Page 23 of His to Take

12

Ann sat at a cheap,pine kitchen table in the expansive kitchen, a fire going in the fireplace, just because her mother liked the look of it. The lights had been dimmed, and the women worked in a soft glow. It reminded them all of the bunker and more peaceful times.

She knew it was odd to think of those years in the bunker as peaceful, but they were. Her days had been filled with lessons from one parent or another the first few years, and then she’d continued her studies on her own. She’d learned about so many different things from the textbooks down there, and she’d thought the enclosed space was a cocoon, a place of peace that she missed now.

Amelia had the night off, and rather than have another woman come in to cook, Mary always invited the Wolfsons over and the three women would all work together to prepare the meal. Ann was pulling the green cover and silk from ears of corn, shelling peas, and peeling carrots to go with the meal. They’d all sit in here, around the fire, and eat, each with a glass of wine at hand.

It was the only time the Wolfsons felt like real people again. Amanda, Stephan, and Rex would be released from the duties given to them by the butler, who was the head of the servants at the house, and they’d have the night to themselves. Tonight, the men were outside grilling fish, while the women prepared a soup and some pasta to go with it.

“I’ve noticed something,” Amanda said, unafraid to speak to her new ‘mistress’, without anyone else around. If someone was, Amanda would bow her head, subservient in her bland, blue uniform dress that looked as if it had escaped some women’s prison back in the 1960s and had taken on new life in the present.

“What’s that?” Mary asked, her eyes on the pasta she’d had resting for hours now.

“Well,” Amanda paused as she stirred the base for the soup Ann had peeled the carrots for. “There are no alien females.”

“What?” Mary asked and stopped rolling the pasta dough out. “What do you mean?”

Ann’s ears perked and she listened quietly, as she always had. The two women would often forget, as they counted out MREs and rationed out hot water, that Ann was in the room. That, or they thought she wouldn’t understand what they were discussing, because it never seemed to occur to them that she could hear them. So, she’d often stayed quiet, listened, and learned far more than they’d ever tell her, even now, when she was an adult.

She sipped at the Muscadine wine the aliens had found and appreciated the fact that age limits for wine consumption no longer existed. She loved the stuff.

“Well, I’ve only seen males, and they call themselves overlords. Women wouldn’t be called that, would they? I mean, they wouldn’t be called overladies, that would just be absurd, but that’s a clue too, isn’t it? I don’t think…” Amanda paused, looked around, and then whispered, but loud enough that Ann could hear. “I don’t think they have any females with them.”

Ann sat up, her eyes somewhere around the ceiling as she thought back over the last few weeks. She had not seen any female aliens. Ever. Oh, that was worrying.

“That one, when we were first taken,” Mary said nervously and glanced over at Ann. “The one that said I could still make babies.”

“Mom, now don’t panic!” Ann said in a warning voice and stood to take her mothers arms in her hands. “Maybe they aren’t allowed to leave the ship. Maybe they are on their way, you’ll see. There’s nothing to panic about. They wouldn’t put us in this nice house, give us nice food, and tasks to complete if they just wanted to use us as baby-making machines.”

Ann knew that’s exactly where her mother’s mind had gone. She remembered the moment her mom had mentioned. She’d thought the remark odd, but obviously it had unsettled her mother a great deal. She knew her mother didn’t plan to have any more children. She was young enough to still have one though, if she wanted to.

“I don’t want more children… I don’t want… that either.” Mary waved her hand in the air, but they all knew what she meant. Being forced to mate with an alien.

“I can’t have anymore. I tried after Rex, I wanted a girl. Desperately. We tried, and then we tried IVF. We finally gave up and decided we were destined to have one. I doubt they’d want me, even if that was their plan. I think…” Amanda had also tried to comfort Mary with a hand on her arm. She moved away, though, and went back to stirring the pot of soup broth.

“You think what, Amanda?” Ann asked and stepped closer to the other woman.

“I think they’ll want the young women like you, Ann.” She turned back to them, her hands out in front of her as if to hold off questions. “I’ve heard things, from some of the wolves that go to other houses sometimes. Things I don’t want to repeat, but this, I think you both should know.”

“Tell us, Amanda! For fuck’s sake, tell us!” Mary was on the verge of hysteria, and Ann pulled her mother into her arms.

“I’ve heard they’re taking the younger women for breeding programs with the aliens. That’s why they want only pure-bloods. We wolves can’t mate with the aliens. They’re almost human, but not exactly. And the wolf DNA is too different. The babies would be mutated, deformed, so we’ve been cast down as slaves.”

She paused, took a deep breath and then spoke again. “There’s also word that all of us women will be forced to reproduce with our mates, if we have one. Those who don’t will be part of the alien breeding program.”

Ann swayed on her feet but stood tall for her mother’s sake. “They can’t force us to have sex with those men.”

“It won’t be that way. They’ll use something like IVF, from what I’ve heard. They’re doing it already in the first cities they cleared.”

“Fuck!” Mary exclaimed and went to sit at the table. “Ann? What about Ann? I’ll have another baby with John if I have to, but she shouldn’t be forced to do… any of that.”

“I’m still a virgin,” Ann said softly and took a seat beside her mother. “It would be funny if it wasn’t so frightening.”

“A virgin birth…” Amanda sighed and sat down too. “We can move up your date with Rex if you want?”

“I think that might be best, don’t you?” She didn’t really want to, she didn’t know what to do, in reality, but it was something to focus on. “I’ll go into the dress stores tomorrow, see what I can find.”

It wouldn’t be a real wedding, but close enough for Ann. She took a deep breath and tried not to panic. “We don’t even know if it’s true; it could just be a rumor.”