Denny Correy rolled off the young teenager, slapping her bare bum as he did. He wouldn’t have her leaking all over the floor for him to step in. It was for precisely this reason he didn’t allow the little piece in his bed. “Off you go now,” he said, as he stood to pull his jeans back on. She scrambled to her feet and snatched up her clothes as she bolted for the door. It was annoying to see the look of fear on her face—and the rush she was always in to vacate his chambers. It was pretty clear he’d have to up the ante with the girl soon. Tell her it wasn’t enough just to open her legs to him. If she ever wanted to see her little brother again, she’d have to at least pretend to like it.
It would have been preferable if he didn’t have to tell her how to act.
The last year had been a wild ride in more ways than one. In all his thirty years it never would have occurred to him that the same laws that had restricted and impinged on him for so long would actually be the making of him. After the bomb—or the Great Equalizer as Denny liked to call it—all the high and mighty had been dragged from their mansions, stripped of their high-tech toys and torched in their Daimlers and Jags.
That last one quite literally, he thought, smiling to himself as he dressed.
Yes, an England without electricity, without cars, without laws, however temporary it was—and make no mistake, there were definite rumblings of the cranky old bitch righting herself—was just the place for a sod like him to plant his flag. And thrive.
He glanced at the rumpled sheets on the floor and saw there was blood again.
In fact, there was no reason to think he couldn’t keep all that he’d built after the lights went back on. The commodity services he offered would always be needed.
“Yo, Denny! You decent yet?”
The voice came from the anteroom outside his bedroom. He knew Meyers, the acting Chief Constable for these parts, was waiting for him. He grinned at what he must have thought watching the girl dash past him naked and trembling as a fawn, his seed dribbling down her long legs.
“Enter,” he bellowed, his good mood restored at the thought of the fat bastard’s randy envy of him.
He settled himself behind the large oaken desk in the corner of the room. When he had first found the house—deserted just days before by the looks of it—he had chosen the largest upstairs room as his headquarters. Over his shoulder and through the ceiling to floor window, he could see the long needle of smoke from the chimney in the middle of the factory.
His factory. He smiled to think of it, flexing his hands in an attempt to limber up the crippled fingers on his right hand—the one smashed to a pulp two years earlier in a prison yard fight.
He looked up to acknowledge Meyers’s entrance.
“Pfew!” the man said, arranging his bulk in a wooden chair opposite the desk. “Smells like skank-sex in here.”
“The very best kind,” Denny said, grinning at the man. “Almost as good as rape.”
Meyers’s eyebrows shot up. “That wasn’t rape? Sure looked like it to me the way the lass was making good her escape.” He laughed.
Denny fought for control of his instant rage, comforting himself with thoughts of the girl’s punishment for embarrassing him like this. She’ll be lucky to have legs left to exit his bedroom at any speed, he thought, trying to calm himself.
“To what do I owe?” he drawled, forcing himself not to reveal to the fat fuck how he’d gotten to him. “I assume, Chief Constable, that you continue to enjoy the fruits of my labors?”
The corpulent slug was a frequent, and free, visitor to Denny’s small prostitution ring. A small price to pay, he thought—especially since he wasn’t paying it—to ensure that the grass-roots law and order group in the area that Meyers headed continued to leave him and his lot alone.
Meyers sighed heavily, as if it pained him to have to tell Denny his news. Denny developed an image in his head of the man swinging from a rope from the center beam of his chicken-processing plant in order to assuage his impatience.
“About that little matter we discussed last time…” he said.
“You’ll have to remind me.”
“You using kiddies in the factories has got a lot of the women in the area up in arms.”
“Fuck ‘em.”
“Yeah, well, if it’s all the same to you, I’ll respectfully decline. But they’re making enough noise and, well, like I said last time, the whores are another thing, and I really think the women can push this to a point where I don’t think you want it pushed.”
“What are you saying, Meyers?” It was all he could do not to pull out the SIG semi-automatic from his desk drawer and put them both out of their misery.
“Look, don’t get me wrong,” Meyers said. “I am a mere tool of the people.” He held his hands out in a helpless gesture. “If the greater good decides to make a move against you…”
“Are you insane? I have an army. Anything you come at me with—”
“Don’t misunderstand, Denny! We are all totally happy with our arrangement. But truth be told, why would you want to fight if you can avoid it? I grant you we wouldn’t win against you, but we’d do some damage. Maybe even shut down the factory for a time. It’s like I told you last time, the women of the district—our wives, mind!—are determined to rescue the poor bitches, who I happen to know for a personal fact give themselves freely to the paying men of the area—”
“In fact, give themselves to those women’s own husbands and boyfriends.”
“Of course! But saying the women have no power wouldn’t be the truth. And this is what they want. If you make us fight you to appease them, well nobody wins that way.”
“Just for the pleasure of watching you take a knife in the gut, I’m tempted to let your women wage their war against me. I’ll have them working my chicken factory and filling my whore house when the smoke clears.”
Meyers, wisely, said nothing.
“Let me ask you, Meyers, do you know where I recruit my whores?”
“My understanding is from your raids on the English villages along the river which were hit the worst by The Crisis, aye? The ones that didn’t re-band or reorganize after it all went down?”
Denny nodded, narrowing his eyes at the constable. “That’s right. And most of those villages are an easy day’s ride from Correyville.” Denny resisted the urge to feel the twinge of pride at the sound of the name of his town.
Meyers’s eyes widened as the light behind them clicked on. “You’re thinking of moving your recruitment efforts further afield.”
“It’s already in process.”
“That’s brilliant.” Meyers rubbed his hands together at the apparent ease and happy resolution to the problem. “I feel confident the ladies of the district will be much mollified, as long as you leave the English rose alone.”
“So glad I could help. Is that all?” Denny steepled his hands in front of him on his desk and regarded the Chief Constable. It had taken him all of one hour to come up with the idea after the last visit from the little fear-spewing worm and his veiled threats. Although Denny’s first impulse was to kill the messenger, he knew there would just be another Chief Constable in his stead. In a rare flash of maturity and conciliation, he had decided that the best route around this particular problem would be to appear to be accommodating to the present government. It could only aid him in his dealings in the new post-EMP world as the UK slowly got back to its feet.
Besides, Meyers was right. Using Irish whores was actually a bloody brilliant idea. There had already been at least one occasion where a newly recruited whore—who had been taken from her village not days before and insufficiently drugged for her first day on the job—had been put in a room with a john from her same village. It hadn’t discomfited the john. In fact, the man had reportedly been delighted to tup—every way to Sunday—a woman he’d known and desired for years, but who had, in fact, been married to another. It had, however, caused a problem with the other whores when it became known.
Recruiting his whores—or factory workers if they were too old or too ugly—from outside the country would alleviate that problem very nicely indeed.