7PM - Emily (A 5PM Short Story)

by Chris Heinicke

  7PM

  Emily

  A 5PM Short Story

  By CHRIS HEINICKE

  COPYRIGHT © 2016 Chris Heinicke

  7PM-Emily (A 5PM Short Story)

  By Chris Heinicke

  Cover Design by Rebecca Berto, Berto Designs

  Manuscript Services—Editing & Interior Design by

  Rogena Mitchell-Jones, Literary Editor

  www.rogenamitchell.com

  All Rights Reserved

  This book may not be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission from the author. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. All characters and storylines are the properties of the author, and your support and respect are appreciated.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  This book is written in Australian English, therefore, includes Australian diction.

  To my dear wife Glenda, whose love, support,

  and belief in me helped make this novel possible.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Epilogue

  Coming Soon

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Erica Steele, aka Emily

  I have absolutely no recollection of my real parents. My early life consisted of a throng of tattered memories of perverted older men with beards and nude women with long hair in smoky little tents. Those memories come from growing up in a culture of drugs, free love, and crazy people holding no regard for the laws of our country. They just did what they wanted with whomever they wanted without consequences.

  One of my earliest remembrances consisted of one of those bearded men lying naked with me on one side of him, and my favourite pretend-mother, Sapphire, on his other. At the time, I didn’t understand what they were doing to each other, and I worried he was hurting her when she was making noises as he was putting his ‘doodle’ in her, as he so eloquently put it.

  Growing up amongst nudity and drug taking seemed normal to me. It was as if everyone grew up that way. We all lived in the middle of a forest in tents, living off the land from fruits and vegetables we grew. Many nights were spent around a campfire, singing, and drinking moonshine, and smoking plants that also grew near our isolated existence. A river ran half a mile from our campsite, a source of water we utilised for bathing and swimming. At the age of fourteen, I lost my virginity to a boy of my same age during a warm starry night on the muddy banks of the watery lifeline of our world.

  While not a great first experience, I loved the way it made me feel to have a boy inside me. So the boy named Darrell and I did it nearly every day for a week. That is until one of the bearded elders caught us in the act and informed me that having reached the age to have sex, I needed to be sharing my body around with other people too, as part of the accepted practice of our civilisation. Without any exposure to the outside world back then, I had no idea I shouldn’t be doing it with anyone at my age, let alone the elders. But whenever I got with one of the older men, something seemed wrong about it, almost as if I was sleeping with my father.

  But one day, a woman joined our little commune, and it soon changed everything. Young and beautiful with long flowing dark hair, I took an instant shining to her and hung out with her as often as I could. She was thirty when she joined us, and when we had time alone, she told me I shouldn’t be having sex with the older men, that it was wrong, and they were only using me. She also didn’t partake when the joints were passed around at the campfire, but when the group sex started, she told me to sit and watch, and she got involved with not just the men, but the women too.

  A few weeks passed by, and one day, I was sitting by the riverbank trying to make out with another girl when I overheard two of the male elders chatting.

  “If we let her stay, she could tear down everything we’ve built here.”

  “Yes, I know. Ever since she arrived here, Erica won’t let me fuck her until I have to get rough with her,” the other man said. “Some nights, I have a really hard job getting her legs apart.”

  “Helen has to go if you know what I mean. I think she’s trying to brainwash the younger ones into standing up for themselves. I prefer it when Erica happily spreads her legs.”

  “Yes, she’s the hottest bitch here, those breasts and that nice tight—”

  “There’s plenty more like her. If she needs to go too, we can just go out and seduce more women and girls to our lifestyle. Oh, and you’re well within your rights to make little Erica have sex with you. But maybe tell her it’s part of the law, and not obeying can mean…”

  I turned away and looked in the eyes of Rebecca, who still appeared stunned about me hitting on her. “I’m sorry, Erica. I’m not sure about this,” she put her shirt back on.

  “Never mind that. I just heard Dennis and Ian talking about Helen and me. I’m worried they might want to kill us.”

  “Are you sure? I didn’t hear anything.”

  “I don’t like sex with the older men.”

  “But it’s how things go here. If we keep them pleased, everything is okay.”

  I looked in her eyes, and she looked up in the direction from where I heard the two men speak. Maybe she was in on it, too. I had to go find Helen, and quick.

  “Erica, where are you going?” she asked.

  “Just going back to camp.” I walked away from her and headed to the main camp field.

  ******

  I peeked into every tent, many of them filled with smoke, some with groups of two or three engaged in various sex acts. Helen couldn’t be found in any of them.

  I scratched my head and wondered where she could be, and as I surveyed the trees blanketing us from the outside world from the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of movement. I kept my gaze glued to the location and walked toward it.

  Leaves and sticks crunched under my bare feet, but I hardly felt them, my soles having grown accustomed over the years. Our lives were simple and our needs few. No shoes, no underwear, just basic clothes sewn by the old lady, and a constant supply of birth control pills and tampons handed to us from the age of our first period, provided by the old man of the group who made monthly visits to this place he called town.

  “Erica, what is it?” Helen’s voice startled me as she came out of the shadows before I saw her clearly.

  “I heard Ian and Dennis talking about you, saying you had to go because you were a bad influence and maybe me as well if I don’t stop trying to resist sex with them. They miss me freely having sex with them, they force me now, and they’re not happy about it, blaming you for me not wanting to put out. It feels wrong having sex with those older men. Now it’s really starting to hurt because they force me to their beds and then force my legs apart, but what if I’m supposed to be doing what they want, and I’m the bad one?”

  Even in the uncertain lighting, I saw her stiffen. “Yes, it is wrong fucking those older men. They’re using you because you’re young, pretty, and hot. In the real world, they would be put in jail for what they do to you. And you know what I think? I think they probably took you from your family when you were a baby, raising you to be a pot-smoking, free-loving hippy. I can get you out of here.”

  My eyes lit up. I always wondered what else was out in the world, but I never thought I would be able to leave—and being forced to have sex made me sad most da
ys.

  “Where would we go? How would we survive?” I asked. Part of me also feared change, as well as any action the elders would do to stop us from leaving—or what they would do to get me back.

  “You two stupid bitches wouldn’t last a week.”

  I turned abruptly and found the bearded Dennis standing behind me, his lips twisted in a creepy smile.

  “You followed her here? You’re one hell of a creep,” Helen said. She reached for a satchel on the ground and pulled out a knife.

  “Put that thing away, Helen. I know you don’t have the balls to use that.”

  Quicker than I could blink, she pulled her arm back and flung the knife through the air. It hit Dennis in the throat. Gasping aloud, I almost fell to my knees as Helen ran over to catch me.

  “We need to get to those tents and find where they hide the money, and then we can hit the road and go to a much better place,” she said. She lowered me to the ground to sit as she gathered her satchel and sifted through it.

  Each time I looked to my right, I saw Dennis’s eyes staring back at me as if his body was telling me that although his body had died, his soul was watching me, and he would still come for me each day I wasn’t having my period. I put my head in my hands and began to sob.

  “Hey, babe, it will all be okay. He was an evil man. Don’t feel sad for him.”

  “But I’ve known him all my life, part of me still loves him despite the—” I said cutting my own sentence short. I saw the blood flow out from beneath his body, and thought about the times he used to lead sing-alongs around the campfire as I danced with the other children. But that was before I became one of his many sex toys, and my mind soon switched to the times his hairy sweating body lay on top of mine.

  “It’s because you don’t know any better. If you come with me, I can give you all the answers you seek about your past and where you came from, maybe find your family. Stay here and I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  I looked in the satchel and found a machete—a massive bladed tool that I thought could double for a weapon if I needed it. My body still shook in fear, but I knew I might have to defend myself.

  “I want to help you. I can’t let you risk your life for me without trying to help you.” Should I have felt bad that I was ready to join up with Helen after only a relatively short time she had been in my life?

  She smiled. “I was hoping you would say that. But we need to get going before the others find the body.”

  ******

  We made it back to the main camp area, Helen with a pistol in her hand and me with a machete I had no idea how to use it to full effect. If all I had to do were swing it through the air, I would be fine.

  Ian was the first to crawl out of a tent, fully naked and dropping to his knees as soon as he saw Helen with a pistol aimed at him. “Please, Helen. Whatever you’re thinking, you don’t want to do it.”

  “Ian, you’re charged with the crime of having multiple non-consensual sex acts with a minor,” she took a few steps forward and placed the steel barrel in Ian’s forehead. “And the punishment is death.”

  I looked away as the sound of the bullet ripping through the man’s head echoed and the screaming started from everywhere around us. I held my weapon high with shaking hands. One of the boys my own age tried to plead with me to put it down, stepping closer and closer to me. Thinking he wanted to talk me down, I swung the machete to my right, slicing his chest open and seeing blood spill in a big pool between his feet.

  “Erica,” I heard a female voice behind me.

  “Rebecca, you don’t need to get involved in this,” I said. “I’m taking a stand.”

  Helen looked from side to side for any movement. If everyone decided to rush her at the same time, she might have been able to put two or three of them down, but with over thirty of us living here, we would be overrun.

  “Come with us, Rebecca,” Helen said. “Come and see the world.”

  She looked at me and stared, and then back at the boy’s and Ian’s bodies. Maybe she thought about what she had been expected to do with the male elders, because as she looked back at me, nodded, and pointed to one of the tents. “That’s where they keep everything, all the money and the pills and stuff.”

  “Thanks,” Helen said and crawled almost lizard-like into the tent. A short burst of shouting erupted, soon cut out by two quick gunshots. She exited with a young girl in her grasp and a big suitcase.

  “I’ll need all the men to come out of their tents or else I’ll kill this young girl here,” she called out.

  It took a good minute, but six men crawled from their hiding spots and put their hands up as quickly as they spotted Helen with her gun. Some were clothed, others not.

  “In society, what you men do here is known as statutory rape, and in some cases, rape. In the court of Helen, I find you all guilty.”

  She lined them up one at a time and shot each of the men through the head. Several others came and watched what she did, crying into their hands and screaming as the majority of the male population of the commune met their demise in a span of just a few seconds. I should have been horrified, but I looked at the line of dead men, thinking of the way they had treated me and smiled. I liked the way my new mentor had the power to take away the whole of a person’s existence in a split second. We stood and waited for one of the women to exit her tent.

  As I tried to force my pulse to lower, I shook with the machete in my hand ready to use. “Miss Lizzie, you are charged with the crime of doing nothing while men thirty years older than I had their way with me whenever they liked,” I said to her.

  “Erica, she’s one of the nice ones,” Rebecca said, touching me on the shoulder.

  I didn’t pay her any attention apart from lifting her hand away from me and walked over and swung the machete at Miss Lizzie’s neck, the blade hitting bone and getting stuck, blood spurting from the wound I had inflicted. I pulled with all my strength to dislodge the weapon as the woman collapsed where she stood in a puddle of her own blood.

  “Blades make such a mess. I’ll have to teach you how to shoot,” Helen said. “I generally use that for chopping firewood or clearing a path through the bush.”

  “Please, just go and leave the rest of us alone,” another woman said, crawling from her tent situated behind me.

  More people came outside and looked at us, and in their eyes, I saw fear. I wanted to swing the machete again, but Helen told me it was time to go, to seek another adventure somewhere else.

  “There’s been enough killing today,” the young girl taken hostage by Helen said.

  The three of us stared at her for what seemed liked minutes. We then looked at each other, put our weapons away, and started our journey from the commune, never to see it again.

  Helen, Rebecca, and I held hands and smiled as our feet tread on new territory.

  Chapter 2

  We had been on our journey for three weeks, travelling from the state of Pennsylvania to Mississippi by foot and in the back of pick-up trucks. With our newfound wealth acquired from the stash of money stolen from the commune elders, we bought new clothes, and Rebecca and I ate meat for the very first time.

  “I don’t know how you survived on beans, mushrooms, and vegetables for so long,” Helen said the first day we stopped for burgers.

  Rebecca and I didn’t know any difference. We also discovered these things called shoes, making our long walk much more comfortable for our feet. Even during the coldest months in our tents, all we had was material wrapped around our feet and held in place with string. We had never felt so free, the three of us exploring more of our country with each day we were on the road and making new discoveries, like hot showers, store-bought underwear, and coffee.

  Helen had a fair idea who not to travel with, and knowing we had the means to protect ourselves if necessary served as the perfect umbrella of protection for us on our travels. Getting a ride was easy for three beautiful females, but we steered clear of those who asked for se
x or blowjobs in return for a lift.

  “Why don’t we just get a bus? We have the money,” I asked Helen after we stopped at a twenty-four-hour diner for breakfast. I’d learned about the world quickly. Before the journey, I hadn’t even known what a truck or buses were, having only ever seen the station wagon back at the commune.

  “That would be cheating. I’m teaching you girls life skills. I’m introducing you to so many different people and how to decide who you’ll ride with and who you won’t. The world is a big mysterious place, and no one will ever work it all out. But I’ve learned a lot in my thirty years, and I want to pass on as much of my knowledge as I can to you both.”

  “How did you learn how to kill people?” Rebecca asked as we walked side by side behind Helen. Rebecca’s question brought the eldest member of our group to stop in her tracks.

  “You don’t ask me questions like that. It’s something I had to learn or else I would have ended up raped by a college jerk. We live in a world ruled by men who crave money, power, and that beautiful object between our legs, and some of those will take what they hunger for by force, as you girls experienced with those men at that hippy commune where you grew up. They were clever in making you think it was your duty. What I will teach you is that females should be taking that power away from them and using our vaginas to get what we want from who we want when we want. We have the power.”

  I loved listening to her, but I had a burning question. “What if I like girls, too?”

  Rebecca looked away.

  “Well, we are allowed to have a little fun as well, whether it’s with boys or girls,” Helen said. “I’ve been with a woman myself, and the experience was fantastic. It felt weird at first, but kissing another woman’s soft lips, feeling the curves of her body with my hands, and having her mouth between my legs was a mind-blowing experience. I think every woman should try it at least once.” She smiled at us.