they wanted to have ample stores in case they got snowed in for weeks on end.
Nothing screamed “people” like a neatly shoveled pathway through the snow, so once the snow start
ed in earnest, they stayed inside unless it was absolutely essential to leave. Last winter had been their first winter separated from their community, and they’d had to guess what they’d need. They’d gotten it fairly accurate but had rationed their supplies toward the end, worried the snow may last too long. So this time they’d decided to err in the other direction and risk having too much stored. Besides, bags of grain wouldn’t go off. If they didn’t need it then, they could eat it later, even the next winter.
Pagan swiped his keycard over the elevator’s sensor, opening the door, and together the two men wrestled the overloaded trolley into the elevator. Koby was closest to the buttons, and he swiped his card and pressed four, the top floor of the warehouse and their living quarters.
The bottom two floors were as empty and derelict as Koby could make them, the floors covered with dust and dirt. Koby even kept a pile of leaves near the door, so they could brush over their footprints when they had to go to the engine-room and turn the elevator on, such as then.
The third floor was sealed off with a heavy, metal-reinforced door, and that was where they grew all their vegetables and stored their water in half a dozen brand-new swimming pools. They collected rainwater from the roof of the warehouse and sent it through a number of filters, before it filled each swimming pool in turn. When they were all full, Koby could redirect the water to run onto the ground as if the drainpipes were broken or rusted through.
At first they’d thought of collecting snow, but this was a much less labor-intensive system. It was Ruby who’d seen the factory where the swimming pools were made, and Ruby again who’d suggested they use the company’s own transporter to bring them there. Getting them in the elevator had been tricky. They’d measured the pools and the elevator carefully, choosing a size and shape of pool that would fit in the elevator. But they’d forgotten to allow for the trolley and themselves and had ended up with Pagan climbing inside the pool as the only way to get the door shut.
After they’d made the trip six times, they’d all agreed that would have to be enough water. “I’d rather give up washing forever than do it again,” Pagan had groaned. But they’d never even used up four at any one time, so everything was fine.
They’d destroyed the staircase from the third floor up to the fourth floor, and the only external entry to the fourth floor was via the elevator, which only worked for someone who knew where the generator was, how to turn it on, and had a swipe card to make the elevator move. There were two internal staircases from the third floor to the fourth though, one at each end of the building. Koby had bolted steel panels over where the now-ruined internal staircases from the second floor to the third had been, so the building was as secure as they could make it. They’d worked damn hard to make it their own little haven and to provide for their needs and had no intention of other people taking it away from them. They’d never seen raiders in the area, but they’d heard plenty of stories about them, and planned on taking no risks they could possibly avoid.
As Koby wrestled the trolley out of the elevator at the fourth floor, he thought of the huge amount of work they’d done to make it a safe haven as well as a home. But being with the people from the village had made it blindingly obvious how lonely they all were. They craved companionship, but they couldn’t just advertise their presence, as there were still gangs around that would steal all their supplies before raping and murdering them all. Yet their own community had been cruel and unkind when the three of them had decided to bond. A community like Arthur’s would be ideal, but they were short of food. It seemed the leaders had been trying to hide how ill-managed the village was, and now the people were hungry. Once he’d known that, he’d noticed how thin everyone was. Not just slim and healthy, but underweight.
He, Pagan, and Ruby had done what they could to help them, but the people only had the one truck, and they needed other things as well as food. The people had crammed as many bags of grain as they could in the truck though. And now they knew the location of the grain warehouse and the farm where there were lots of chickens and some sheep, they could always come back. Likely not until the next fall though. Travel in winter was too dangerous, and in spring and summer they’d be too busy in the fields with their crops.
Koby threw off his thoughts and helped Pagan manhandle their own overloaded trolley through the door and into their home. The fourth floor was their living quarters. They had a big living room, with a bunch of equipment they’d liberated from a gym on one side, shelves of books on another, and a long table where they could work or do craft projects in the middle. After the living room was a kitchen and dining area. A storeroom led off to one side, and that’s where they were headed. Shelf after shelf was full of preserved vegetables and cans of food they’d collected on their scavenging trips. Bags of grain were stacked neatly on the floor by type, rice, corn, wheat.
Another shelf had spices and sauces, and there was a small section with Ruby’s stock of cookies and chocolate. Koby noticed she had only one chocolate bar left. They needed to find her some more, but it wasn’t easy. Maybe the three of them could go on a little journey and travel to some new areas they hadn’t visited before. There was sure to be untouched food stores somewhere. They’d deliberately moved ten miles from their old community, so they were unlikely to cross paths in their everyday lives. Most people lived as close as possible to a food source and a river or lake. By coming over there, they’d had to build their own water storage, but it was worth it to have the freedom to love each other and such a perfect new home.
After storing the food, the two men walked down the stairs and into their own little farm. Row after row of metal trays were filled with tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, peppers, corn, beans, carrots, onions, and potatoes. Plastic tubing ran along each tray with tiny holes in it, forming an elementary drip watering system. High windows let in plenty of light, and because the temperature remained mild except in the middle of winter, they were able to have two crops a year. Three of sturdy things like carrots and onions.
They also had a row of fruit trees in big pots, but it’d be another two years before they had fruit, maybe even three or four years. The floor area wasn’t crowded. They could easily add another row of metals trays, likely even two if they moved them all closer together, but that would only feed two or three more people, not enough to be a real community.
Koby shrugged his thoughts off yet again and hurried down the rows of peppers to where Ruby had looked up from her work and smiled at them.
“Got plenty of grain?” she asked.
“More than enough for winter,” affirmed Pagan, giving her a hug.
Koby stood behind Pagan, wrapping his long arms around both Pagan and Ruby. They were his family, his community, and at times like that, he cherished their presence and their love.
Pagan was just a few inches shorter than him, with a stocky, muscled body and brown hair and eyes. Ruby was four inches shorter again, also with brown hair, but hers was long and curly, and her eyes were more hazel than brown. He loved the way they changed color when she was happy or sad. They truly were the windows of her soul.
“So what’s for supper?” Ruby asked.
“We went through the drive-through pizza place,” joked Pagan.
Pizza was his favorite food, and often when it was his turn to cook, they knew that’s what they’d get. But fast-food outlets, or working shops of any kind, were very rare those days. There were too few people left, and of the ones that were around, too many of them were more inclined to just take what they wanted instead of buying it.
It was strange to think even five years ago there’d still been factories and shops operating their businesses. But not now. Not for four years anywhere he knew of. Things could be different in other states, Koby guessed, but there’d been no really functional central government in his lifetime. From the stories the oldest people in their former community had told, when the disease-laden winds had struck more than fifty years ago, the government had been the first to flee
to underground bunkers or distant, safe areas. But no one had died from the winds in years, a decade even, and the winds seldom blew like that anymore. Surely it was time for the government to take control again?
Ruby and Pagan were discussing what they’d cook for supper, and Koby followed them back up the stairs to their apartment. He set the coffee percolating, warming their two big thermoses to save hot coffee for later that night after the generator had been turned off.
While supper was cooking, they each took a shower. Koby was last, and he filled the tub with hot water when he finished so they could wash again later. The water would have cooled some, but it should still be warm enough.
His favorite time of day was when they were all in bed together, and as soon as they’d eaten, he’d turn off the generator, and they’d go to bed.
* * * *
Pagan lay on the bed, idly tugging on his cock as he waited for Koby and Ruby to finish undressing and join him. He knew Koby was worrying about something. His mind had been wandering almost all afternoon. Pagan was confident he could get Koby to talk about it after few good orgasms had relaxed them all. Pagan wasn’t concerned. He was sure they’d work out whatever difficulty Koby had discovered—or imagined. Koby was the thinker and worrier in their family. Pagan was much more relaxed about everything. The world had been in a mess all of his life and for a long time before he was even born, and somehow or other, they’d survived, coped, and made their own family and their own happiness. He was certain they’d get over whatever roadblock Koby was agonizing about, too.