News of Suzy’s birthing and the return of the men from the cavern where the beast had helped deliver her babies traveled fast. A large crowd awaited them at their hovel.
Waving everyone aside, the men assisted Doc into his quarters while the crowd hovered around the newborns in the wooden wagon with Suzy. The men were respectful, befitting the reflected power held by Suzy as Doc’s woman. The women of the tribe held their silence out of respect for their secret leader.
But Suzy could hear the faint whispers about the deformity. In the past, the boy would have been taken. The girl would be saved as she would be useful as a sexual plaything for the men of the tribe. Suzy’s influence over the years had mandated the cardinal rule of no touching until the age of sixteen where all girls were given over to the next man in Doc’s line.
Well, that’s not going to happen to my baby, Lorna. As soon as the next council meeting convenes, I’ll make damn sure Lafe gets what’s coming to him for the death and assault on the Janice twin. The remaining twin will just have to suck it up and go to the man she’s promised to.
Suzy caressed the top of Seth’s soft head, grateful her boy would be spared the horrifying ending represented by the tiny skulls she had found near the old camp fire in the cavern. She idly wondered who of the remaining original men from Doc’s inner council had been in on the cannibalism. Her nerves burned with bitter hatred for the greedy sick men. Pushing a germ of an idea to the back of her mind, she made ready to be eased out of the wagon.
*
Three hours later, with help from Liz and some of the other women, Suzy finished bathing. Her every bone ached with pains and exhaustion.
“We’re all right now, Liselle. Why don’t you and the rest go and have your dinner? I’ll see you all in the morning. We can talk about our plans for the men’s council meeting then.” She fought to keep her eyes open and focused.
“We have a lot to go over. We must be prepared. Doc’s really sick. It won’t be much longer. We must see to it that I’m appointed in his place. We might have to let him think it’s just temporary. Until Seth is of age. But it will be Lorna we prepare.” Her eyelids lowered as her voice trickled off. “Check the babies once more, Liselle. Make sure they’re snug and can’t roll out.”
“They’re fine, Suzy, safe in their beds. We’ll bring a proper bed for Seth in the morning. But he’s fine now. Sleep.” With that, Liselle and the women left the bedroom to take their leave, and Suzy drifted off to a deep exhausted slumber.
*
The next day, Suzy sat nursing Seth and Lorna as she tried to reason with Doc about the necessity of making her leader of the tribe.
“If you’re going to continue yammering about this all day, Suzy, I’m going to leave. Can’t we have one day without you plying your manipulations on me? I hear what you’re saying. Now give me one of my babies.” She blotted the weeping blood on his arm, wrapping precious gauze around the worst of his non-healing sores. She then placed Lorna in his arms, hoping to have him fall in love with her first.
Doc’s scrawny body left little room to cuddle Lorna. Her claw-like hand tangled awkwardly in his long clumpy hair. As he became sick, he had stopped attending to his toilet and no longer bothered to sweep it back in a ponytail. Suzy cringed at the dirt and grime under his nails as he touched the baby.
“I saw them, you know,” she informed him.
“You saw what?”
“The skulls. The infant skulls.” Her mouth screwed up in distaste, her accusation skewering him with its venom. Suzy moaned with the thought of the pain the infants must have gone through in the hands of Doc and his brutal men as they readied them for the fire pits.
“You didn’t see shit.”
“I saw them.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about woman, and if you keep it up, I’m going to be forced to shut you up, you hear me?” Doc’s eyes exploded with wildness, Suzy was too engrossed in her own revulsion to heed the warning signs.
“Ha, ha, ha. What can you do, old man? Look at you.” She found herself unable to stop, the words tumbling off her sour lips. ”You can barely get it up anymore, you leak your nasty blood all over everything. Even your men are pulling away,” she lied.
“What’s that you say? My men? I’ll show you who can’t get it up anymore.” He transferred Lorna to his ramshackle bed, stripping off her blanket to leave her fully exposed. He fumbled with his pants, dropping them to his ankles and leered over the infant, stroking his flaccid penis as he made ready to inflict horror on the newborn.
Without warning, his head split open like a ripe melon as Suzy bashed it in with a thick piece of metal, frantically rescued from her bedroom.
His grunt of surprise was soft and feeble, just like his treasured penis which he had planned to use to rape Lorna. His body did a slow motion fold as it made its way to the dirty floor.
Crying hysterically, she sidestepped the remains of Doc to rescue her daughter. She wiped at the snot that ran free from her nose with the back of her hand, careful not to touch the baby with it.
“Oh shit.”
Suzy whirled around to see Kimmey and Liselle at the door. Kimmey’s face drained of color as she tiptoed to a chair, her voice a mere whisper. “I just wanted to see the babies . . .” Suzy ignored her as the stronger Liselle pushed her into her bedroom. She removed Lorna from her hands to wipe off Doc’s blood which had splattered onto the infant.
Making sure baby Lorna was safe, she glanced at Seth, who remained sleeping in his makeshift bed. Grabbing Suzy’s elbow, she pushed her toward the door. Suzy yanked her arm back.
“You’re not getting me to go back in there.” They listened as the sounds of Kimmey retching carried into the room.
“I don’t know what happened here, Suzy, but if you care anything about the women of this tribe and your babies, you’d better just suck it up and figure a way out of this mess before anyone else finds out what you did.” Liselle paced, wringing her hands. “Why now? He was getting ready to die anyway. Couldn’t you wait?”
Kimmey and Liselle’s faces drooped, flaccid and green as Suzy described her grisly discovery from yesterday.
“We were fighting again over the announcement at the council. He wouldn’t commit. I thought he might be planning a fast one. I thought I could hold it over his head. Things got out of control.” Suzy held her head in her hands, her voice faltering between sobs.
“But his pants are down. What . . .” Suzy looked up, sickness oozing from her eyes.
“He was going to hurt the baby . . . to get even with me for insulting him. I . . . I’ve never seen him like that before. I just . . . lost it.” Liselle took her into her arms.
“It’s okay. We just need to come up with a story, fast.” They froze as they heard a man’s voice from the other room.
Seconds passed as if hours before Suzy recognized the voice of her lover, Tom. Pulling away from Liselle, she rushed back into the room and threw herself into Tom’s arms.
“Thank God you’re here,” she sobbed. Quickly calming down enough to talk, she filled him in on the discovery in the small cavern, the monster and Doc’s subsequent death.
“Good God, Lorna. I don’t know if I’m up to getting sucked into something like this.” Tom’s face screamed fear.
Stiffening her spine and relegating her emotions to the back recesses of her breaking-down mind, she took a deep breath, faced Doc’s corpse and turned back to Tom. “It’s all right, Tom. We have it all under control.” Liselle clearly tried to swallow her surprise as Suzy rushed over to Doc’s sixty-pound medicine safe.
“Come on, give me a hand.” They hurried over to the safe. Directed by Suzy, they lifted it over Doc’s mangled skull and dropped it on him. Liselle gulped and knelt to pull up his pants.
“That should work. No one will think much about it when I claim he was moving things to make room for the baby’s stuff. I’ll claim Liselle was here to see it happen. Besides, they’ll be distracted when I tell them Doc finally made his decision about his successor.”
Tom looked at her with amazement, guileless and clueless. “Did he tell you?”
Suzy sneaked a look at Liselle, tossing her a covert wink. “Yes. It’s me of course, Tom.”
“Well you sure have had a lot of luck come your way lately, Suzy.” His brows knit together as if he was having trouble passing a difficult bowel movement. “Quite a bit of unexpected luck . . .”
Suzy anxiously herded him to the door. Trying to get his mind off recent events and her role in them, she kissed him softly, nipping passionately at his lower lip until she felt his manly swelling.
“I think we might have a few things to talk about later, don’t you, Tom?” His eyes glazed with foreseen passion, glittery in their eagerness to forsake everything but the pursuit of sex.
“You better go now. I’ll see you later.” She smiled until her muscles hurt, pushing him out the door as he dreamed of their next tryst and the possibilities now that Doc was out of the way.
Suzy leaned against the door to catch her breath, while Liselle looked on with doubt in the slope of her shoulders.
“I don’t know, Suzy. Are you sure you can trust him?” Suzy wordlessly nodded her head, rubbing her hands on her face, then raked back her loose, stringy hair.
“Yeah, he’s a little temperamental, but he has a sweet simple side. As long as he’s satisfied, he’s happy and easy to control. It’s stress free for me. He just doesn’t want to get dragged into something that would draw the attention of Doc’s men. I think he’s just as afraid of them as we are.”
A sudden pounding sounded on the door, vibrations tunneling straight to Suzy’s hammer-tripping heart.
“Shit.” The raucous pounding sounded again, the women paralyzed with fright.
“Open the damn door, Suzy.”
Suzy whispered to Liselle as they clutched each other, relaxing as she identified the voice. “It’s Lafe. What’s he doing here? He’s got a hell of a nerve.”
She pounded right back on the door. “What the hell do you want, Lafe? You’re not wanted here anymore.”
“Shut up, bitch. I want Doc. He makes the decisions around here, not you.”
Suzy bit deep on her lip, the pain clearing her thoughts. “It’s Doc’s decision, not mine,” she shouted back. “He’s had enough of your shenanigans. Your boys killed one of the Janice twins. He can’t ignore that. We can’t have the likes of you around now that we have the babies.”
“Sounds like more of your bullshit to me.”
She felt a body slam to the door but it held. “Your things will be left for you at the Council Center. Now get lost before Doc loses his patience with you,” she added.
The women were met with quiet. They held their breath as they weighed the silence. It wasn’t long before the odors of Doc’s body reclaimed their attention. Praying that Lafe had departed, they discarded plan after plan until the simple actions of frightened women took over.
Peeking out the door to see if it was clear, they stepped outside and screamed their heads off.
*
Suzy munched on her peach, which she had retrieved from her pouch. The thick aromatic juices ran down her jutting chin unnoticed as she studied her two infants. Her heart swelled with vulnerable love and hope for a better life for Lorna and Seth. Grabbing a cloth, she swiped at her chin, removing most of the juices in preparation for bed.
She dipped the cloth into a cold pail of water, shucking her shirt to scrub at her grimy neck. It had been a long day and she was exhausted.
The council meeting to award the Janice twins to their man had been postponed due to the twin’s death as well as the unexpected death of Doc. It would be held in three weeks after tomorrow’s official mourning of the tribe’s first leader.
Suzy smiled to herself. Out with the old, in with the new.
Doc’s men had come to pay their respects this morning. None had commented on the passing of leadership to her, but she knew from the silent nods and bobbing heads that the official announcement would brook little challenge at the council meeting in three weeks.
Most of the tribe was so saddened and shocked that the women’s version of Doc’s death was readily accepted.
As Suzy slipped her raggedy gray nightgown down over her head, she ran to the next room to make sure the door was bolted. She kissed the babies gently, breathing in their newness and the clean milky smells that come with new infants. After giving Lorna a last loving caress, she climbed into her cot with its heap of frayed blankets. Her last thought before she drifted off to sleep was about how good her life with her babies would be without Doc around.
*
Morning came quickly, the babies having slept straight through the night, with not a peep from her two angels. She heard a squeak that ended in a jerky squall—Seth demanding his breakfast. As she pulled down her nighty to feed him, she glanced over fondly to say good morning to her quiet princess.
The crib was empty. Her mind blanked in panic, her thoughts unfocused and useless. She grabbed the now screaming Seth from his crib and ran to the door, which stood wide open. Lafe. It had to have been him. She groped for the sleeve of her nightgown, balancing Seth as she tried to get it up her quavering arm, distracted by the taint of sulfur in the air.
For the second time in three days, she ran outside to scream her head off.
*
Three weeks passed in a daze for Suzy. Liselle and the women of her inner council cared for Seth while Suzy fell apart. She wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t bathe, and wouldn’t feed her remaining child. Other women, heavy with nourishment from their own newborns, took turns with the neglected infant.
Today, she lay in her cot, wasted from the lack of food, depressed and useless. Her only thoughts were of her kidnapped hope and dreams; her baby Lorna. She couldn’t help compare it to her own kidnapping so long ago. The same defiant spark that had carried her so far for so long buried itself deep, hiding from her consciousness as it had decades ago.
“Get up.” Suzy opened her eyes at the harsh words. Liselle stood at the foot of her cot, hands on her hips and steel in her voice, but softness in her eyes.
“It’s time, Suze. The council meeting is in three hours. You have to pull yourself together. I can’t just watch all our plans go up in smoke. So many women here have lost infants. They go on. Our plans were to make things better for everyone’s babies. Think of them.” Liselle perched on the end of Suzy’s cot.
“Are you going to get up?”
Suzy remained silent, her eyes closing heavily.
“There’ll be time to mourn. You have the rest of your life. Carry on in Lorna’s name.” Liselle stood up with a sigh as it became clear Suzy was unreachable. “You might as well know. Lafe has been sighted. No sign of the baby. It’s rumored he’ll attend the council meeting.”
Suzy’s eyelids flew open. She cleared her throat as steel seeped back into her eyes, recharging her. Liselle held her tongue, watching Suzy swing her legs over the cot and try to stand. Her voice croaked out the words Liselle hoped to hear.
“Over my cold dead body, he will. Get me some water and fruit, please, Liselle. And ask one of the others to bring me a bucket.” She swept her hands over her oily face, cheekbones straining at the translucent skin that strived to hold her together. “I guess I’d better clean up.”
With visible relief, Liselle hurried to fetch the items Suzy would need to bolster her strength. She returned with two women to help Suzy wash and dress.
“Here Suze. Drink this.” She handed over a large mug of tea, filled with bits of strange leafy plants that grew in the growing field.
Downing the hot liquid gratefully, Suzy pushed herself with the blinding hatred she felt for Lafe. The son of a bitch would be made to tell where her baby is. He would pay. Turning to Liselle, she gave the woman a silent hug. Liselle uttered no words as Suzy drew further strength from her wisdom and the force of the tribal women’s dependence on her. Parting, they stared somberly at one another. Liselle’s intense face split with a wan smile. “Welcome back, Suze.”