Sitting back in her chair, she crossed her arms beneath her breasts and glared. “Why can’t we leave the crazy ones in the wild?” she muttered. “They don’t belong with us.”
I wanted to laugh at her, to tell her how stupid she was, thinking that I was the crazy one. They were the crazy ones. Living out in the open like this, playing with biters, being noisy and laughing as if there were still something to laugh about in this world.
There’s nothing to laugh about anymore.
“I don’t like this,” she continued. “I’ll never get her stench out of the sheets. I’ll have to burn them.” Her voice turned shrill. “And sheets are expensive!”
“Sure, sure,” the short one said.
He reached for my arm, and I shuddered as he touched me. I wanted to go back to my cave. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want their hands on me. I didn’t want to hear their noisy voices. See their stares, their anger. I didn’t want any of it.
“I want to go home,” I whispered, and my voice sounded foreign to me. How long had it been since I’d heard my own voice?
The woman glanced at me, surprising me with a sympathetic expression. “Don’t we all, darlin’.” She sighed and shook her head. “But you gotta know you’re better off in here than out there.”
I could read her body language—the slight pinching of her lips, the slump of her shoulders—and knew she didn’t believe her own words.
“Home is where you stay,” she continued. “And this is where you’ll stay now. It’s safe here.”
A snarl slipped past my lips, the only response I could manage in the face of her lie. Her cheeks flushed hotly and her eyes widened as she realized I could see straight through her, see her for what she really was. A liar, and a bad one at that.
Glancing sharply up at the men, she nodded and jerked her thumb over her shoulder, and they began dragging me across the room. All eyes were on me, the room quiet except for the sound of my sneakers snagging on the uneven floorboards and pieces of dirty carpet strewn about.
I was taken down a dark hallway where the air grew considerably warmer, and the smells rose in their intensity. Closed doors surrounded me on both sides, strange but familiar noises coming from behind them. Groans and grunts, moans and cries, not of pain but of pleasure.
Memories of pleasure came unbidden, even though I didn’t want to remember them. I remembered his handsome young face, the feel of his warm hands, the way his soft mouth would cover mine. He had the sweetest eyes.
But he was dead now. Dead, like everyone else. Dead, like the whole world was dead.
“Jesus, she stinks.” A naked woman pressed herself against the wall as we passed, wrinkling her nose in disgust.
“Don’t I fuckin’ know it!” the tall one replied, laughing. “But pussy is pussy.”
“You’re going to hit this?” the short one asked, sounding shocked. “Man, she probably has a hundred fucking diseases.”
“I’d hit a hole in the wall,” the tall one said. “A knot in a tree, a rip in the mattress, makes no difference to me.”
We came to a stop in front of a door, and the short one released me to open it. Gripping me tighter, the tall one shoved me inside. The room was dark, aside from a lone dirty window that allowed meager beams of sunlight to highlight the sparse furnishings—a small bed, a dresser, and a sad-looking chair.
The tall one released me, and I fell to the floor in a heap. “I’ll be back once you’re cleaned up.”
Lifting my head to look at him, I found him sneering down at me. He pointed to his swollen cheek, and his expression turned deadly. “You owe me for this.”
The men left, slamming the door shut behind them. A lock clicked into place, the sharp sound echoing loudly through the small space, sucking all the air out of the room and making it hard for me to breathe. The walls seemed to grow nearer, closing in on me as my heart beat painfully in my chest.
“I want to go home,” I whispered to no one. Home to my yellow rosebushes that lined the driveway, to the swing set in the backyard, to the full pantry and pretty bathroom, to the TV that I used to watch from the comfy peach sofa with the three cream cushions. I missed that home. I missed that life.
These people, their noises and their smells, this place, they were making me remember all I had lost. I couldn’t remember it, couldn’t remember everything I’d lost ...
“No!” I screamed, slamming my clenched fists on the floor. “No! I want to go home!”
Chapter Three
Eagle
Storming through the marketplace as people hurried to get out of my way, I turned a corner that would eventually lead me to my home.
Home. Inside, I scoffed. It wasn’t a home, but a safe and secure enough place to close my eyes for a few hours, far from the center of the main complex. There were too many people here, somewhere upward of five hundred, but I’d stopped counting long ago, right around the time I’d stopped caring about pretty much everything.
