B00C74WTKQ EBOK (6 page)

Adrian drove until the engine started to sputter from lack of wood gas. He pulled off the road, then shifted into all-wheel drive and slowly drove well back into the trees. There he shut the engine down. The sudden stillness and silence was a relief, although he hadn’t realized until that moment that how loud it was.

Adrian opened the cab door and stepped out. He stood and stretched as high as he could, his arms reaching up and his back bowing as he got to his tip toes. A shudder of a muscle spasm ran down his body as his muscles almost groaned with relief at having movement again.

Racy came around from the back of the truck, rubbing her eyes. “Why’d we stop? Everything okay?”

“Time for a break, and we need to gather more wood for the gas generator. Tell the girls we need all the wood we can put in the back. Small pieces that will fit in the generator tank.” He pointed back the way they’d come. “The road is that way, tell the girls to stay out of sight of it, and to keep the noise down. Don’t want to alert anyone nearby any more than we already may have. We’ll stay here for a couple of hours. Wouldn’t be a bad idea to fix up a quick meal too. Then we’ll get back on the road.”

Adrian called Bear out of the cab and said “Wait here.” Turning back to Racy he said, “Bring the girls by to meet Bear. I want Bear to get the idea they are not enemy, and for the girls to understand the same thing about him, that he’s no enemy to them. While you make introductions, I’m going to take the horse out and water him, then walk around a little out there. Don’t let any of the girls shoot me, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Oh, and tell Bear to come find me when he’s met all the girls. Just tell him to ‘find Adrian.’”

An hour later Adrian came back to the truck, Bear stayed out on the perimeter. Adrian moved the horse to a spot where he could graze and hobbled him, leaving a bucket of water nearby. He found all of the girls sitting around a fire, eating. Adrian sat down with them and one of the girls handed him a plate that had already been prepared and waiting. Adrian took his time eating, thinking the situation they were in over bit by bit. When he finished his plate he said, “Good food, whoever prepared it did a good job. Thank you.”

“Ladies, it’s time for me to learn all of your names, get a little of each of your history, and to answer questions about myself. We’re going to be together for a while, let’s get comfortable with each other. First let me tell you my plan for you girls, see what you think of it. I’m pretty sure that’s on the top of your minds right now, isn’t it?”

Almost every girl nodded their heads up and down, some saying quietly, “Yes, sir.”

Adrian rubbed a hand across his forehead. “Ladies, I am at a bit of a loss how to act here. I’ve not been around young girls before, and I don’t know how to treat you. If you were boys, I think I’d be fine, but…obviously you’re not. Here’s what I need to know: How do you want me to treat you, and in return have you give me your instant obedience to any order I give you? It’s not that I want to boss you around, but if we get into a bad situation, I need you to do exactly what I say and when I say it, without hesitation or question. I don’t want to yell at you like I would men or boys, but I don’t want you standing up after I yell ‘hit the dirt,’ either. Does that make sense?”

When Adrian finished the girls all looked from him directly at Racy, expecting her to answer for them.

She looked at them one at a time, then turned to Adrian. “I think if you treat us the way you have so far, it’ll be just fine. We’ve been treated like cattle for so long we’ve forgotten what being treated with respect feels like. I can’t remember the last time anyone asked any of us our opinion about anything. You just did, and I think we are all in a bit of shock over it. We just kind of assumed that you would boss us around like everyone else has.”

She looked around at the girls again before continuing. “In fact, I think we would all like to hear why you’re helping us instead of either using us or abandoning us.”

Chapter 7

A
drian cleared his throat. Finding
sixteen pairs of young girl’s eyes glued to his every move and expression unnerved him. He cleared his throat again.

“I guess I don’t see any choice in the matter. I don’t think any decent man would have any better luck dealing with this than me. I would have left you behind if I thought you’d been able to take care of yourselves. Or if you had all been older and there voluntarily. But, I don’t think you would have been okay for long, and you weren’t there voluntarily. You were all there against your will, being raped. It sickens me that you’ve been put through that. Tell me, have all of you been raped?”

Racy replied, “Everyone that has had her period. Lacy watched for that, and as soon as it happened she put the girl up for auction. I guess we were lucky she waited that long. When we knew a girl had her first period, we hid it from Lacy as long as we could. Sometimes we could hide it for several months, but she always found out sooner or later.”

Adrian nodded. “Okay, so here’s the deal,” he said. “One of these days you’re going to run into people that will judge you, and consider you to be low-life’s, even trash, because of having been prostituted. It won’t matter to them that you were forced, that you were raped. Their little minds won’t comprehend that you had no choice. Certainly they have no right to judge a girl for what she has been forced to do.”

Adrian looked at each girl for a moment, locking eyes with them one at a time. Some of them blushed and looked down, some held his gaze. A couple held his gaze defiantly.

He continued, trying to be gentle, but firm. “When you’re back around other people, it’s up to you whether you bring up your past. You can talk about it, or not, as you personally see fit. But, if you don’t want to talk about it you’ll need a consistent cover story. If you don’t want to discuss it, just say that you were in an orphanage for girls, that the head mistress died a week before I came by to drop off Rita and Lila, and that since there was no adult in charge I took you with me to find another place for you to live. Simple and effective, okay?”

Most of the girls nodded.

“But whether you choose to talk about it or not, you need to be prepared for the story to get out, for people to look at you differently. Some men will try to treat you poorly. Most men won’t pay you much attention at all. Good men will treat you as the ladies that you are. It’s the way life is, be ready to deal with it and remember that whatever may happen or may be said, you are no worse, or no better, than anyone else. You’re just people too. Okay?”

Around the campfire, he watched the girls carefully. A few of them nodded, their heads barely moving.

“All right, now, back to answering your question. I couldn’t leave you behind, because sooner or later the men that had been frequenting the place would return. I’ll take you as far as Corpus Christi. I hope to find you a good house there and get you set up as a trading post. You’ve got a darned good start with what’s in the back of the truck. By careful trading and sound negotiating you should be able to keep yourselves fed and clothed and sheltered. I’m going to teach you ladies how to defend yourselves as we travel. By the time we get to Corpus, I expect each of you—even the youngest ones—to be able to handle a gun expertly, to work together as a team. With luck and some hard training, I’ll leave you there in excellent shape, and safe. Then I’ll say goodbye and return to my travels. When I finish my trip, I’ll come back and check in on you; and take anyone who wants to go back to Fort Brazos with me. Does that sound okay to all of you?”

Most of the girls nodded, the rest just stared at him, making him uncomfortable. Adrian had a prescient moment where he knew that when the time came to leave them behind he would feel like he was abandoning them, and that some of them would feel the same way.
But I didn’t take them on to raise, and couldn’t take care of them if I wanted to, without abandoning my own life, at least not until I can get them back home and set up somehow.

“Okay then, let’s get started teaching me your names. I want each of you to just call me Adrian. Racy, would you introduce them by age, starting with the youngest first?”

Racy stood and walked behind the girls. She stopped behind each one and gave her name and a couple of brief words of their backgrounds, all of which were remarkably similar: orphans that had been taken in by guile and then used by Lacy and Reggie. “Gina, Tracy, Erin, Alana, Celia, Selena, Lena, Shayla, Victoria, Faye, Rylie, Helen and Regan. And you already know Lila and Rita.” As each girl was introduced Adrian said hello and called her by name.

When the introductions were complete, Adrian said, “It’ll take a while for me to get your names all straight, bear with me until I do.” Then thinking that manners might be a good thing to show he added, “Please.”

He stood up and stretched. “Let’s get the wood collected and then get back on the road.”

Racy spoke up. “Can I make a suggestion? It might be a good idea to stop here for the day, let everyone kind of get used to the idea that we’re no longer slaves, that our lives are extremely different.”

She must have seen the puzzled look on Adrian’s face, because she continued quickly.

“I know this must sound crazy to you, Adrian, but this is the biggest day in our lives, ever. I’d like to see the girls play, that’s something they haven’t been allowed to do. Just loaf around and play. One day of that won’t hurt, will it?”

Adrian scratched his head.
Play? They need to play? Oh geez what have I gotten into
. “I expect not Racy, one day isn’t going to make a lot of difference. Go ahead and set up camp, get the girls situated and then let them play all day. I’ll go hunting so you all can have privacy. When I come back you’ll hear me whistling.”

Adrian took off, collecting Bear outside the camp. He carried his M4 and went looking for wild hogs. Feral hogs had become a problem in Texas even before the grid dropped, reaching a critical mass of four-million with their population doubling every two years, in spite of intense hunting pressure. With few humans to restrict them in any way, the wild hog population had grown to numbers making them an important part of the food chain—hogs had become to the grid survivors in East Texas what the buffalo had been to the Plains Indians. Adrian was now traveling through heavily populated hog territory. With Bear to sniff them out, it didn’t take long to find some.

Adrian shot two of the smaller hogs—young ones were better eating; easier to carry, clean, and cook; and there wouldn’t be much, if any, waste. Seventeen people and a wolf could put a quick end to two young hogs. Adrian field dressed them, then tossed the internal organs to Bear while he tied the pig’s feet together and slung them over his neck like a bandolier.

When he got close to the camp, he could hear the girls; they were laughing, giggling and apparently having a great time on their day off. He sat down to wait; there was still plenty of day left, and if they needed a day of fun, as Racy suggested, then he didn’t want to put a damper on it or inhibit them with his presence. After three hours, they seemed to have settled. Adrian began walking towards them, whistling loudly.

The girls all looked up at him as he came into the camp. They did look more relaxed than they had before. Adrian gave them a big smile as he stood there with the two dead and gutted pigs hanging from his shoulders.

Racy said, “What’s wrong with your face? Stop that!”

Rita spoke up, “He did that to us too—he thinks he’s smiling.”

All the girls started laughing and making strange faces at Adrian. Adrian started laughing, as much at himself as at the girl’s antics.

When they finally settled down, he lifted the pigs off his shoulder. “I brought a couple of small pigs to cook, we’ll eat fresh, hot, roasted pork tonight. We’ll need two decent-sized fires, four forked sticks, and two long sticks for spits.”

Lila asked Adrian, “Could you please cut their heads off before you cook them?”

“Sure thing Lila, sure thing.”

That evening, after everyone had eaten their fill of the delicious meat, Adrian studied the girls. They were full, warm, and comfortable. They seemed to be at ease, he didn’t see nearly as much signs of tension among them as before. He had noticed earlier that the girls seemed fascinated by his every move, even if it was just to scratch an itch, he invariably found over a dozen sets of eyes watching him. For a while it made him self-conscious, but after some thought he realized it was natural and tried to give it no more mind. They were wary of him because of the way men had treated them in the past.