“Give me a bite,” she says, digging into my can of dog food with her long-nailed index finger.
She slurps down the dog food and smiles at the flavor. Although it originally seemed like Pippi was forcing us to eat the McDogfood as a way to humiliate us, I now realize that this is the food she must have been eating from a can earlier in the day. Out in the wasteland, they are probably used to eating whatever they can get their hands on.
Although he looks like he could eat anything, Pete is the only one who can’t stomach the dog food. Guy and Krall shovel the food into their mouths as fast as they can so that they don’t have to taste much of it. They only eat it because they both know that they need to keep up their strength.
“Where’d they get the McDonaldland food?” Pete asks Krall.
Slayer kicks his food out of his hands. “No talking, Meat.”
The can of McDogfood splatters across the dirt. Pete seems almost happy he doesn’t have to eat it until Slayer says, “Now lick it off the ground.”
She points down at the food in the dirt. Pete obeys. As he eats the slimy meat on the ground like an animal, Pippi laughs at his enormous butt facing them.
“We got the food from you,” Slayer tells him. “Our big sisters attack the McDonaldland vehicles. They eat the drivers and leave us the food and supplies the vehicles were transporting.”
“We also capture any men that survive the attack,” Pippi says. “But our big sisters usually eat them all up.”
After they get bored with humiliating Pete, they stop paying attention to us. They pretend we’re not sitting right next to them, even though the conversation revolves around what Pippi is going to do to me.
“I don’t smell Tessa at all,” Pippi says. “I don’t think she’s coming.”
Although I listen to their conversation, I focus more on trying to spot the girl in the metal bikini. I have to know for sure whether or not it is Nova. I watch every biker wolf girl as they walk around the camp, fixing their vehicles and moving supplies.
“You should have him work for you or rent him out,” Slayer says. “That’s what I’m going to do with mine.”
“That’s boring,” Pippi says.
“If you’re going to kill him,” Slayer says, “you should make use of him first. Play with him. Trade nights with them for some food or gas rations. You always waste them too soon.”
“I hate sharing,” Pippi says, rubbing her claws along the back of my neck as she examines me closely. “But I always wanted to keep one around for a while, to make the fun last longer.”
I don’t look at Pippi as she digs one of her claws deep into the skin between my neck and collar bone. She smiles and watches me carefully as I wince at the pain. It pleasures her into twisting her nail deeper, causing a stream of blood to trickle down my chest. When she sees the blood it makes her giggle.
She licks the blood from my neck with her long dog tongue, as I continue to scan the camp in search for Nova. I try not to respond too much to what she is doing, because I know it would only make her want to escalate the pain. I don’t see the girl in the metal bikini, perhaps because it is so dark, but I keep watching.
Because I don’t react, Pippi removes her nail and continues to speak to Slayer.
“How many times do you have to have sex with them before you can get a baby?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” Slayer says, cleaning her machine gun. “I’ve never had a baby. Maybe you do it once. Maybe a dozen times. Why would you want to have a baby anyway?”
“It would be fun,” she says. “I always wanted to have a baby.”
“You would be a terrible mom,” Slayer says.
Pippi’s whiskers quiver as a pissy expression crosses her face. “I would be a great mom!”
“Your kid wouldn’t survive a week,” Slayer says. “You’d get bored with it after a few days and then get rid of it.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“Or you’d forget about it and leave it in the hot sun until it baked to death.”
“You’re wrong,” Pippi says, licking my blood from her claw. “I’d be the best mom. My kid would kick ass.”
Slayer just laughs at her. “Actually, that would be a sight to see a little Pippi running around with you. She’d be a little terror.”
“See!” Pippi says. “I’d even teach her to throw knives as good as me. She’d be throwing knives into everything!”
“Grandma would be so pissed.” Slayer laughs. “She just got you to restrict your knife-throwing to the trees. Now that I think about it, I don’t think the Warriors could handle having another Pippi around here.”
“They’ll just have to deal with it,” Pippi says. “Baby Pippi is going to come whether they like it or not.”
The two of them look at me and I accidentally look back. They both smirk at the look on my face, which I believe they are interpreting as fear.
“Oh, poor Meat,” Slayer says, smacking my shoulder with her paw. “I almost feel sorry for you.”
A large brown wolf girl, who looks more like she is turning into a grizzly bear than a wolf, approaches our campfire.
“I heard you got some Meat,” she says to the wolf girls. “Can I use one for the night?”
“No,” Pippi stands up. “You can’t use mine.”
The grizzly girl looks down at Pippi. “I wasn’t talking to you.” Then looks at Slayer. “How much?”
“Five cans of food,” Slayer says.
“Five?” the grizzly girl snarls.
“And five gallons of gas.”
The fur on the back of the enormous wolf girl stands up.
“I’ll give you two gallons of gas and three cans of food,” she says.
“No deal, Alyssa,” Slayer says. “I’m not haggling with you.”
Alyssa, the large wolf woman, bares her teeth. In an aggressive stance, she tries to intimidate Slayer into cutting down her price. Slayer, nearly half the size of this monstrous woman, casually cleans her gun and doesn’t appear to be threatened in the slightest.
“So do you want it or not?” Slayer says.
Alyssa relaxes her posture. “Fine.”
“Great.” Slayer looks up at Alyssa and leans her gun against my back. I consider grabbing it, and turning it on them, but quickly change my mind. “Do you want the skinny one or the fat one?”
The grizzly woman looks between me and Pete. She doesn’t realize that her choice is between Pete and Krall, but I am the skinniest of the four men so I can understand her confusion.
“I’ll take the fat one,” she says, salivating. “He’ll make a good snack if I turn.”
The look on Pete’s face is one of shock as well as confusion. I don’t think he realizes what is in store for him. He watches the back of the grizzly woman as she walks away.
“If you turn,” Slayer yells, “I get to keep all of your stuff.”
Alyssa yells back, “I’ll pick him up when I’m ready.”
Pippi and Slayer see the look of terror on Pete’s face and they laugh.
“This is going to be fun,” Pippi says, giggling.
On the way back to the cages, Pippi decides to take the long way around to show me off to more of the wolf girls. She takes me by the leash and jerks on it hard so that it chokes me in front of them. She aims for a particularly large group of wolf women, all of them standing around snarling and laughing as they speak. I look for the girl in the metal bikini in the group, but I can only see their backs.
There is one girl who seems like it might be her. It looks as if she is wearing a bikini because most of her back is exposed. She seems less wolf-like than the others. She has short black hair and dark skin, just as Nova did. There is a strip of fur going down her back and ending at a small tail just beginning to form. It is more of a cat tail than a wolf tail.
I keep my eyes on that girl. As we pass, the girl turns around and walks away from the crowd. She walks right in front of me. It doesn’t look like the Nova I remember, but there is something incredibly fam
iliar about her. I can’t place it. When she gets closer to me, I figure out what it is. She looks like Nova’s mother.
“November?” I say to her.
The girl stops and looks at me. I study her. She looks like she has changed quite a bit since I saw her last, but I swear it is her. Her face and neck seem longer, and her chin more pointed. Her eyes look bigger, wider. But her cheeks and lips are Nova’s. Her posture is Nova’s. Aside from her wolf eyes and ears, all the scars on her arms and belly, and the long fingernails, she looks just as she would have had she aged ten years. It’s her.
She looks at me with a questioning face.
“Nova?” I ask. “Is it really you?”
She cocks her head at me as a confused dog would.
“Yeah,” she says. Her voice is Nova’s.
Pippi gets annoyed that I’m talking and yanks on my collar. I resist her.
“It’s me!” I cry. “Daniel!”
She cocks her head slightly the other way, examining me.
“You’re not allowed to talk anyone else, Meat!” Pippi says, yanking the choke collar so hard that it feels like my neck is going to break.
“Don’t you remember me?” I ask.
She just shakes her head.
Pippi grabs me by my second upper arm, digs her claws into my flesh, and drags me away from Nova. I try to resist, but her animal strength overpowers mine.
I watch Nova walk away, toward her tent.
“You know me, November,” I yell across the camp, catching the glares of the wolf women around me. “You were my Novey.”
When she hears the word Novey, she freezes in her tracks. As Pippi drags me away, I see Nova turn around and look at me. Her mouth dropped wide open. There is a look of recognition in her yellow eyes. She remembers me.
“Daniel?” she says.
It’s too far away for me to actually hear, but I believe that is what she said. She doesn’t come after me. She just watches as Pippi pulls me back to the cage.
When Nova was a teenager, she was one of the toughest kids in school. If any of the plump foosball cheerleaders made fun of her at lunchtime she would just jump up on their table and kick them in the face with her yellow factory-worker boots.
If a guy made a vulgar comment about her sexuality she would slam his kneecap into the pavement by jumping on the back of his legs butt-first. If there were a whole group of foosball players who wanted to bully her she wouldn’t back off. She would just go after their leader and pop him in the face with her tiny bony fists repeatedly until his lips were bloody. If the others tried to pull her off of him she would elbow them in the eye and squirm out of their grips. She said she wasn’t afraid of them because they were way too out of shape to do anything about it. She said all she had to do was run away and they wouldn’t be able to catch her.
Now that I know Nova is in the camp with me, I feel a lot safer. Although I was in pretty good shape, too, I wasn’t the aggressive type. If a foosball player made fun of me I would just take it, walk away, and laugh it off. But I felt safe when I was with my Novey. She taught me how to be brave and confident. Just knowing that she is nearby, after all these years, is filling me with a bravery and confidence that I haven’t felt since the day we were separated. She has always been my inner strength.
The day I lost her, much of my inner strength was cut away from me. It was a shock to hear she had been raped. It seemed impossible. If any woman could protect herself from an attacker it would have been Nova. She could take on the entire foosball team single-handed. But they said the guy had a gun. I guess she couldn’t outrun or outfight a guy with a gun no matter how good of shape she was in. It still pains me to this day to know this happened to her.
When I tell my brother that November is still alive and living in this camp, he just grunts and rubs his mustache. It is as if the information is not news to him.
After an hour, Slayer, Pippi, and a new wolf girl, who has short boyish hair and about a dozen piercings in her face, take us out of our cage.
They release Guy, Krall, and I, but as Pete is about to leave, Slayer says, “You stay.”
She only has to hold out her black paw to get him to obey. I notice that although her hands are mostly human-shaped, her palm has black pads on them like that of a dog. The rest of her hands are coated in dark fur and her thick dog-like nails are also black.
Slayer closes Pete in the cage. A few more wolf girls come forward and pick up the cage, with Pete still inside, and carry it over their shoulders to the center of the camp.
I look at my brother and Krall. They just shrug at me. The wolf girl with the piercings pokes at us with a jagged saw-toothed sword, indicating that we have to follow after our masters carrying the cage.
When Pippi and Slayer put it down in the center of the camp, they leash us and back us away from the cage. They make us kneel at their feet. Sitting in the dirt, with Pippi hovering over me, I watch Pete curled up in the middle of the cage as a crowd gathers around him. Pippi cups her hands around the back of my neck, fidgeting with my collar, as she watches over my head.
The entire camp seems to have gathered, creating a circle around the cage. All of them are at complete attention and grow more and more silent. The only one not paying attention is the little girl, Ashley, who sits down in front of Guy and pulls out a bag of marbles. She pulls out marbles one at a time and shows them to my brother, but my brother completely ignores her, too focused on Pete to acknowledge her presence.
After a long moment of silence, three women make their way through the crowd to the cage. One is Alyssa, who is now wearing an ornate purple robe. It is the only clean article of clothing I have seen anyone wear in this camp since I arrived. The one to Alyssa’s right is Talon, the second in command of the Warriors of the Wild. The one to Alyssa’s left is an old woman. She must be the leader. She is older than any woman I have ever seen. She is half wolf, with long gray hair covering all of her body except her eyes and wrinkled black lips. She must be seventy years old, or maybe older.
I scan the crowd and lock eyes with Nova. She is standing in the crowd on the opposite side of the cage, staring at me. I look at her and try to communicate with my eyes, by winking at her. She winks back at me. First she winks with her right eye, then she winks with her left. Then she smiles. I think she is trying to show me that she remembers who I am. Even though she hardly looks the same, I feel like I’m looking at my old Novey. I can’t help but smile back.
Pippi realizes what is going on and pulls my shoulders backwards, pressing the back of my head hard against her crotch. She stares down Nova until she breaks eye contact with me. Then she leans down and whispers in my ear.
“Don’t you dare make a sound when Grandma is talking,” Pippi says.
Grandma steps forward and gives a speech:
“In the walled city, women are forced to suppress their natural urges. We are told when we can have sex, how many times we can have sex, who we are allowed to have sex with, and that’s if we are permitted to have sex at all. We are taught that female sexuality is something that must be controlled and feared. But here, out in the wild, we are free. We release our inner desires. The beasts within us are not to be feared, they are to be embraced. We will not allow our souls to be locked away, covered up, or forced out. This is our strength. This beast is the physical manifestation of our feral souls, the wild passion that defines our femininity, the keen sensing, and the creative playful spirit. This is our destiny. We belong to the wild.”
She pulls Alyssa next to her. The large woman stands a good two or three feet higher than Grandma.
“Today, Alyssa will go one step closer to releasing her inner spirit. She will unleash her boundless passion without the need of permits or marriage. Perhaps this day will be the day her inner soul will completely break free of its bonds, and she will be able to join our big sisters in the freedom of the night.”
After she is done, all of the women stomp their feet and howl. Their howls are not at all the sam
e as wolf howls. They basically just sound the same as humans making howling sounds.
Grandma takes the robe from Alyssa, as Talon opens the door of the cage. Alyssa’s hairy mass is almost too big to fit through the door of the cage. When the door closes, the wolf women howl again.
Pete is curled in a ball on the opposite side of the cage. The look on his face is the most horrified I have ever seen on a human being. His biggest phobia is about to come true. He is about to be raped by the biggest, most beast-like woman he has ever seen. And he doesn’t know if he’s going to get out alive. It hurts me to watch him as he snivels and shakes at the sight of her.
Pete is the biggest guy I have ever known. He is not the tallest or the most muscular, just really fat. He has more body mass than any man I’ve known in McDonaldland. But now, seeing him in the cage with Alyssa, he looks tiny. Nearly half her size. Since Pete is nearly twice my size, I couldn’t imagine how I’d look if I were in the cage with her. I’d be only a quarter her size.
On all fours, she circles the cage toward him, teasing him, eyes locked on him, pretending she is already a complete wolf and that he is her prey. Her teeth chatter as she growls at him. He quivers at her. Then she attacks. He cries out as she lunges at him. She grabs him by the ankle and tugs him into the center of the cage, then pins him down. Once on top, he looks even smaller.
The crowd cheers. Alyssa seems to be putting on a show for everyone. She rips off Pete’s clothes with her teeth, growling and snarling at him. To toy with him, she shreds each article of his clothing one at a time as soon as she removes them. Pippi laughs above me as Pete shrieks.
Once his clothes are gone, the girls laugh at the look of Pete naked. He’s just a big pink ball of blubber. The women around me seem to be salivating, their wolf sides seeing him as a big piece of meat. Pete is more like a juicy cheeseburger to them.
“Get that fat boy!” Slayer yells.
Pippi giggles at that.
When his small boy-sized third leg is revealed, Alyssa grabs it with her jaws and playfully thrashes it around like a rabbit. Pete cries out in horror. He doesn’t seem to realize that she’s just messing with him.
Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland Page 7
