24 First Night

We kept to ourselves most of the next day. One of Alvarez's soldiers returned our baggage, minus the weapons and maps, but the packs were a mess. We spent part of the day inventorying and re-packing everything, setting aside laundry, and making a list of what was missing. We took meals with the Green River ladies in the dining hall. They were a little more somber for yesterday's events, but they were holding up well. You could tell which of them were long-time River residents and which ones were newcomers, because the newcomers were dealing with the "duty lottery" a lot better. The Green River veterans had spent years in a colony where women were equal citizens, while the newcomers had all escaped places that kept them as little more than slaves.

"They feed us here," said one woman whose arms bore the scars of human bite marks, "and they're not allowed to hurt us for no reason. It's not as nice as the river but," she shrugged, and left the rest unsaid. People would compromise a lot for the sake of food and safety, and everyone present had made that trade at some point in the past.

One of the matrons, another steel-haired lady from the same mold as the others, came around after breakfast to give out work assignments. Some women were sent to the laundry, others to help in the mothers' house where children were cared for, and some to cook or do general cleaning. White Hawk was exempt, thanks to her position as a colony leader. Sandy, however, was not.

"You can start with Lorie's crew," the matron told Sandy, "she'll show you the ropes. You're such a little thing, but we won't work you too hard."

I threw my arm in front of Sandy. "You won't work her at all," I said, trying to sound authoritative, "she's mine."

"Young man, you don't get to decide who works and who doesn't. That's my job. So unless you're someone important, I'll be the one who decides whether she spends the day doing laundry or turning compost."

White Hawk interrupted her with a knowing smile. "That young man is the Engineer." The matron's expression faltered, from bureaucratic disdain to surprise.

"My Sandy does most of the soldering. It's a critical skill right now, and I can't have her hands messed up by labor."

"I've seen her work," confirmed the Green River leader. "She has great hands."

The matron went away without so much as a "very well" or even a "we'll see about that". She just turned and left.

Sandy squeezed my thigh under the table when the matron's back was turned and whispered near my ear, "You called me your Sandy." I felt my face burn with embarrassment.

"You two," sighed White Hawk.

Without assignments or anything to do, we retired to our room and took a nap. The previous days had been strenuous, and we didn't know what tomorrow would bring, so we elected to get some rest while we could.

I woke up, some time later, to discover Sandy was straddling me. We had the blackout curtains drawn except for a small crack to let in an edge of winter's light. She glowed a healthy pink against the darkened room, dressed in nothing but a pair of white women's briefs.

"There you are. I've been trying to wake you up for ages!"

"What are you doing, Sandy?" I half-thought I must be dreaming, but my erection was very real. It wasn't my first one while she was around, far from it, but I always turned away from her and thought of something else.

She took my hands in hers, put them on her breasts the size of pomegranates, dark nipples warm and hard against my palms. She leaned into my hands. Her hips pressed against me and stroked me once, twice … and there in the semi-dark she was transformed. I felt the bony starveling under my hands, brittle butchered hair and scarred skin, desperate to please for scraps of food and a dirty blanket.

She had been broken when I found her, and I had seen her as broken ever since. For a year she ate and learned and healed, but in my head she was broken still. My eyes could see her, my hands could touch her, but somewhere in my head she was a starved and beaten scrap of human being.

I was frozen in place, trapped in the cognitive dissonance of how I imagined her and what she was trying to tell me and … I recoiled from her.

"Get off me," I said, and pushed her aside, "I can't do this." I couldn't face her. I was embarrassed by her nakedness, ashamed to want the helpless thing I had pulled from an RV a year ago, the woman who begged to belong to me like a shirt or a plate.

I heard her dress. The shirt buttons got done up, and her pants went on. Then, she went searching for her socks and boots.

"I'm sorry," I said to the floor.

"You're sorry." Laces ran through the eyelets of her boots, followed by the thip thip thip of them fitting into hooks. "I'm sorry, too. I'm sorry you think I'm too ugly to fuck, even to save my life."

"You're not ugly. I'm just … confused. It's a big change, you know?"

We were sitting on the same bed now, back to back. Sandy tried and failed to keep the tears out of her voice. I had never seen her cry, and the imminent tears clawed at my shame. "Can't you just, I don't know, man up or something?"

"It doesn't work like that," I laughed, "and for the record, penises don't like being inside anything that's too challenging or dangerous. So the 'man up and fuck me' demand has kind of a poor track record."

"Ugh." Sandy strode to the door and shouldered her pack, "that explains so much about men!"

"Wait, where are you going?" Even though I had just treated her badly, it scared me to think of her running around the palace alone. I worried too, that she might not want to come back.

"I'm spending the night in on the women's floor. I'm fertile in three days. If you weren't lying about keeping me, you have to get your situation figured out before then."

She was out the door before I could ask her to stay. I could have chased her, should have chased her, but I didn't.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

❖ ❖ ❖

It took a few more days for Ludovic to get around to me. During that time Sandy and I met at meals and lingered before and after, but otherwise spent our time apart. I didn't know how to cross the sudden gulf between us, to where she waited on the other side. Men looked at her during the lotteries, hopeful, curious, speculating about when her name would go on the list. It was easy to see why: she was a short woman, but firm and shapely, and the skin she showed fairly glowed with health. She had ditched the layers of pants and jackets and took to wearing tight sweaters and pleated skirts, with a little makeup, and her hair in loose curls. She wasn't the tomboy any more, a girl who could run fast enough to keep up with the guys. She was undeniably desirable, and every man in the palace could see it better than I could.

I slept poorly those nights in the palace, in the sealed-up hotel room with no power and no companion. We had always slept in the same room, usually next to each other, often sharing a blanket or a double sleeping bag. The only exceptions had been when I was sick or when I was scouting locations for Zee Muncher. I had missed her then too, but kept myself distracted with other people and other problems. In the palace I was alone for the first time in over a year, and found myself staring at the dark Sandy-shaped hole next to me. Meals were the only times I could see her, so I showed up early and left late.

I tried telling myself propriety was my problem. The plague should have burned all of the old world out of me, obliterated the hangups and the boundaries. You can't demand sex from someone you have power over. People shouldn't own people. The imprisoned can't consent. But Sandy had agency, had demanded what she wanted, had recruited Rachel to convince me, made her own choices.

The real problem was a heap of rags in the kingdom deserters' RV, and the naked starveling thing who changed clothes in front of me in the bike shop, could only read at a fourth grader's level, and had never had a real friend. That wasn't her any more. Sandy was healthy. She was stronger and smarter than when I found her. According to Rachel, she knew exactly what she was doing.

"You don't have a lot of time," White Hawk warned me during one of our meals. "If you can't bed her, find someone else to do the job. Someone who'll be nice to her. You are her guardian, so you can choose."

I tried to imagine what that would entail. How would we pick someone for her? What would be the criteria? How many nights would she spend with him? But, my imagination jammed like a dirty pistol. I didn't want to give her to anyone else, not ever. Yes, I am aware of the hypocrisy of not wanting Sandy and not wanting anyone else to have her. My only excuse is that I was a man in transition, and not everything was making sense.

On our fourth day in the palace I got invited to lunch with the king. This wasn't the sort of affair where you get a neatly written card days in advance, to which you respond in writing with an elegant, "It would be my pleasure to join you," and then you meet in some charming brunch spot under the warm sun. No. I got summoned to join him immediately, left Sandy surrounded by the ladies of Green River to follow a clerk to where Ludovic and his greenies were feasting by a roaring fire.

With all their helmets off, you couldn't miss the similarity between the king and his guards. Strongmen have surrounded themselves with members of their own clan since the dawn of strongmen, and Ludovic was no exception. All his guards were somewhere on the light end of the skin tone spectrum, their hair tended towards blonde, their eyes were mostly blue. I was directed to sit in the empty place on the king's left side, where a huge plate of venison and potatoes waited for me. I murmured something polite about his invitation and remembered to call him "Your Radiance" so as to keep my brain parts intact.

We were served by attractive women, the most attractive in New Kingdom according to Ludovic, all in blue dresses, with one gray-haired matron to watch over them. Ludovic could eat a haunch of deer and make the exercise look polite, but what his eyes did to the servers was anything but genteel. It was clear which ones he liked, and which parts of them he wanted most, and the servers played to his appetite. They wore short skirts and deeply scooped tops, bent over more decorously than their work called for, and pressed against him when pouring his drink or refilling his plate. Meanwhile, all of the other men in the room received a professionally detached degree of service. The blue-dressed women were for Him alone.

"Eat," he told me between bites. "Talk after." I didn't know it then, but they didn't get to eat that well every day. Most days they ate what everyone else did, only more of it. That morning, someone had found and shot a number of deer. I was supposed to be flattered that he included me in his little feast, in an informal setting with his private guards, but the gesture went right over my head. Mainly I wanted to know what he wanted from me, but I ate as much as I could given the tension I felt. As the plates got cleaned up after, he had the cooks make a box for me in an honest-to-Living-Jesus to-go container like I hadn't seen or used in years. It even had the former restaurant's name and logo printed on one side.

"Feed that woman of yours," he said generously, "good breeders need extra padding. Keeps 'em healthy." I thanked His Radiance again, and waited for him to explain what I was doing there. For several seconds we just looked at each other. It was his meeting, and I was too afraid of saying something offensive to push the conversation forward.

"So, Engineer, what's your dream?"

The question was so sudden that I'm sure I sat there for a heartbeat or three with my mouth wide open, but I got myself together eventually. I knew the answer to that question.

"Kill all the zombies. Everywhere. Why, what's your dream?" That last part slipped out because I was so shaken. Then, remembering I didn't want to get shot, I added, "Your Radiance."

The king sat back in his chair and lit a fat, stinking cigar. It had probably been stale before the plague, and was nearly a decade older since. It smelled like he had dried a turd and lit it on fire, and none of the greenies joined him. Possibly they saved all the cigars for their king to pay homage to him, and wisely avoided smoking the nasty things themselves. I silently prayed he wouldn't make me smoke one of the leafy droppings with him.

"A vast kingdom," he said, once he had raised a thick smoke about him, "west of the Mississippi. Forget about the northeast corridor. Shit there's too radioactive for another ten years, best case."

"Only ten years? I would have assumed longer, your radiance."

"U.S. nukes were supposed to be clean," he explained, "so people could go back to the land after three years. That's what they told everyone. Fucking liars, it's more like twenty, minimum, if you don't want to die of cancer. Then there's fallout. They had nuclear winter from the coast to Appalachia for a year, so practically everything died. Also," we waved his cigar around in broad circles, "we destroyed the Mississippi bridges. Damn zombies kept using them. If we'd had your gizmos a few years back we could have kept the bridges, but what's done is done. Good news is, three hundred million ex-humans can't get from there to here.

"Now, I've been building settlements all over but keeping it working is a chore. Wheat has to go west. Salvage from Utah and Colorado has to go east. Our success is hurting us, because we're too spread out. People have been saying I should put all our eggs into one basket, make one massive settlement, but that's a disaster waiting to happen. One bad shamble, one outbreak of tuberculosis, one drought, and New Kingdom dies like that!" Ludovic snapped the fingers he wasn't using to hold his smoking turd. "A little distance is a good thing. We just got too much of it."

"The trains," I interrupted him, at some risk to myself. We were forced to listen to Sundown Review every night because they piped it into the dining room during dinner, and they just wouldn't shut up about Grand Junction and all the people they were planning on moving there. The kingdom had Moab too, yet they barely said anything about it. What Grand Junction had that Moab didn't was a spot on the rail artery that ran across the country. "Your Radiance is moving people to settlements on rail lines instead of highways."

Ludovic pointed at me with the stink stick, and talked to his normally helmet-wearing minions. "This fucking guy, what did I tell you? He's something, right?"

"Yeah," Ludovic told me, "that's the plan. You want a world without zombies. I want a kingdom without zombies. But first, we have to free Denver."

The warmth of the fire and meal left me. "Denver's a problem, Your Radiance."

"Not for much longer. Now we got ourselves the Engineer."