There was even a pottery cup—broken but still useable!
It wasn’t coffee, but it was hot and it warmed her and made her feel more like facing the day.
She settled on the stool Kael had helped her on to the night before when they’d arrived, cupping the mug and sipping slowly at the broth she’d dipped out.
She managed to drink it all down before it cooled to tepid, then set the mug down and got up to examine the stuff the guys had collected.
She’d examined the things she recognized five times before it dawned on her that she’d willfully blinded herself to every clue that had been presented to her.
Because she’d developed this preconceived notion that Dar and Kael were primitives—based in part on Dr Hobbs’ prejudice—and refused to actually accept what was right in front of her face every day since she’d arrived.
Both men were dressed in rags that barely preserved modesty, but they were ragged pants. It was real, manufactured clothing and it wasn’t something primitives had stumbled upon and decided to wear. If she hadn’t been willfully blind to every suggestion that she was wrong, she would’ve accepted that her notions weren’t the least bit logical—much less scientific.
They’d gone feral—been driven to it to survive their circumstances, but they were a very long way from primitive.
The objects they’d gathered together might be broken, but they’d been manufactured by some fairly advanced people.
Their civilization had been destroyed. There was no way to determine just how advanced they were beyond the fact that she accepted that they were a long way from wild.
Maybe she’d just wanted that to be true because she didn’t want to think that Earth might be in a similar situation? That any humans that had remained on Earth and survived would be forced to go feral to survive?
She didn’t want to think about it now.
There were people she’d known who hadn’t been chosen as a colonist.
There were people she’d known who’d declined to leave the mother Earth.
Was it like this there now? Was this what she’d avoided experiencing on her own world, only to be trapped on an alien world in the same state?
Or worse.
She didn’t know which bothered her more—the idea of the Earth being worse off, or the notion that conditions on Earth might be better and she’d made the wrong choice.
That thought brought her around to the two men who’d set her off on this thought train to begin with.
How, exactly, did she feel about them?
Drawn to them physically in spite of the fact that they were a different species?
Even though she thought she was still intimidated by the fact that they were alien.
Thankful beyond anything that they were willing to take care of her!
She wished she could convince herself that she didn’t really need them, but she wasn’t a moron. Her training hadn’t prepared her for anything like this. It was the whole reason they’d left Earth—to avoid trying to survive something like this—because it was not thought to be survivable.
So unequivocally, she absolutely would not survive without them.
Did she blame them for her predicament? Was there smoldering resentment lurking somewhere deep inside her psyche?
She thought about that a lot longer, searching her mind.
She didn’t think so. If she blamed any person, she thought that would be the bastard captaining the colony ship. Captain Clarkson would’ve given the order. No one else would have taken that upon themselves and made that decision and acted upon it.
He was the one who’d ordered her to go on the mission. He was the one who’d ordered their shuttle destroyed.
She hadn’t wanted to think about it because there was nothing she could do about it, but there it was.
She supposed she could have blamed Dar and Kael for setting her disaster into motion, but she didn’t feel like they’d meant her any harm any of the time and she thought, if she’d been in their position and there had seemed to be a chance of being rescued she would’ve done a lot worse to try to save herself.
On a scale of one to ten, how sorry was she that things had turned out the way they had?
Ten the day the shuttle was blown up and most of the time since.
The night before?
Well, that experience had been beyond anything she’d ever even hoped for.
But it did it make her less sorry she was stuck on their world?
Maybe a teeny, tiny bit.
Wouldn’t life on the colony world be nearly as difficult, though?
Well, she was never going to know.
But there had been nothing about the preparations that had suggested it was expected to be a cake walk—the opposite, in fact.
Maybe they’d thought it best to prepare for worst case scenario?
And maybe they’d still been optimistic about the actual situation?
Did it matter?
Not really since she was never going to get to find out any of that.
What mattered was she really hadn’t had any choices beyond deciding whether to go or stay and face what was expected to happen on Earth.
She hadn’t had any choice about this at all—well, except the brig.
She wasn’t certain prison would have been worse.
Well, she knew it couldn’t possibly have been worse in terms of danger, starvation, and lack of comfort.
Thrusting the thoughts aside, she collected the pieces she thought most useful for their ‘household’ and moved them to a place near the fire/light/cooking area.
Dar came in a little later carrying what looked like bloody thigh bones. There was a greasy looking rag wrapped around one end of each. He moved around the room, studying the walls, and finally found a couple of crevices to wedge one end into.
Monica studied them doubtfully.
She had a bad feeling those were supposed to be for more light. From the smell, she couldn’t imagine what it might be like if it was burned.
He glanced at her after a studying his handiwork. “Stink but make light.”
Monica sighed. “Yeah I was thinking that,” she responded, trying to sound pleased. “Does this mean we’ll stay here? At least till spring?”
She had to work at explaining spring and she wasn’t certain he’d grasped it when she finally gave up.
He looked around the place and finally shook his head. “Bad. Try find better for Meeka.” He seemed to struggle with something. “Soon.”
“Aww! That’s so sweet!” she responded impulsively. “It’s … well, it’s not that bad.”
He gave her a look filled with skepticism. “How bad?”
Monica bit her lip. “Better than nothing,” she finally responded, trying to be honest and still polite and believable.
He nodded, but she thought he looked angry when he left.
“It just needs a little work,” she offered, “and it’ll be way more comfortable. It’s already a lot better than camping outside.”
He kept going as if he hadn’t heard her.
She supposed that wasn’t as placating as she’d intended.
It wasn’t as if she hadn’t noticed they had been working themselves half to death since they’d lit. She could see where her impulsive comment could easily be misconstrued, but she couldn’t think of anything better so she decided to leave well enough alone.
Little by little, they did transform the sparse shelter into something approaching comfortable.
Their first completed task was to build a sort of wind break/atrium in front of the entrance out of stacked stones. Well, given the attack by the monster, she supposed the main objective was to prevent late night visitors or at least slow them down. But it worked pretty well as a wind break, making it possible to leave the skin door hanging open to let in more light.
It took nearly a week to complete the project since they had to also hunt fuel for the fire and food on a daily basis. There were three of them to feed and alt
hough the animal/former occupant they’d killed when they arrived was fairly large and the monster that crashed their party was even bigger, they had no way to preserve anything except the snow. And, even packing it carefully in ice didn’t keep it long, particularly since everything in the world was starving and on the hunt.
They got to eat three days running and on the third night some bastard animal crept up and stole the last of it.
The fourth day they had almost nothing, splitting a container of preserved food from before the end of the world between the three of them.
She wondered where the guys had found it since she hadn’t noticed it when she was looking through the stuff they’d collected, but she didn’t ask.
It was pretty disgusting, whatever it was, but it didn’t seem to be spoiled and it was enough to silence the growls of the monster in her belly.
And truthfully, the meat hadn’t been that great considering the crude cooking conditions and the complete lack of any kind of seasoning or anything to accompany it.
Monica consoled herself with the thought that the meat had already started getting strong. They probably wouldn’t have gotten more than another meal or two before it turned.
But it was small consolation.
Reluctantly, Dar and Kael left her to hunt a little further afield.
Monica drank all the water she could hold to fill the belly cavern while she waited hopefully for a successful hunt.
Not that she simply waited.
They’d threatened her life if she went outside and, as indignant as she was about their bossiness, she really didn’t want to go outside with nothing more than a stick to protect herself. But they hadn’t warned her not to go into the belly of the ‘cave’ and she decided to see what she might find that they’d missed.
The torch stank to high heaven and smoked like a son-of-a-bitch. On top of that, it produced damned little light, but she had nothing else and her eyes didn’t work as well in the gloom as theirs apparently did.
She could see well enough, though, to tell that she was in a structure—apparently a fairly large one. Of course, despite the damage, she’d known the room they were camping in was certainly not constructed by nature, but she’d been more doubtful about the area behind that. Now she could see fragments of all sorts of manufactured building materials. It led her to wonder just how advanced the civilization was that had held the role of apex predator until the destruction.
She didn’t see anything that looked like advanced electronics, but then if they were very advanced those would be miniaturized, she was sure, which would make them harder to spot in the mud and debris.
She found a bathroom.
Well a toilet and lavatory.
They were on the wall.
Sadly, unusable.
Her heart seemed to stop in her chest for several moments.
The design might be alien, but there was no arguing that these were artifacts from a very modern culture—on par with Earth culture at least in regard to amenities.
She wasn’t certain of just how she felt about the discovery—curiously close to tears—but sheer terror chased everything else away when she heard a rush of sound in her direction that presaged the arrival of something very large.
Whipping around, she held the flickering torch high and in front of her, struggling to pierce the darkness.
She recognized Dar a split second before he reached her. Grasping her upper arms, he gave her an angry shake, said something in his tongue she couldn’t understand at all, and then curled his arms around her so tightly she was afraid he was going to crush her.
“Loka’s balls, Meeka! You were gone! I thought …. The worst.”
Chapter Twelve
Kael took the torch from Meeka’s slack hand before she could drop it or set Dar on fire.
“You will break her if you keep that up,” he said tightly.
Dar immediately loosened his grip, but he gave no other indication that he had heard and Kael was not completely convinced that was a response since Dar shifted his grip to her face and tipped her head back to kiss her.
Struggling to dismiss his own stomach churning fear that something had happened to her, Kael moved away from them, using the torch to help him examine the area better than he had been able to when he and Dar had conducted their initial sweep to make certain they had no dangerous tenants in their cave. And, for that matter, the later exploration when they had searched for anything that might be useful.
He dismissed the temptation to dig, convinced that anything under the rubble was not likely to be of much use. Instead, he climbed the piles and peered through partially collapsed walls and door frames until he came upon … treasure. It looked as if it might have been a break room or snack bar and since it was still blocked, he thought that there was a chance that whatever had survived the collapse of the building could still be there and possibly intact.
Stepping back, he lifted the torch and studied the rubble and, more importantly, the opening, trying to decide if the rubble was holding the structure in place or if it had simply piled in that spot. Finally, he decided not to attempt it alone. He wasn’t going to do anyone any good if he got crushed and killed—or worse, crushed and lived long enough to create more difficulties.
It was the latter thought that cinched the matter. He could not think of a more gruesome or lingering death and he did not want to go that way.
He found Dar and Meeka pretty much as he had left them except that they had progressed to trying to figure out how and where to couple.
“I have found something that I believe is significant.”
They might have been deaf for all either reacted to his momentous announcement.
“You do know that she has begun another cycle, right?”
* * * *
Dar had no idea when Meeka had ceased to be merely an obligation he was honor bound to protect and become the lifeline he needed to stay sane, but there was no denying that his reaction to the discovery that she was missing was not mild enough to refer to it as dismay. His consternation was so profound that he instantly went into a state of blind panic.
They had seen no sign of her outside—and he was certain they would have if she had been close by—so he expected to find her inside. When he did not, his mind instantly leapt to horrific images that may or may not have been completely sane and logical considering there was no sign of resistance of any kind.
He could not take comfort in that.
She was not there, and she did not seem to have senses as keen as they did. He could not rule out that something, or someone, had crept up behind her and grabbed her before she could launch a defense.
It was fortunate that the thought had brought his attention to the torches because he had seen then that one was missing.
It did not comfort him a great deal. They had been staying in the most intact part of the demolished building. The rest of it was in a state of near collapse that made it a death trap. All that was needed was a small shift in the debris here or there and it would finish its collapse and disintegration.
If she had gone back to explore, she might already be dead.
He was so relieved to find her alive and unhurt he did not know which he wanted most—to shake her for scaring the life out of him, or kiss her because he was so very glad she seemed to be alright.
He did both.
He had not counted on the effect his raging emotions would have on him when he kissed her and added lust to the mix.
Her instant, heated response was enough to make him completely lose his mind.
But not so completely that it did not occur to him that there was no space on the floor that was not strewn with gravel or rocks.
He moved to the nearest wall that looked steady enough to use as a brace—a clear indication his brains were already mush—and pushed her against it to give him the leverage he needed to pull her suit open.
Briefly, he explored her breasts beneath the under thing she was wearing, but he was f
ar more interested in penetration.
Covering her mouth again, he kissed her deeply while he wrestled with his pants to unearth his cock—no easy feat when the fucking thing was already rock hard and fought his efforts to free it.
He had just managed to gain control of it and wedged the head inside of her when Kael returned.
He might have been speaking her tongue for all Dar understood him.
And he did not give a fuck either.
Grasping her tightly to prevent her from escaping the minute he thrust, he began working his way inside of her with teeth gritted and grinding in his determination to sheath himself before he came.
He stopped when he’d achieved penetration, huffing for breath, struggling to keep from coming.
It flickered through his mind that if she was not as ready as he was, she was going to be pissed when this was over. But he did not think he could have stopped or even slowed down if he knew positively that she would take his head off when he was done.
He was halfway to heaven when Kael’s last comment finally made a connection in his brain.
It almost deflated his cock the instant it did.
Fortunately for his sanity—unfortunately for his peace of mind—he came instead, so hard he thought for a few minutes that he was going to be disemboweled.
He did not know how he could come so hard when he had fucked her for days until he was so sore he could hardly piss.
He should not have been able to produce any cum. His cock should be coughing dust by this time.
But no. There was so much semen it filled her and then overflowed.
Please, Loka! Let there be no egg to receive!
There could not be—not so soon, could there?
He did not believe so, but he was not certain of whether that was pure hopefulness or if there was some logic to it.
He was so angry with himself, though, for risking it, risking her unnecessarily, that it was all he could do to ease her gently to the floor and steady her before he stalked off. His legs feeling like rubber. His mind in turmoil.
It did not help that she looked confused and hurt.
* * * *
Exodus: Extinction Event Page 11
