Dragos Falls
Page 13
Mike laid down next to her once more, softly stroking her back and running his fingers through her hair in silence. After she seemed to be totally calmed down, he went to the bathroom and found a small tube of ointment that had been left behind. He resumed his place next to her and removed the towel, then slowly applied the ointment, welt by welt and cut by cut.
Whether from exhaustion, or from crying herself to sleep, Aubrey finally dozed off. Although it was the middle of the afternoon, Mike would not allow himself to leave, so for two hours he stayed beside her as she slumbered and escaped the searing pain across her entire bottom.
In the late afternoon, Aubrey finally stirred, but upon waking she reached back to her bottom and began to cry once again from the lingering pain. She took a deep breath and looked at Mike: “I still have something to do.”
Mike helped her to get up, but every movement was painful to her. He helped her to get dressed in loose fitting cotton underwear beneath a sundress. She commented that she would likely forego jeans or sitting down for at least a couple of days.
Once dressed, she walked over to the nightstand and retrieved the stolen bracelet. She held it up so that Mike could see what she was doing and begin the walk toward the door. Mike called out to her: “Want me to go along?”
She nodded and began to cry softly. “Thanks…that would be nice.”
They went out of the house and began walking toward the street, and Mike was pleasantly surprised when he felt her reaching for his hand. They intertwined their fingers and continued toward the residence from which the bracelet had been stolen.
They found Lorraine Adamson in her yard, sitting at a card table with two other older women. They were cutting up remnants of cloth to make quilts for the cool nights that would come later in the year.
Aubrey walked up to the group slowly. Lorraine greeted her with a smile, but the other women seem to be reluctant to welcome her. “Hello, Aubrey. I remember that you told me not to ask you to have a seat when you stopped over today. From looking at how red your eyes are, am I to assume that you have indeed been rendered unable to sit?”
Aubrey leaned across the table and handed her the stolen bracelet. “Once again, I’m so sorry. And indeed, I cannot sit. And I think it’s only fair to let you know that I was thoroughly punished.” She turned and looked at Mike. “Honey…I would like to tell them how I was punished today.”
Mike simply nodded silently. “I had to go over to the school building, and I bent over a desk, then Michael gave me twelve hard whacks with a paddle on my bare bottom. Then when we got home, I got three lashes on the bare bottom with Mr. Watson’s flogging whip. I don’t advise anyone to experience that.” She reached back to rub her bottom for emphasis. “Once again Mrs. Adamson…my apologies.”
Chapter 10
Neither Mike nor Aubrey had much of an appetite for an evening meal, so they ate very little and went to bed just as night was falling.
Aubrey had taken off all her clothes, and once again, laid on her stomach uncovered. Mike also remained on top of the covers so that he could feel close to her. As they lay in the gathering darkness, Aubrey rested her head on Mike’s shoulder. “I know that this thing inside me is not gone. But I do understand, Mike, that today wasn’t about making it go away. Today was about being honest and letting you help me cope and work around it all.”
Mike took a deep breath. “I just wish it wouldn’t have taken…”
Aubrey began to run her hand across his chest. “I think that today had to happen. You’ve tried to make me understand, that we are now in a brutal life, and I have to get a grip because there will not be a psychologist on every street corner now making excuses for me. Just think, Mike, if you hadn’t come along…I may have been banished from the group by now.”
She hesitated for a moment. “Marlene and Watson are nice people. But we’re talking about people traveling in a survival mode. Things could’ve turned out different, because I could have been put out on my own. I could have been found dead along the road. I don’t want to sound vain, but if some bad guys would’ve found somebody like me alone on some lonely Texas road…it makes some welts on a red ass sound pretty tame in comparison.
“So our world is kind of scary. And my husband wants to protect me and keep me from making the wrong person an enemy. I think that’s a pretty good thing.”
Mike looked at her with raised eyebrows. “Have you seen your butt in the mirror?”
“Yes I have. And to be very honest…I almost passed out. Rather dramatic, isn’t it?”
She carefully turned on her side and snuggled up against Mike. “Just keep me safe, Mike. Just do whatever it takes. I need for you to do whatever is necessary to help me cope.”
Mike began to stroke her back and her hip, as she quickly drifted off, and slept through the night.
At 6:00 AM the next morning, Mike was already out of bed and dressed. But instead of leaving the house, he stood in silence in the doorway of the bedroom watching Aubrey sleep. He could not help cringing while looking at the angry red marks across the bottom flesh that still would have been a dark pink under any circumstances after the paddling he had given her.
On one hand, he felt an obligation to take a walk through the village in his unofficial role of assisting Watson and Marlene in frequently checking to see that all was well. At the same time, he really did not wish for Aubrey to wake alone in the house after what she had endured.
He was stirred from his indecision by a knock on his front door, and when he opened the door he was met by what under other circumstances would have been an enticing vision of the attractive brunette in the short nightshirt: “Sally?”
They went to the school building together. Sally sat at a round table in the school cafeteria along with Mike, Watson and Marlene. Watson arched his eyebrows, and then said to her: “Okay tell us about this phone call.”
The attorney leaned forward. “It was about 3:00 AM. Just out of hope, I always keep my cell phone close by at night, and just yesterday afternoon I was able to charge it on that contraption Mike built in the gymnasium.” She looked over at Mike with a wicked smile. “I was trying to get my mind off my burning ass.
“Anyway…in the middle of the night my phone goes off. It was my brother calling from Nova Scotia. It turns out he lives in about the only portion of the province that wasn’t wiped out. It seems that they rigged up a generator to charge their phones just like here.
“He picked up a BBC broadcast yesterday. Now the Europeans think that there are only about a dozen colonies of people like us. Just like we had heard before, most are in the South and the West. But they are estimating that overall, there probably aren’t ten million of us left, at least based on their surveillance flights.”
They all began to look at each other in shock and sadness, then Mike spoke. “There were over three hundred million of us, not counting the Canadians. So all of us survivors number what would have been the population of Los Angeles before…”
Sally continued. “There’s more. Because of the surveillance flights, of course, our locations are supposedly known. So, the report went on to say that we are probably going to get some supplies dropped to us. That’s the good news. The bad news is nobody is going to bother to land to help us out, because they don’t know how safe it is. But the supply drops are supposed to start today. We can only hope they know about our little group here. We just have no way of knowing for sure.”
Sally leaned back in her chair. “I’m afraid that’s all I have. I had a hard time hearing my brother, and the call kept fading in and out. I will say this…I feel very fortunate to have been able to talk to him and know that he’s okay. He’s my older brother, still looking out for me, his loudmouth kid sister lawyer.”
Sally stood up, and then leaned down toward Mike with a smile. “Even when I was a kid, my smart mouth and my temper got me in trouble…I mean, frequently.” She smiled at Mike again, then turned and walked out of the cafeteria.
Mike,
Marlene and Watson began the task of going through the village homes and gardens and telling everyone what Sally had related. Instructions were rapidly distributed by word-of-mouth regarding the possible event of a supply drop. Several people who had pickup trucks were designated to bring any relief materials to the back door of the school where the generator was located, so that supplies could be stored and distributed in an orderly fashion.
Mike took a detour to his own house, and stirred the still sleeping Aubrey. When he told her what was going on, the excitement seemed to overwhelm her lingering physical discomfort, so she put on some loose fitting pajama bottoms, sandals and a tee shirt, and walked to the school to look for some writing tablets and pens in anticipation of helping to record the supplies being brought in.
Everyone felt reluctant to have very high hopes. Without an assurance that their own colony of survivors had been spotted, if they were passed over, the psychological devastation on top of knowing that they were still virtually quarantined from the rest of mankind could have been catastrophic.
That was why the first sound of a droning airplane engine in the distance made hearts begin to skip beats. People working in the gardens looked up in the sky and pointed, their shouts of excitement being heard through open windows, bringing others outside. A couple of minutes later, three cargo planes appeared at first like tiny dots in the cloudless blue sky, and as they approached they were flying low enough that the refugees in Dragos Falls could see doors opening on the cargo bays.
All of a sudden, parcels the size of automobiles began to fall from the bottoms of the planes as parachutes opened above them to slow their descent. The large pallets were welcome, regardless of what they carried. The refugees could feel their humanity being restored simply by knowing they had not been abandoned and forgotten.
One by one, the large cargo pallets landed with a ‘Whumph’ that shook the ground around them as the field behind the school building suddenly looked like a small separate village of white canvas tents. Within minutes, pickup trucks were pulling up at the site, and the field was swarming with villagers eager to see what had been sent to them.
Nearly every adult on the scene pulled a pocketknife out of their pants pocket and began to cut the strips of tape that held the bundles together beneath the clear plastic packaging. That was when they found the bulletins telling them that this particular shipment had been provided through an airlift by the Royal Air Force, and that the supplies had been furnished by Britain, France, Germany, Mexico and Brazil. As the packaging was removed, individual boxes were loaded into the trucks and taken to the school building.
As the villagers began carrying boxes into the gymnasium, they found that Marlene and Aubrey had placed paper signs on the floor to designate where different types of supplies and foods would be placed. To their relief, many parcels consisted of first aid supplies and common medications. Although, anyone depending upon some of them to live, likely would have succumbed before reaching Dragos Falls, a supply of the drugs would be on hand for anyone needing them in the future.
There were no doctors or nurses among them, but the shipments did contain instructions on the use of various medications. Under normal circumstances, many of them would have been tightly controlled, but survivor colonies such as Dragos Falls had been relieved by fate from following many of the usual rules governing the administration of drugs.
Box after box was brought into the gymnasium, and packing lists revealed the extent to which the villagers had been generously supplied with canned meats, powdered milk and powdered eggs, flour, salt and sugar. There were canned vegetables and canned fruits and boxes of fruit flavored snacks. There were crates of coffee and tea, and cases of soft drinks.
There were cases of soap and shampoo, cartons of toothpaste and toothbrushes, even birth control supplies, to Aubrey’s great relief.
There were tools and materials for starting fires, packages of duct tape and boxes of nails and screws. And when all the boxes were finally unloaded, with the gym taking on the appearance of a grocery store, they even found instructions on how to best utilize the wood pallets as firewood and the fabric from the parachutes for clothing.
They would still need to work diligently with their gardens and the cattle herd they hoped to develop. But for now, they would no longer have to worry about going off into the countryside to scavenge and place their lives at risk, when their supply of nonperishable foods would have inevitably run out. The fact that they could eat moderately well until the recently planted crops were harvested helped to offset the hurt of the prospect of their continued isolation.
Nearly everyone residing in Dragos Falls had packed into the gymnasium to either help unload or simply be in the presence of the supplies. After five hours of work in bringing the supply parcels into the gymnasium and making sure that they had been recorded, Watson stood on a chair and called for everyone’s attention. He asked for some volunteers to work on the committee to set up a system for the distribution and use of everything that had arrived. But the shipment was so generous and large, he invited everyone to celebrate by taking away a tin of canned meat and one of the thousands of boxes of flatbread.
Mike and Aubrey relaxed in the living room of their tiny home. Aubrey lay on the sofa on her stomach, while Mike sat on the floor next to her as they shared a meal from the newly arrived delivery. Mike bit down on a sheet of the flatbread upon which he had placed a slice of the canned meat. “I think this is a British version of Spam. Whatever the case, it’s pretty good.”
Aubrey took her first bite, tilted her head and nodded. “It’s a welcome break from Vienna sausages.”
Mike rested his food on his knee. “How are you doing today?”
Aubrey reached out and ran her hand across his cheek. “I can give you the flippant answer that I have never felt so good on the day following an extensive paddling topped off by a flogging.” She batted her eyes at Mike and smiled. “In all seriousness, I’m doing fine. I do think I’m going to have a couple of little scars on my butt. Probably not a bad thing to have such little reminders like that following me around. When I need to, I can always reach back and feel them so they can remind me of why I need to stop and think.”
Mike looked down and rubbed his forehead. “A year ago…if someone had told me that I would be using a whip on a woman…”
“A year ago we couldn’t have imagined anything we’re experiencing now.”
“But taking a whip to…a woman I love like…I have never loved anyone before?”
“Now in my case, if someone had told me a year ago that I would be in trouble for stealing something…I would’ve just shrugged it off and asked what else was new. You see, Mike, when things were the way they used to be, I was never forced to really confront my problems. Now, everyone around me has me in their focus. I’m surrounded, so I can’t run and hide from it anymore and pretend it’s no big deal. Because the first time these people caught me stealing something, they tied my hands behind my back and tossed my ass in the back of a truck and kept me there so I couldn’t cause any more trouble. No talk of psychological complexes and hidden needs to act out to gain attention to compensate for some childhood slight over not getting as much ice cream in a dish at a birthday party or some such silliness.”
Mike looked at his wife and shook his head. “Sometimes you seem like an adolescent. Sometimes you seem to possess all the wisdom in the world. All I know for sure, is that somehow in the middle of some really horrible stuff, I met you, and I can’t imagine life any other way.”
Two weeks after the supply delivery, three couples decided to give up the known quantity that was now life in Dragos Falls and try to head on back to their homes in Iowa. They knew that they might die along the way at the hands of robbers, or die from a new outbreak of the epidemic. They also knew that they might return to find their home was occupied by strangers, and face a choice of acceptance or cohabitation, or fighting for what was once theirs. They said their goodbyes and left, and some of
the homes in the village became less crowded.
Most of the residents of Dragos Falls decided that it was only inevitable that a cultural stratification develop among the residents. The older couples tended to try to hold on to their habits and customs from before, as if they had simply moved rather than been forced into a new world full of perils and uncertainty.
The younger people, Mike and Aubrey included, began to seek each other out for companionship and gatherings. They had come to accept that the new reality because they had simply not spent the same decades of adulthood in the normal world as had their older neighbors.
It was on a rainy evening when they were forced inside after tending the crops, that many of them decided to assemble in the gymnasium of the school. Some light came in through the thick, glass block windows, but they also lit candles as much for the ambience as their vision. They broke out some of the wine that had been gathered on their trek that ended in Dragos Falls, and talked of the small vineyard they were cultivating in the hopes of making their own wine the following year.
It was an unwritten rule in the village that batteries were to be reserved for essential use, but Sally, the young and attractive attorney, had brought a CD player when she had fled her Iowa home. For many of the young adults in attendance, the sound of music was a rare treat they had not known for some time.
The heavy, throbbing beat of “Iron Man” brought cheers from the assembled group. Sally, followed by Aubrey, both in silky short dresses, then other younger women, went to the center of the gymnasium floor and began a sensuous, swaying dance that entranced those present, most of all, the men.
Later, back in their house, Mike and Aubrey sat on the sofa sipping at the remnants of a bottle of wine given to them by one of the other couples, having been told that it was an overdue wedding present. They talked for a while, then set their glasses on a small table in front of the sofa and began to kiss and caress.