ME2 (S.E.E.D.S. Book 1)

by J Peregrine

“You like food?” George yelled. “You want to eat?” he yelled. “You can play with Sasha till we sell her, that slut is worth a fraction of this one.” With that, Sasha whimpered from somewhere to my left until someone slapped her. “I want to watch you fuck her,” said George. He laughed again and I could hear them releasing the ropes that held her as Sasha whined.

  At first, I thought they had kidnapped me for ransom, thinking my father might pay but now I realized that the slave trade business must be booming, and I needed a way out.

  Trying not to panic, I calmed my breathing and forced my heart to be still then I had a flash of an idea. Grandfather and I had once played a game, it had been years ago, and I had forgotten about it until now. It was a game of escape. “If you relax completely, you will be able to slip your hands out of the ties,” he’d said. I told him that was impossible, and he’d said, the only thing stopping me was that thought. So, I pushed the sounds of moaning and cots creaking to the back of my mind and relaxed, exhaling and relaxing as I turned and twisted my hand and then finally pulled my right hand free. The sounds of moaning were still coming from behind the curtain but thankfully no screaming, at least they weren’t killing anyone I thought as a sad consolation. As soon as I had pulled my arms and legs free of the ties, I had to work on the knot behind me, tying my torso to the pole. It was tight and difficult, but I got it to budge when I heard George talking again and guessed they were done with Sasha and would be coming my way again any minute.

  “Don’t you pee on the bed or you will have hell to pay,” ordered George.

  Fearing I was out of time I nearly ripped my fingernails off as I pried the ropes apart and yanked the rag away from my eyes. Leaping to the fire I pulled the glowing poker free, realizing for a moment that this was what had caused the burn on Sasha's thigh, and quickly turned to wield it at George who had just come out from behind the curtain.

  Chapter 12

  George slowed at the sight of the hot poker but the look on his face told me he had no intention of letting me get away. He took one step to his left and grabbed a knife from the rafters above his head where it must have been stuck, I guessed it must have been there in case of intruders. Armed with this he came at me. “You think you gonna hurt me, bitch? You‘re nothing but a bug to me. You sure as hell not going nowhere. I have plans for you. Put it down and I only hurt you a little." He stepped forward and grinned. "If you don’t drop it now, I guarantee I will fuck you with that poker and put an end to you very slowly,” he said, as he swayed back and forth in a low fighting stance. “Or maybe I just sell you down river.” He smiled a nasty smile. “There they make you beg to die. Don't worry though, they won't kill you. They just make you wish you were dead... ha, they do things even I wouldn't do, but I watch.” He laughed as he slowly inched towards me.

  I guessed he was giving me time to weigh my options. I didn’t know what my plan was, I only knew staying here was not an option. That would be suicide. So, I did the next best thing. “Okay, lets at least make this a fair fight, shall we?” I grabbed the knife Piper had been using off the counter next to me and chucked the hot poker out between the wood slats at the window. I had realized the poker would prove awkward to wield in such a small space.

  This had two effects. First, it surprised him and gave me the advantage of striking first. Second, it fueled his anger. I reached forward and sliced the inside of his arm as he raised it towards me. That was like throwing kerosene on an already burning blaze. He forced me around the room, whacking his blade back and forth with his other arm and then leapt forward stabbing the air between us. He caught me once on the cheek and then again on my forearm making me jump backwards. I attempted to focus on my feet a little harder trying to stay out of his reach and come up with a better plan.

  As we came back to where I had first touched him, I slid through the blood and landed on the floor. If I made it out the door, I realized it would be without Grandfather’s notebook, but rather that than dead or trapped. George however, understood my intent and leapt over the blood and the bench and landed straight on top of me and my knife. I was impressed by his sheer bull-doggedness.

  I could have raised my hand to slice his neck, but I was too slow. If I had thought about it, I could have held my knife like an anchor and let him land on it four-square and ended him right there, but I didn't. Instead he crashed down on top of me and we rolled away from the door. As we rolled, I jabbed my knife fist into his stomach. As we came to a stop, I tried to slice but he punched my hand away and as he did, I cut his knife hand from his wrist into his forearm, which caused him to drop his knife. I scrambled to my feet and kicked his knife sending it sliding to the back of the room under the cots. Only then did I realize I was bleeding. He had managed to slice me across my ribs on one side. At least it wasn't very deep and hadn't hit any muscle.

  George was on the floor squeezing one of his wounds shut trying to stem the flow of blood from another. In the meantime, there had been a crash of glass and Dog jumped out from behind the curtain looking larger and fiercer than I had ever seen him look before, producing ear splitting barks.

  George pushed himself to his feet, holding one arm against his stomach and grabbed a pan from overhead with his other hand ready to defend himself.

  Dog placed himself between us and snarled his warning ready to attack.

  I also held my wounded arm against the sliced skin on my ribs and tried to catch my breath as I watched him. “You are no match for Dog.”

  George looked at me with hard eyes. “You haven’t seen me fight, yet,” he said.

  “I don’t want to kill you. I only want out of here....”

  George roared as he threw the pot at Dogs head and grabbed up the bench, rushing us. I guessed he thought if he could get to me, Dog wouldn’t attack. I have to hand it to him he was nothing if not persistent.

  Dog slammed into the bench and sent George flying backward into the wall.

  “George!” came the scream from behind us as Piper ran out from where she had been hiding, rushing to George’s side.

  George pushed Piper away and struggled to sit upright, the midsection of his shirt was stained with blood. “Get out!” he said in a raspy whisper, steadying himself.

  I started to move but reconsidered. “You need to find another line of work,” I said, “People deserve their freedom, find something else do or I will turn you in....”

  “To who?” he grimaced. “Get out!”

  I grabbed my bag from under the table where I had left it and took my knife to the cots, cutting Sasha free and pulling her upright. “Come on.” I pulled on her, but she couldn’t seem to comprehend what I was saying. I threw a shirt at her and pants, and when she didn’t, move I helped her pull them on. Then I took her by the hand and drug her with me out the door.

  Piper was still sitting beside George on the floor. She watched us leave but didn’t say a word. I knew she wouldn’t leave George, so I didn’t bother trying to convince her otherwise.

  Sasha didn’t weigh much but it didn’t take me long to realize that supporting her as I drug her along was more than I could manage. I had to stop and let go of her arm. She collapsed instantly into a heap on the ground. Holding my wounds, I squatted down next to her. “Sasha, you need to get up. We need to run." I looked back towards the door praying George didn't miraculously appear. "I am going south to the city. Come with me. You can go back to your people.” I waited for a hint of understanding. “Sasha.,” I shook her shoulders. “Sasha,” I whispered. When she looked at me, I realized she wasn't unconscious, she was crying.

  “No,” she cried. “You don’t understand. I have no people, no skills, no nothing.” She sniffed and wiped her eyes. “You think you’re rescuing me, but you’re not.” She rubbed her nose with her arm.

  “It’s all right," I said, stroking her arm. "You can come with me then.”

  But she shook her head and stood up. “You don't understand, he promised to look after me, and he promised to find me someon
e who would take care of me, he has connections. I can’t do it on my own. I'm not strong like you.” She had the look of someone resigned to her fate even if that fate was death. Touching my face, she gave me a sad smile then she turned and started back to the cabin.

  I didn’t know what to say. I hadn't considered myself strong. But mostly I couldn't imagine feeling so down on my luck that what George had to offer would sound like a good thing. “Sasha, you think he’s doing you a favor but he’s not, he's selling you for his benefit not yours. You’ll be a slave for the rest of your life,” I shouted.

  Sasha turned her head as she moved away. “It’s better than what I got now, we’re all slaves one way or another.”

  She was so desperate it astounded me. I wanted to help her, but she was right, I didn’t know her life. I stared after her trying to think what to do.

  Without warning a shot rang out from the cabin and Sasha collapsed into a heap on the ground. My own body recoiled from the sound as I stared at Sasha’s unmoving form. I stood there for what felt like an eternity staring at her collapsed form, waiting for her to move or groan but she didn't. My body vibrated and jerked. This couldn't be real. In what felt like slow motion I finally raised my eyes as Dog stood and pushed against me, barking into my face and saw Piper standing in the cabin doorway looking straight down the barrel of a rifle at me.

  Chapter 13

  I ran.

  I was lucky I had my bag on my back or I would have left it behind without a thought. Running for my life again, I didn’t even care if I was heading in the right direction this time. All I knew was that I needed to move as far and as fast as I could away from George, away from Piper and away from what I assumed was the now dead body of Sasha. Sasha who had been alive and crying a moment earlier, who wanted to live as a slave rather than die, and now she was gone.

  Another shot rang out, behind me. All I knew was that it didn't hit me, and Dog was in front, so I kept running.

  My mind raced as I ran. What had happened? Why, why, why? After Grandfather had been killed, I had decided that maybe there was some reason behind the violence. But this... there was no reason for this. In fact, there was every reason not to kill her if she was their livelihood. I couldn't understand it.

  I ran as far and as fast as I could, and then I ran farther. Was everyone like this? As I ran I realized that the world was obviously much different than I had ever imagined it would be because even in my wildest imaginings of what it was like, I had never imagined this. When I could finally go no further, I collapsed in the grass around the corner of a rock face with a cliff at my back hoping it was far enough that Piper would not want to chase me this far away from George, unless of course he died and then she would have no reason not to.

  I pushed these thoughts aside as my lungs cried for air. When I could breathe again, I dug in my bag to find my wound ointment and uncovered my wounds enough to put ointment on them. I found they were not as bad as I had thought which was good since I didn’t have much ointment left. I applied what I had and tried not to think about the blood loss or the chance of infection or the fact that I had no water.

  When I was done, I looked at Dog. “Is the whole world is like this?” I sighed and leaned my head back against the wall closing my eyes. I felt Dog as he sat down next to me, “Maybe what Grandfather said, and what he feared is true, maybe everyone is crazy and I should have just found another cave to hide in.” I sighed and looked down at my blood-stained hands. The thought that this might be true was depressing me and that was pointless. “Come on,” I said, "we need to keep moving." If nothing else, we needed to find water, and get farther away from George and Piper.

  From the maps I had studied since I was a child, I knew the city and supposedly my father were southwest and along the river. I also knew the river meandered back and forth, east and then west as it went south and then it curved west again towards the city but that was as much as I knew. Piper had said, George went to the city but how far did he travel to get there? George and Sasha had come from the south, had they come straight north or only traveled north towards the cabin near the end of their journey?

  My body ached and I had blood, sweat, and dirt everywhere. My wounds were numb, I hoped not from infection, and I was thirsty and tired. I needed to find water, so I pushed myself forward.

  As I traveled, I worried over why George did what he did, selling the likes of poor Sasha into what was basically slavery. Maybe he was trying to get back at others for what had been done to him. Or maybe he was just cruel. Or, it occurred to me, maybe they were criminals. Was George wanted for murdering those boys? Maybe it wasn’t self-defense. I had read novels where a trauma had created a psychotic break in the person, creating a desire to cause the same fear or pain in others. I had no idea what the present world was like but surely enslaving innocent girls wasn’t normal behavior. I couldn’t imagine a society that had fallen that far into darkness.

  Grandfather and I had watched news clips years ago of the chaos during the Fall. Grandfather had unearthed them from some ancient library long before I was a child. We watched them spellbound, news of the War and the devastation that resulted from it. The reports were not from war zones, the reports showed normal neighborhoods and communities where bombs had leveled entire areas. And then there were the politicians trying to one-up each other fighting over who had won. Finally, there had been nothing left to fight over as the infrastructure collapsed and the last broadcasts went out from a lone newscaster trying to breathe hope into the impending darkness.

  The screen went dark and so had the world according to Grandfather. He said, from what they could put together generations later, humanity had died by the millions or maybe even billions from the bombings, poison gas, fire, terror, starvation, dehydration, disease, exposure, depression, suicide, and genocide to name a few. Of course, they didn’t know how many people had survived in other parts of the world, they could only guess.

  When they had finally come out from the shelters, they were different, and the world was a different place. There was nothing, even the things that he had grown up with in the shelters. The shelters had run dry which was why they had braved the outside. He had been studying inside the shelters and had hoped in the reemergence they would build a great new society like they had always been taught would happen. But when they emerged from underground there was nowhere to begin.

  He had joined other young people and left to find their own way and they did find others, others who were trying to rebuild the things they had imagined down below. They hoped their combined skills would help them start over. But the fight for survival was real and brutal and those stronger and most brutal had, in their greed, destroyed the little that remained.

  So, Grandfather fled once again. He had gone north where he scavenged the land and had made his own way and found things he rescued, stored and recommissioned for his own use. He told me that there were pockets where people were working together to rebuild and make the world a good place again. I had had no reason to doubt him.

  Chapter 14

  Hunger started to gnaw at my insides when I stopped to apply ointment to my wounds. I had already started watching for things I could eat on the run, plants or flowers, berries. I was still concerned with distancing myself from George and Piper, but I was getting tired and weak from hunger.

  The landscape slowly started to change. It became hillier and I came across scraggly, thin trees huddling against the side of narrow ravines. I followed them hoping it would lead me to water and possibly food. Crashing through the undergrowth I came across mushrooms growing off the side of the carcasses of old trees that had crashed to the ground. They did not look like an edible variety, so I left them but instead I grabbed a few stalks of tall grass to chew. I wasn't sure how much grass I could eat without getting sick or whether I could get any nourishment from it at all like animals did, but at least it took my mind off my stomach.

  Close to dusk I finally smelled damp earth. "Water?" I move
d as fast as I could, checking the ground for any sign of water. I followed this promise of a creek a long ways before I saw any hint of water. Then I had to follow it farther before there was enough water that I could lay on the ground and suck water from it enough to tame my thirst. After this I followed it further till there was enough running water to fill my water skin. At least now I was not dying of thirst, but my hunger drove me on. A ways farther down the creek there was an area where the creek widened and I found cattails growing there. Grandfather had harvested cattails on the trips we had taken to the coast to gather seaweed. So, I took off my shoes and socks and rolled up my pants. Then I found my knife and waded carefully into the edge of the water where the creek had pooled creating a mini pond. Cattails liked areas like this. There were a few small shoots sticking their heads above the water. I reached in and cut the shoots off at the mud line and then cleaned them in the water before wading back through the taller cattails and grasses to the bank of the river. Before I got out, I washed my face and hands and splashed water over my head and breathed a sigh of relief even to have a moment of pleasure. Then I got out and sat on the bank cutting the shoots into long thin slices. I ate the tender bits. They tasted green and woody and I wished I could cook them. I stuffed the other shoots into my bag to save for later. The thicker ends were tougher than I remembered and left me with a stringy wad of material I didn’t feel the need to swallow. At least it was something and eased the burning I felt in the pit of my stomach. I moved a short distance away so I could sleep. Then closed my eyes knowing Dog would alert me to any danger, but I prayed there would be none since even if Dog did alert me, I was far too tired to run let alone fight.

  I’m not sure whether it was dreams of rabid beasts gnawing at my middle or a sound in the night that startled me, but I jumped into wakefulness sending my heart into high gear. Dog sat beside me alert, both of us listening. It was still dark, and I heard nothing but I wouldn’t be able to sleep again now. Getting up, I could feel that my wounds did not seem as deep as they had the morning before, but I wasn’t sure if they were healing that fast or if they just had not been as bad as I thought to start with. Whatever the reason, I was thankful. I moved up the hill to the creek to drink again greedily, and then I filled my water skin to bursting. I had realized that the creek stopped here at the pond so in order to move on, I would have to leave it behind.