The dark-haired man turned and said something to the other man, the blond one, and he, too, came over to the edge of the road, spotting her lurking in the bushes when the first man pointed her out.
Damn it all… She checked her leg, relieved to see the bleeding had stopped for the moment. As one woman against about twenty men, armed only with a short knife, she had no chance of fighting them off, but with her leg injured, she had even less chance of making a run for it.
Get your head together, girl, she scolded herself sharply. If she was going to accept defeat without even trying, she may as well have jumped off that bridge with Kathy. No, she was a warrior, a survivor, and she’d perfected the art of battle long before the world had gone to shit. She scrabbled around in the leaf litter, no longer caring about giving herself away, and came up with two thick sticks, about two feet long each. Perfect.
She looked up again, staying in a low crouch. The dark-haired man kept his eyes on her while the blond one took a quick assessment of the terrain – no doubt calculating which way she’d try to run.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” the dark-haired one called to her, a challenge rather than an invitation. The triumphant sneer on his face was nauseating, and she rapidly lost any respect she’d had for these men. They might have carved out a nice little niche for themselves in this harsh wilderness, but they were still thugs who preyed upon women.
The blond one glanced sideways at his friend, then muttered something to him that she couldn’t hear. With a shrug, the other man wandered off, going back to helping the others finish their job.
“We mean you no harm,” the blond man told her. She didn’t bother replying. She cautiously put weight on her injured leg and was relieved to find it would hold her up. So long as no nerves or tendons had been damaged, she could still walk out of here. She straightened up – no point in trying to stay hidden anymore – and weighed the sticks in her hands. The feel of them was comfortingly familiar. Then she looked the man in the eye.
He sighed, more annoyed than angry or aggressive, and that subtle indication of his mood was enough to piss her off. She was so sick of people assuming she wasn’t a threat just because she was a woman!
“You can come out or I can send someone in to get you,” the man said next, when she neither moved nor replied to his ridiculous assertion that he wasn’t going to harm her. It had taken literally fifteen seconds from his first statement to the one where he started threatening her, which was a poor effort on his part, but certainly not setting any records.
“Come for me,” she goaded him, adopting a battle-ready pose, “if you think you can take me.” He was not just a thug, but a coward as well, she decided. He hadn’t even volunteered to come and fetch her himself, instead intending to send one of his lackeys to do the hard part for him.
Unfortunately, it seemed he was going to have no shortage of volunteers. At her loud challenge, half the men stopped what they were doing and turned to stare at her. But rather than selecting two or three of them to come and subdue her, the big man instead looked her up and down slowly, with none of the lecherousness she’d been subjected to for so much of the recent past.
“You’re injured,” he said, with a frown of concern. She ignored it, having no intention of falling for any of his tricks.
“I killed four men when I had a deeper wound than this one,” she told him in reply. It was no idle boast.
“We have no wish to harm you,” he said again, and she could only roll her eyes.
“That would make you unique among the men of this world,” she said, a sardonic edge to her voice.
The man shrugged, with an uncommon sort of self-awareness. “True enough.” He sighed again, glancing over at the dark-haired man. He was now acting as a sentry, keeping an eye on the road and an ear out for any sign of a further attack. He caught the look and shrugged one shoulder; capitulation to the inevitable fight to capture her? Or indifference as to whether they ever captured her or not?
“I’m not going to force you to come with us,” the blond man said finally. “But as it stands, you have no allies, and wandering the wilderness alone is a death sentence.”
His words, though true, did nothing to convince her that she should join him. “Some things are worse than death.” She’d seen a lot of them, and only a sharp sword and a keen willingness to use it had kept some of them from happening to her.
“That, they are.”
Silence descended as he seemed to run out of things to say and she ran out of accusations against him. Most of the men had gone back to looting the dead or to hacking the heads off the fallen men ready to be mounted.
The seconds ticked by, and still none of the men moved so much as a single step towards her. She didn’t fool herself for a moment that it was because they recognised her ability to fight. Outnumbered the way she was, their victory was assured.
So why weren’t they attacking her? They could move to surround her, come at her from all sides, use those pikes as blunt weapons if they weren’t inclined to risk killing her with the machetes and knives; thankfully necrophilia was still considered a perversion rather than an accepted consequence of circumstance.
Deliberately, she lowered her sticks a few inches. The man didn’t move, didn’t attempt to take advantage of her momentary vulnerability, didn’t even try to talk her into surrendering anymore. He ran a hand through his hair, and his shoulders sagged in defeat.
“Look, you’re free to go,” he said finally. “As hard as it might be to believe, we’re not like this lot.” He kicked one of the bodies lying on the ground. “My point is simply that you’ll have a tough time of it on your own. Slavers roam up and down the coast. Their main stronghold is a day’s walk to the north, so I’d avoid that area if I were you. To the east is the ocean, and to the south is a vast, empty forest. Take your pick.”
“And to the west?” she asked.
“West is the place we call home. You’d be welcome to join us. We have a stable village, livestock, crops, a clean river with fresh water. There are far worse places to be, all things considered.”
His behaviour was odd, and becoming more so the longer they stood here. It had been a long, long time since she’d witnessed such voluntary respect from a man to a woman. His offer was also a conundrum. He was right; trying to go it alone was like buying a lottery ticket for survival: one chance in a million that she’d make it. Aside from the difficulties of finding edible plants and trapping animals for food, climate change meant the weather had now whipped itself into a frenzy, trying to kill any humans left with searing droughts, violent storms and wildfires that razed the landscape to pure ash. It was not an enticing future.
The other men had completed their work and were now waiting for the blond man to finish talking to her, loitering at the edge of the road and getting restless. No doubt they had a long walk back to their village.
But even as she contemplated the man’s offer, tempted more than she liked to admit, one glaring detail about this unusual tribe stood out, and it did nothing to assure her of a benevolent future, should she join them. “There seems to be a shortage of women among you,” she pointed out flatly. “If I won’t be a whore for the slavers, why would I be one for you?” For the women who had survived, there seemed to be only one currency that mattered, and that was the one that required access to the tight little cavern between their legs. Most of the time, it was forced at knifepoint, but there were plenty of other potential arrangements that could be made, depending both on the circumstances and the inclinations of the woman involved. At a superficial level, it might be called consent, and if the men made the effort to be gentle with her, it was certainly preferable to the sick perversions that many men seemed to think they were entitled to. But even so, she baulked at the idea of trading her body for a full belly and a warm bed. Was that really the best she could hope for? The battle for survival had brought out the worst in humanity, but did it necessarily follow that holding on to honour and integrity was a fool’s dream?
In the swirling turmoil of her thoughts, she almost missed the sudden look of alarm on the man’s face. He glanced over at the men waiting for him, and a grim realisation seemed to strike him.
“You have a point,” he admitted, and she felt a brief moment of surreal disbelief that the problem hadn’t occurred to him before. “It would be a rare tribe that could have one woman among fifty men and leave her unmolested. So I’ll offer you a deal: if you join us, I’ll take you as my wife. I’ll provide you with food, clothing and protection from wandering hands.”
“And in return?” she asked pointedly. It wasn’t that his terms weren’t clear; she just wanted him to state them out loud.
He stared at her for a moment, and she could almost see his thought process ticking over in the air in front of him. Startled disbelief that she wouldn’t understand his terms. The swift realisation that she did understand and simply wanted to make him say it. And then a faint embarrassment, and it was that final flicker of emotion that made up her mind. He was as uncomfortable asking her for sex as she was agreeing to it, and good God, that truly made him a unique man in this ravaged world.
Who had he been before civilisation had ended? She’d learned in the past few years that it wasn’t only a bent for brutality that had dictated who lived and who died. Adaptability was a vital component; the willingness to leave old ways of doing things behind and embrace a culture of living in tents, of semi-nomadic wandering, of bathing out of a bucket and shitting in a hole in the ground.
Creativity had been another factor. Food had to be grown, goods transported, enemies avoided, animals hunted. The tribes who had been the most successful had abandoned all the ‘rules’ that hampered society. They wore clothing made of bedsheets. They turned toilet cisterns into campfires. They looted shops and houses with nary a hint of guilt, constructing all manner of machines and devices to ease their way forward in a world that had suddenly gone backwards a couple of hundred years.
Cooperation had played its part, too. The loners had all but disappeared, and while it was possible they were whiling away their existence in some remote camp deep in the forest, it was those who embraced a tribal mindset who had done the best, who had access to land and resources, who fought off intruders and defended their hard-won prizes. Loyalty to the group was of far more worth than any demands for individual comforts these days.
But aside from all that, sheer, bloody-minded determination had been the real ingredient, the hard-line refusal to give up, the biting grit that said it was perfectly fine to collapse in a heap and rage at the world, but sooner or later, you had to get up again and just keep fucking going.
This man had once been perfectly civilised, she decided, as she watched him find his voice. A little shy, maybe, he’d lived in suburbia, probably worked in an office; a generic, non-descript member of the rat race, until the world had ended and he’d suddenly realised he had a choice between turning into Bear Grylls or dying.
“And in return,” he answered finally, swiftly banishing his own uncertainty, “you’ll share my bed – on a regular basis and without complaint. I have no interest in renegotiating our agreement every five minutes because you decide you have a headache.” Touché, she thought darkly. If the last hundred years had proved anything, it was that men weren’t the only ones who could be bastards.
Trading her body for creature comforts was still an unpleasant scenario, but despite her reservations, she also had a deeply pragmatic streak, and it was no great stretch to realise that this was by far the best offer she was ever likely to get. One man, instead of dozens, and one that seemed to have a notional respect for her half of the human race. As he’d already pointed out, she was caught between a slaver camp, this tribe’s lands, and the Pacific Ocean. Between the devil and the deep blue sea.
“I’ll be your wife?” she clarified aloud, eyeing him suspiciously. “And yours alone?”
“Mine alone,” he confirmed. “I’m not an unreasonable man. And I don’t expect you to agree to unreasonable terms.”
Reasonable wasn’t really the yardstick by which she was measuring her lot these days. Tolerable was a more realistic goal, with survivable as an unpleasant but sometimes necessary backstop. What he was offering her was far above either of those two marks. “Then I accept your offer,” she agreed finally.
The man’s shoulders sagged, this time in relief, and a ghost of a smile crossed his face. “Then come and meet your tribe.”