by Marla Monroe
“I packed up everything I thought might be of some use and hiked out of Manhattan. There was no way to drive anywhere. There were cars in the middle of the road all over the place so that you couldn’t get by any of them. The bridges were so clogged it was hard to even walk across them. I met up with a couple of families trying to make their way west, so I hooked up with them. We made it as far as the Mississippi River and realized there was no way we could make it in the old truck they had managed to get running. We set up shop in a small town on the banks of the river and stayed there for a few years.”
“That sounded like a pretty good place to stay. You’d be near fresh water, I’m sure, and with it being the Mississippi area, there should have been some good hunting,” Wade offered.
“It was a pretty good setup. There were about fifty other people living there at the time. They welcomed us easily enough, and we all worked together to provide enough food for everyone. Then some guys came through on bikes and in campers and took it all away again. Killed almost everyone. About ten of us got away. I found a bus of people headed out this way and climbed on without looking back. Gave them everything I had even though it wasn’t enough to cover what they were asking for taking us to New Hope. That was the name of the community we were heading to.”
“Can we still go there? Do you know about where it is?” Lyssa asked.
Wade could see the blossom of hope on her pretty face. Somehow he didn’t think the rest of Stanton’s story had a happy ending either. The man didn’t appear too thrilled right then, and it wasn’t just traveling down memory lane that was putting that hopeless look in his eyes. He’d seen it too many times in the past.
“It doesn’t exist. They lied to us to take our money and leave us stranded here. When we got off the bus while they supposedly located parts to fix the thing, they snuck away in the middle of the night with most of our belongings and, of course, all the money we’d paid to come out to this godforsaken place. At least all my belongings were in my backpack, and I kept it with me. Some of the others don’t have much more than the clothes on their back.” Stanton looked over at Wade with a serious expression on his face. “I was in that bar gambling to try and make enough money to set myself up to find a place to live. Was doing pretty damn good until they accused me of cheating. That’s where you came in.”
Wade just nodded. He’d been watching the man over his bathtub beer and knew he wasn’t cheating. He was good at bluffing, and though he didn’t really count cards, he was good at remembering what had been played.
“Thanks for negotiating for me. You lost your money because of that. I’m grateful,” he told the other man.
“You took up for me. I couldn’t just let them beat you to death then leave you to die out behind the bar. Why did you step in for me? You don’t know me, and no one does things like that in the world we live in now,” Stanton said, looking over at him then back to the road.
Wade just shrugged even though the other man probably didn’t catch it since he was driving. He didn’t know how to answer him. He just did it. Didn’t think about it or anything, just found himself standing up and pulling the others off of him.
“You weren’t doing anything wrong. I don’t like to see someone get jumped on for no reason, and I couldn’t sit there while three men ganged up on you.” He turned and looked out the window. It was still dark outside, but he figured they weren’t long from sunrise.
“What about you, Lyssa? I know a little bit, but I bet Wade doesn’t and you didn’t get to tell me much last night before that bastard shut you up,” Stanton said.
Wade turned and looked at her, extremely curious to know her story. He wasn’t surprised that she was locked up, but how she’d ended up there would be nice to know. Stanton probably wasn’t as use to the plight of women there now. Since there were so few of them still alive, they were a very lucrative commodity. Men lied, cheated, and killed to get their hands on one. They even went as far as to steal them away from their families. The women in Barter Town were little more than sex slaves, treated worse than farm animals and fed only enough to keep them alive to make their owner money.
“I was working as a nurse practitioner in the emergency department of a charity hospital in Dallas when everything started happening. First the earthquakes and floods and tornadoes devastated everything, then the diseases spread like wildfire. We were overrun to say the least. I don’t know how any of us that actually stayed there to take care of the sick and injured made it as long as we did without ending up sick ourselves. We operated on little or no sleep and had to ration the food and boil all the water. It was horrible. I thought it was the worst thing I’d ever seen or ever would see. I was wrong.” Lyssa leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes.
Wade thought she wouldn’t go on, but after a few seconds, she continued without opening her eyes. He figured she was either trying to hide from the horrors she’d experienced or was reliving it in her mind.
“We were operating on bare necessities after about six or eight months, I’m not even sure anymore how long it was. Then another wave of disasters came through, and we had to abandon the hospital. We set up a street clinic, literally on the street. Mostly what we did was watch people die. There were only about five of us left by then. We took turns going out to hunt for food and supplies two at a time while the other three stayed behind to take care of the patients we had. God, we didn’t even have anywhere to put the dead. We would carry them back into the hospital as far as it was safe for us to move around and leave them laid out. There was nowhere to bury them in the city, and we had no method of transportation anyway.” She shook her head as if to rid herself of the depressing images and opened her eyes.
“I’ll never be able to go to sleep again without seeing all of them stacked in layers across the hospital’s cafeteria floor. I thought that surely they would stop showing up and dying, but they didn’t. Every single day at least two or three would show up in horrible shape, begging for help. I’d stopped crying about it so long ago that I wasn’t even sure when I had cried.”
“I can’t imagine,” Wade said honestly. While he’d seen a lot of bad shit, he’d never lived through anything like that. “What about your family?”
She sighed. “My parents died when I was in medical school, and my older brother lives in Oklahoma. I don’t have a clue if he’s even alive. He was married with two children when everything happened. From what I heard, there weren’t many left alive after the massive tornadoes went through.”
Everyone was silent for a while. The miles passed, and Wade had to squelch the urge to ask her again how she’d ended up locked up in a cell in Barter Town. He knew it was rude and insensitive to want to know bad enough he had to restrain himself from asking again like a child on a long car ride.
“Anyway.” She startled him when she spoke up again. “One day some men came through talking about how bad things were in the city and that people were doing much better in the wide open spaces where they could grow food and protect themselves from the gangs. The guys tended to agree with them and talked about gathering what little we had and heading out with them when they returned. They said they were scavenging for supplies to sell to the settlers out there. They bartered for fresh food that way. I wasn’t so sure about them, but the others were tired of living in fear and dealing in nothing but death. It was going to be good to take care of people who weren’t destined to die within hours or days. Eventually they convinced me to go with them, and I did.
“Once we were outside the city, I knew we’d screwed up. The men started talking less civilized and getting cruder with every mile we put behind us. The others with me realized it as well, and when we stopped the second night, one of the men tried to attack me. They tried to protect me and steal the van we were traveling in, but the others were armed and used to fighting. They killed one of my friends and beat the others until they were unconscious.” Again she paused before continuing. Wade could see how hard it was on her
and wished he could help her somehow, but they didn’t know each other that well.
“They left them there and took me with them. Eventually we made it to Barter Town, and they sold me to the highest bidder, which turned out to be Arnold. He has a son with severe asthma. He planned to use me as a whore to make him rich, but his son had a bad attack while he was discussing my lot in life. He enjoyed telling me that I would do what he said, or I wouldn’t eat and he would beat me. His son was in the room while he was talking, telling me all the things he could do to me, and suddenly he started wheezing then coughing. His dad panicked and totally forgot about me. I could have escaped if I’d just left. I might even have gotten away, but I couldn’t stand to leave him like that. He might have even died if I hadn’t helped. So, I made a deal with Arnold that I would do anything medical he needed and take care of his son, but no one touches me sexually. It wasn’t great, but it was better than the alternative.”
Wade couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. He looked at her again and finally got up the nerve to ask her.
“How long have you been in that cage, Lyssa?”
She didn’t turn to look at him, but he noticed her hands clench and unclench in her lap as she stared straight out into the lightening sky ahead of them. She licked her lips then drew in a deep breath.
“Seven years.”
Chapter Three
He nearly slammed on the breaks. Seven fucking years? Ah, hell. He couldn’t imagine spending seven months in a cage, much less seven years. Stanton had to fight to remain in control after hearing that. He’d thought it would take a lot of work and a long time before the country could be put back to rights, but now he wasn’t sure there was any hope whatsoever that it could be fixed at all. In that moment, Stanton lost some of the hope he’d managed to hold on to for a long time.
He’d rationalized that the men who’d raped and murdered his wife were the scum of the earth, gang members and common criminals already beyond redemption. Now, after having met the men in Barter Town who’d once been productive, law-abiding citizens but had turned into the kind of men who would enslave women, he wasn’t so sure of who could be trusted anymore. He risked a look over at Wade. The man was still a mystery to him, but he had stepped in to help him when others were going to hurt him. If he could trust anyone, Stanton felt that Wade was that person.
They continued to drive in silence as the sun fully rose in the sky. He knew that, by now, Arnold and his goons would know they were all missing and be looking for them. There wasn’t much out there in the direction they were going, but he felt like it would be the last direction they’d expect them to head. According to the map he’d found, they were moving toward the northern tip of New Mexico. He planned to turn and head north once they made it into Utah. Arnold thought he was heading directly for Colorado where New Hope was supposedly located. Arnold wouldn’t know that it had all been a hoax in the first place.
What were they were going to do once they got somewhere. Hell, he didn’t know how they were going to survive on the way. They had nothing. All he’d been able to scrounge up without calling too much attention to himself had been half a case of water and a couple of sandwiches. It wouldn’t last them long.
“Do you think they are behind us?” Lyssa finally asked, breaking the silence.
“No. I think they’ll head directly north looking for us. We’re going northwest right now. Once we get into Utah, I’m going to change directions. I don’t think they are going to keep after us more than a day or two. They’ll give up on us.” He sure hoped they would anyway.
“He’s going to be desperate for the medication I made for his son’s asthma attacks. I’m not sure he’ll give up that easily,” Lyssa said.
“It won’t matter if he does catch up with us, Lyssa. We aren’t going to let him have you back,” Wade said.
“I won’t be going back regardless,” she told them. “I’d rather die than go back.”
“It won’t come to that. Don’t even think that way again,” Stanton said, a little harsher than he’d meant to.
“It’s not that I don’t think that both of you mean what you say, but Arnold and his guys have access to weapons. We don’t have anything to fight back with.”
“We’ll find our own weapons and a safe place to live,” he told her.
“Do you have an idea of where you plan to go?” Wade asked.
“I’m thinking the best place is in Wyoming. There are supposed to be a lot of homesteaders in the area who are working together to keep each other safe. I like the idea of banding together with families. If there are women and children there, I think we can trust them more so than a town full of men.”
“I agree, but I’m thinking that Wyoming isn’t far enough north for what’s going on out here,” Wade said. “I’ve been moving around for a while now. The slavers out here are different than the men who killed our wives and took Lyssa. They work as part of an organization that has armed themselves. They call themselves lawmen. They look for women who supposedly have escaped their men to take them back. Out here, women are possessions of the men who have them. Many have sale papers because the men bought them. Some have them drawn up just to keep them safe.”
Lyssa gasped. “You’re telling me that it isn’t just Barter Town? It’s everywhere? I won’t ever be safe. I’ll always be looking over my shoulder, waiting on someone to find me and want to take me back to that bastard.”
“That’s ridiculous. Who gave them the authority to do that?” Stanton asked.
“They gave themselves the authority. There’s no one to stop them. The men who have a reason to stop them are too busy protecting their families. Most men out here who are decent are too busy trying to survive to put a stop to them,” Wade told them.
Stanton felt as if yet another hole had opened under him. What was the use in even trying to make it under that smothering cloud of oppressive news? He could feel his heart pounding at the realization that they were well and truly fucked.
“What are we going to do?” Lyssa asked after a few tense seconds.
“We’re going to survive,” Wade told her. “Stanton?”
He swallowed, unwilling to allow the woman next to him to fret and remain so afraid. She’d been through enough. Maybe that was his new purpose since he seemed to have lost his. Keeping her safe.
“We survive.”
* * * *
Fear ate at her chest and curled around her mind like a snake intent on consuming her. She had to fight it. If she let it get a foothold on her she’d eventually end up paralyzed by it and if she were going to survive and not be a burden to the men, Lyssa had to fight it. One thing she did know was that she wouldn’t spend the rest of her life in a cage or worse, servicing men like the poor women in Barter Town. She’d kill herself first no matter what Stanton said. By the time it came to that, the men would already be dead and wouldn’t know anyway.
She’d known things were bad, but had thought it was confined to the bigger cities and the hellhole called Barter Town. If women weren’t even safe living with their husbands, where did that leave her? She wouldn’t let her think that far ahead. Instead, she focused on the here and now. What were they going to do for food and water? What about when they ran out gas, because they would.
“How long until we run out of gas?” she asked Stanton.
“We’ve got a half tank. I expect us to reach at least two small towns before then. There should be a way to get some at one of them. We’ll scavenge for food as well.”
“We’ll have to be very careful and keep low, Stanton,” Wade said. “If there are still inhabitants around, they are easily spooked. They tend to shoot first and ask questions later.”
“You know more about how things are run out here than I do,” Stanton said. “I’ll follow your lead.”
She could feel Wade tense next to her. She figured he wasn’t too thrilled with having that responsibility put on him. She wouldn’t like it either, but Stanton was right. Wade’s k
nowledge was their best chance to survive.
She wished they could stop and get out for just a few minutes to stretch. With the way she was having to straddle the gearshift and try to keep her left leg out of Stanton’s way, her hips and thighs ached. They were even starting to quiver with the constant strain on them. She was sure there would be a bruise on the inside of her left thigh from when Stanton shifted gears so much to get them out of Barter Town.
About an hour later, they made it to the outskirts of a small town. Stanton slowed then stopped the truck. He looked over at Wade.
“How do we do this? Head straight through town looking for what we need or find a back way in?”
“They already know we’re here if there’s enough here to post a watch. Just drive through slowly so we can look for a parking lot or something with a lot of abandoned cars to siphon gas from. Then we’ll look for food and supplies,” Wade told him. “As long as we don’t try to take something from anyone, they should let us be.”
“How are we going to know if something belongs to someone?” Lyssa asked.
“They’ll have marked it somehow. I’ll show you if we come across anything,” he said.
“Okay. Here we go.” Stanton shoved the gear shift to first and started forward.
Lyssa managed not to cry out when he rubbed hard against her already bruised flesh. She was going to have to do something or she was going to end up too sore to walk.
Her first view of the community they entered proved to be depressing. There were cars everywhere and no signs of life. Of course the way Wade had presented it, there wouldn’t be. They would be hiding in their homes, keeping clear of strangers they couldn’t trust. No doubt someone had a rifle or shotgun pointed in their direction right now. It made her shiver with fear. Ten years ago, Lyssa would have laughed if someone had told her this would be her fate in the future. In fact, even a movie producer couldn’t have made up something as crazy sounding as this new reality she was living.