Krall obeys.
She gets on her bike and re-straps him to her chest, crushing his wrists with her paws as she binds him.
“If you ever free yourself from my bonds again I will kill you,” she tells him.
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I say, “He just saved your life!”
She looks at me with a snarl and says, “I didn’t ask him to do anything for me.”
Then she starts her bike and rides it out of the woods.
Once we all get out of the forest, we see the wolves taking apart the vans to get at the mutant prisoners inside. Unlike Krall and myself, these deformed citizens aren’t making it out alive. A couple of them run for the woods, but they have even more limbs than any of the mutants from yesterday. They just aren’t agile enough to get very far.
In the back of the feeding frenzy, I see half a dozen smaller wolves have joined the pack. I recognize the smallest one. It is Alyssa. With the other smaller wolves, she is scavenging for severed limbs that the bigger wolves leave behind.
The other Warrior vehicles have retreated.
“Come on,” Talon says. “We’ll let our big sisters have their meal. Then we’ll come back later to claim the leftovers.”
Then we rejoin the group.
Pippi pulls up alongside Slayer to see how she’s doing. Slayer smiles, pretending she’s perfectly fine.
“I got two of them,” she says. “How many did you get?”
“Three,” Pippi says.
Slayer laughs. “No, you didn’t.”
“I did!” Pippi says.
Slayer looks over at me.
“How many men did she kill?” she asks me.
I think it over for a second, but decide to tell the truth.
“None,” I say.
Slayer laughs loudly, closing her eyes and laying her head back in Krall’s face.
Pippi grumbles.
“Oh, you’re so dead,” she tells me. “I’m not going to keep you around long enough to impregnate me anymore.”
Slayer keeps laughing, kicking her leather boot into the air.
The wolf girls set up a new camp in the woods. Many of the girls are huddled around Grandma, who says a prayer for their fallen sister, Mars. The wolf girl’s body is in a pile of gasoline-soaked wood, about to be lit on fire. Venus cries the most. The multi-colored wolf girl, Athena, holds Venus and rubs her green fur.
Pippi doesn’t seem to give a crap about paying her respects to Mars. She is still fuming at me for telling Slayer the truth. Because I’m her property, she thinks I should be on her side.
After Talon, Casper, and a caravan of Warrior vehicles return with the McDonaldland supplies left over from the wolf attack, they ration out the booty to all women, even those who did not participate in the attack.
Pippi separates her share into halves, puts the smaller half into a sack, and throws it at Slayer like a brat.
“If my bike didn’t stall out at the beginning I would have beat you,” Pippi says to Slayer.
Slayer smiles with her fangs and sticks her hairy face into the sack of goods.
“You should take better care of your things,” Slayer says.
Pippi tugs on my choke collar and takes me toward the cage.
“Pippi,” Nova calls out behind us.
Pippi stops and turns around.
“I want to cut a deal with you,” she says.
“Get lost, Nova,” Pippi says. “I’m not in the mood.”
“I want your Meat,” she says.
“I won’t share,” Pippi says. “Go talk to Slayer if you want to rent some Meat.”
“I don’t want to rent,” Nova says. “I want to buy.”
Pippi’s face becomes even pissier.
Nova points to her vehicle. There is a yellow Fry Guy strapped to the hood. I think it was the one who crashed into a tree and thrown through the windshield.
“I’ll trade you this Meat for five others,” she says. “This one I have captured will be the down payment. I’ll get you the other four within a month.”
Pippi looks at the yellow Fry Guy and sneers. “No deal.”
“Why not?” Nova asks.
“I like this one,” she says. “He’s mine.”
“But this one is a Fry Guy,” she says. “He’s worth more.”
Pippi looks at the other man. “He’s damaged.”
Nova goes over to the man on the hood. She twists the man’s broken arm and he shrieks in agony. “But this one is in pain. You like them when they are in pain.”
“I like causing the damage myself,” she says. “I like them fresh.”
“The next four will be fresh,” Nova says.
“No,” Pippi says.
“Then I’ll give you ten more,” Nova says.
“No,” Pippi says.
“I’ll give you all of the men I capture for the next five years.”
“No,” Pippi says. “I like capturing them myself. I like damaging them myself. I have no interest in anyone else’s Meat.”
Nova exhales furiously.
“Look, Pippi,” Nova says. “I’ll tell you the truth. I know him. We grew up together in the walled city. He is not like the other men. He is good. I don’t want him to die.”
Pippi smiles.
“I promise, I’ll do anything you want. I’ll give you half of my rations for a year. Anything. Just let me have him.”
Pippi looks at me and licks her fangs. “You were lovers in the walled city, weren’t you? You were boyfriend and girlfriend.”
“He was like my brother,” Nova says.
“You love him,” Pippi says.
Nova puts her hands on her hips.
“Okay,” Nova says. “Yeah, I loved him. If I would have stayed in the city we might have been married. Please, let me have him.”
Pippi giggles. “No way!”
“Please!” Nova looks as if she is going to hit her.
“He’s mine now,” Pippi says. “I’ll do whatever I want with him.”
“I’ll have Grandma convince you to sell him to me,” Nova says.
Pippi leans in close to Nova’s ear and whispers, “He probably won’t last that long.”
Then Pippi walks away, giggling, yanking on my choke collar as hard as she can so that Nova hears me whine.
Pippi takes me back to the cage with Krall and Guy. Guy is pretending to be asleep, probably so that the little girl doesn’t ask him to play with her again. Krall is stitching up the hole in his stomach. Nova comes by shortly after to deliver her new Meat to the cage. The yellow Fry Guy looks to be in bad shape. He isn’t bleeding very much, but he’s incredibly banged up from the car accident. Nova tosses him in the cage like he’s just a sack of potatoes. Krall stops working on himself and goes to the aid of the Fry Guy.
Nova looks at me with her solemn wolf eyes as she closes the cage door. “I’m sorry,” she says. “There’s nothing I can do.”
She breaks eye contact and rubs her black wet nose.
“That’s it?” I ask. “You’re not going to ask Grandma?”
“It wouldn’t do any good,” she says.
“You’re just going to let her kill me?”
She takes a deep breath and steps back.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “You’re her property. She can do whatever she wants with you. It’s against the law for me to even be speaking to you without her permission.”
Before I can say anything else to her, she turns her back and walks away. I watch her as she moves toward her tent. She really isn’t my Novey anymore. From behind, she doesn’t resemble her in the slightest. The stripe of fur going down her back, the black ears sticking from her head, the fuzzy tail. She is more interested in embracing her animal side than reclaiming her human past. Even the way she steps through the weeds is more animal than human.
Krall shakes his head as he examines the Fry Guy. The man is in a delirious state. He doesn’t know what is going on around him.
“He’s not going t
o make it,” Krall says. “I don’t think he will last the night.”
“What’s wrong with him?” I ask.
“For starters, his spine is broken,” Krall says. “Some major organs are badly damaged. They should have just put him out of his misery back there.”
Nova surely would have put him out of his misery back there, if she didn’t want to use him to trade with Pippi.
Even though it seems hopeless, Krall doesn’t stop helping the man. He resets some of his broken bones. He rips strips from his white suit to use as tourniquets. I watch him, surprised he would go through so much trouble to help this man who is surely going to die, even though he has a hole in his own stomach that still hasn’t been completely stitched up.
“Why did you do it?” I ask Krall.
He doesn’t know what I’m talking about.
“You could have escaped,” I say. “Why did you rescue that wolf girl instead of saving yourself?”
“She would have died,” he says.
“You could have gotten away.”
“I thought it would be easier to save her life than it would be to save my own,” he says.
“But she didn’t even care,” I say.
He shrugs.
Krall says there was a time when he never would have risked his own life to save another, especially not a woman. In McDonaldland, Krall was raised to believe that women were vile, disgusting, inferior creatures, who deserved to be treated like animals.
When he was young, Krall didn’t have any exposure to women. He was raised by two fathers. One of them was on The Blessed McDonald’s Corporation’s board of directors. The other was the head of Research and Development. The two men were homosexuals. It wasn’t uncommon for the citizens of McDonaldland to engage in homosexual activity, because sex between men was perfectly legal. However, it was not at all common for homosexual men to live together as if they were married.
Krall’s dads did live together and considered themselves married, even though it was not legal for two men to marry. With high positions in the McDonald’s government, these men were on a mission to change the way of life in McDonaldland. The two of them hated women. They thought women were beasts and should be treated as such. Like cattle, they wanted women to be raised on farms. They wanted men to live together, marry each other, and when they were ready to have sons, the men could impregnate a woman on one of the farms and then take the male babies from her after they’re born. Outside of carrying the children, the women would have no function. They would grow babies then be tossed into the wasteland once they became too wolf-like to manage.
This is what his fathers taught to Krall. For a long time, he believed that women were animals to be used and thrown out. He didn’t even believe they had souls.
He was privately schooled and completely sheltered from women for most of his life. His real father, the head of Research and Development, wanted him to follow in his footsteps and become a scientist. Krall agreed.
In McMedical School, Krall was the most ambitious student they had. He was ruthless, snobbish, abrasive, and an absolute genius, just as his fathers had trained him to be. He could handle any task thrown at him, and would step on any of his peers to get ahead. By the end of his schooling, there was not a single person who didn’t shrink before him in fear and respect. Even some of the teachers couldn’t help but cringe with unease when he was around. He had a way of making his superiors feel stupid.
Upon graduation, he was assigned to the parasite division of Research and Development, which mostly worked on ways to cure females of their lycanthropy. This was the first time he really interacted with females. At first, he just treated them as he would a lab rat or a cadaver. He didn’t bother speaking to them. If they tried to communicate he would inject them with something to make them too drowsy to talk.
About this time, his two fathers were separating. They fell out of love for each other and wanted to move on. This upset Krall. He never thought that his fathers would ever be apart. They meant everything to him. Out of spite, Krall told his fathers that he would never speak to either of them again until they got back together. They never got back together. Without the influence of his fathers, Krall’s perspective on life was beginning to change.
One day, Krall decided to talk to one of the women he worked on. She was a young teenaged girl who had started practicing masturbation soon after puberty. Her parents tried to pretend she was being home-schooled and hid her in their basement, but the Fry Guys eventually found out. That’s when they took her to Krall.
The girl wouldn’t shut up. She was crying so loud that Krall couldn’t hear himself think. He was about to inject her with a sedative, but then she said, “Please don’t let them send me away. I want to go home.”
Krall knew that after he was done with her, she would just be thrown out of town, most likely to her death. He had never cared before. Women were animals to him. But this time, he became intrigued and even a little saddened by her situation. He asked her about her family and about her life. He learned that, besides her wolf-like features, she was just as human as he was.
When they took her away, Krall began to feel sick. He felt as if it was his fault she was being taken away. After communicating with other females that were brought to him, he soon realized that these women were all just victims of McDonaldland society. It was the fault of The Blessed McDonald’s Corporation that they had these parasites. He
realized that his fathers only wanted to get rid of women because they thought it would be easier than curing their lycanthropy.
That’s when he promised to dedicate himself to finding a cure for the parasite. He knew that he had the power to help women like these, and so he was going to do it. He worked day and night for several years. Although he never came any closer to finding a cure, he kept trying.
Every woman that came by him he treated with complete respect and tried to make them feel as comfortable as possible. It killed him every time he had to let them go, but he quickly developed a thick skin so that he wouldn’t let his emotions get in the way of his work.
Then the male parasite was discovered and Krall was transferred to work on that project. It infuriated him to know that all of his work would just be passed on to some lesser doctor, so he decided to work on both projects at the same time. That is when he theorized that the two parasites were of the same species. But before he could come to any conclusion, he was discovered for having the deformation and was sent out of town. He says he will some day continue his research, even if he has to do so in the wasteland, even as a prisoner of the Warriors. And someday he will find a cure to bring back to McDonaldland.
He says that he recognizes a few of the Warriors from McDonaldland. They were some of the women he studied before they were sent into the wasteland. He says they haven’t recognized him yet, and he’d like to keep it that way. Even though he was pleasant with some of them, he doesn’t want them to think of him as that man. He’d rather just be Meat.
Pippi comes to the cage with a spear.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
She points the spear at me.
“This is for pissing me off,” she says.
She stabs the spear through the bars of the cage at me. I jump out of the way. She stabs again. A smile appears on her face. She giggles and sticks the spear in again, piercing it into my foot just a little.
I jump around the cage as she stabs at me. Krall pulls the yellow Fry Guy into the corner with Guy, leaving me to defend myself.
“Hop!” she cries, jabbing the spear at me. “Hop like a toad!”
The spear pierces my hip. As I wince at the pain, she sticks me again in the back. Not very deep. Just enough to draw blood.
I continue trying to dodge the spear attacks as she giggles and barks, but my movements are becoming slow. At first, I think it is because of the wounds, but then I realize even my thoughts are slowing down. I feel like I’ve been drugged.
I stop moving, sitting upright in the
center of the cage. Pippi sticks me one more time in the upper thigh.
“Nighty-night,” she says.
The spear must have been tipped with poison. My eyes are heavy. The dizziness becomes too overwhelming to fight. I fall onto the floor of the cage. The last thing I see before I close my eyes is Nova, sitting casually on top of her vehicle. She was watching as it happened and didn’t do a thing to stop it.
I awake upside-down. I’m in midair, looking down at the ground which is maybe fifty feet below. I look up at my feet. They are tied together at the ankles.
Pippi is up in the tree above, glaring down at me with a big smile. She is holding the rope that is attached to my ankles, dangling me from a branch.
“You awake now?” she asks.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I cry.
“Good,” she says.
She rings a bell.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I repeat.
She giggles at me and continues ringing the bell, looking off into the distance.
The trees crack and rumble in the direction Pippi is looking. I twist my neck so that I can get a better view. A giant wolf is coming through the forest, creeping toward us.
“Dinner time,” Pippi says.
The wolf steps beneath the tree, its eyes locked on me. It is a bus-sized wolf with curly dirty blonde hair. Its long frizzy ears look more like that of a cocker spaniel than a wolf.
“I got a treat for you, Tessa,” Pippi says.
The wolf is salivating, licking its lips. Pippi lowers the rope and I find myself moving within range of the beast. I try to lift myself to grab hold of the rope at my ankles, but gravity pulls me back.
The wolf opens its mouth. Its tongue, twice as long and twice as wide as I am, rolls out over its teeth. The back of its throat pulses in anticipation. The cavernous gullet is wide enough to swallow me whole. The uvula dangling in the back of her throat is the size of my torso. It is something that proves that she was once human, because wolves do not have uvulas. The giant animal sits obediently, waiting to be fed, as if this is a common routine.
I am lowered far enough to feel not only the heat, but also the moisture, of the creature’s breath. I wiggle to reach my ankles, but my struggle only makes Pippi laugh and enjoy herself more.
Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland Page 10
