Page 21 of His to Mate

10

“Doyou know that using candles to create heat is one of the simplest things you can do?” Skye asked Ann as they sat together over lunch the next day. Ann had invited her over before she left the day before, and now, they were outside in the garden.

“Candles? How?” Ann had learned quite a bit about the woman already, but the main thing she’d learned was that Skye was a survivor. She was bi-racial and had grown up with a lot of flack from people about it, and that had turned her mind inwards. Rather than let it eat at her, she’d taken her solitude and had started creating solutions where she saw problems.

She had a scientific mind and that had led her into a nursing program at Washington State University. She’d been found last week, in a basement, still clueless that the world had sprung back to life. She was also a lesbian, and Rager had made an exception for her. She would still need to carry a child, but she wouldn’t be forced to mate with a male.

Speaking of Rager, he’d been very busy over the last couple of days, he’d come home late each night, and left very early. She assumed he was working on something important, maybe to do with that meeting she’d walked into by accident. Or those men of his that hated her so much.

“Ann? Are you there, Ann?” Skye laughed and snapped her fingers near Ann’s face.

“What? Oh, I’m so sorry. I completely zoned out. So rude of me.” Ann’s face scrunched in apology. “Tell me about the candles.”

“You need a lot of them and a lot of terracotta pots, but it works if you do it right. That was one way I kept warm. I also used a bike that I’d rigged up as a generator. It was connected to a battery, which I had connected to an inverter, and as long as I rode the bike often enough to keep the battery charged, I could run a small heater.”

“Wow. No wonder you’re so fit!” Skye was very svelte, and her body was covered in muscles with a lot of definition.

“I was bored, and I couldn’t read textbooks all day, so I worked out a lot too. Which also helped me to stay warm.”

“Didn’t you tell me you lined the basement with cardboard?” Ann prompted, curious as to how Skye had survived so long, alone and without a bunker to keep her warm.

“Yeah, that came from the bookstore too. I wore a lot of clothes, and was lucky to find some sub-zero gear too. I had a couple of sleeping bags that were made for that too. Some nights, I wasn’t exactly sure I’d wake up the next morning, but I did. I got really tired of eating dried food and canned food, but I survived.”

“You didn’t do bad, at all,” Ann complimented. “I really admire your ingenuity. I’m not sure I’d have survived without my Dad. We were in a bunker one of his clients gave him when he couldn’t pay his legal fees. It was well-stocked and quite cozy, really. I’m not sure how long we’d have all lasted down there, but, well, it didn’t turn out to be as bad as I thought it would be when we first went down.”

“You’d have survived, you have that drive. I can see it in your eyes.” Skye nodded her head wisely, her lips pursed in confirmation. “You would have found a way. It wasn’t like one day it was warm, and the next the ice age showed up. We had time to prepare, and I could see what was coming when we got that first super-early snow. I started hauling food and supplies down to the basement.”

“Did you find a gas stove or anything you could use?” Ann wondered aloud.

“I did and used it for heat when I cooked. I had to crack a window when I did, to make sure I didn’t kill myself with gas fumes, but it kept the basement toasty. I ended up going through my supply before the aliens found me, but I had a small electric hotplate I’d connect to the bike setup when I couldn’t stand the thought of cold beans again.”

“That’s really smart.” Ann looked down at her hands, and wondered if she should ask the next question she had. She looked at the smile on Skye’s face, and decided it was best not to bring it up. People’s pasts were dangerous places to tread, mainly because most people had lost everyone that was special to them.

Ann was lucky, she had her parents, her neighbors, and Rex. Although Rex was a dick, he was still a part of her past. Most of the people she’d met hadn’t been so lucky. And so far, the children she’d seen when they first left the bunker were the only ones she’d seen. She hadn’t seen any since.

“I guess I just had a lot of time to think things through, down there on my own. It’s funny, I’d noticed it had started to warm up in the basement, but I thought I was cracking up. When the aliens came down to bring me out, I thought I had died, and we’d got the afterlife all kinds of wrong.” Skye scoffed at her own joke. “I really didn’t know what to think when they gave me an address for an apartment and let me go. With the reminder that I’d have to have a child before I turned 38.”

“What if you can’t?” Ann had worried about that question too.

“Apparently they have ways of fixing problems.” Skye grimaced uncertainly. “I don’t know what that means.”

“Maybe it means they have some kind of medical equipment on the ship that we can use down here. We’re all expected to have babies, but they haven’t told us a thing about how they expect us to give birth and not die.” Ann’s voice rose at the end, a sign of her fear.

“I’m sure they have stuff up there to help us. And I’m going to focus on studying obstetrics, Mary’s going to start studying pediatrics, and Meg’s going to focus on general medical care. It won’t be perfect, but if they don’t have tech and help up there that could make this easier for all of us, well, we’ll just hunt down the supplies we need and take care of it ourselves. I promise.”

Somehow, Ann didn’t doubt that Skye would keep her word. “Thanks. I needed to hear that. I’m terrified about it, but I can’t really talk to my mate about it, can I? I don’t think he’s afraid of anything in this world.”

“They’re scary, aren’t they? Those aliens? Sexy as fuck, but scary.” Skye smirked at Ann’s shocked face. “Hey, I’m gay, not blind. Those are some fine men that came out of the sky, I can’t lie about that. Doesn’t mean I’d want to sleep with any of them, but I can admit they have great genes. Hopefully, we’ll all have pretty babies out of this whole thing.”

“I hope so.” Ann settled back into the white folding chair she was in and looked around. Her cow was out in the field, asleep in the warm afternoon sunlight. “I still can’t believe you didn’t know. You must have been really surprised when you came above ground.”

“Floored, really. I’d managed to get the basement at a constant temperature, but as I said, it had started to warm up. I thought I’d hit some point where maybe I didn’t need to exercise because those cold walls finally warmed up a little, from the inside out. I was still trying to puzzle it out when they came for me.” Skye laughed, her eyes on the wispy clouds overhead. “I thought I’d never see clouds again.”

“We’re still waiting on rain and we have no idea what the seasons will be like, but my guess is, the aliens will make sure we don’t have anything too bad. They had the tech to end a new ice age, so I have to guess they can keep it at bay.”

“I hope so. I do not want to live in a basement ever again. Even if I did clean the potty out once a week, and clean the place every day, it started to smell a little funky down there. And I don’t think I could do it all on my own again. That shit was hard.”

“I can only imagine. I think I’d have lost it.”