The day after: An apocalyptic morning (101 page)

              Slowly, her fuzzy mind trying to sort through what was happening, she began to remove her shirt. Could it be true? Could it be that she was nothing but property here? Could it be that this man could beat her whenever he wanted? That he could rape her whenever he wanted? What kind of place was this?

              "Come on," Stinson said impatiently, "I ain't got all fuckin night. I have to pull a watch in an hour."

              Feeling as trapped, as helpless as she ever had in her life, she took off her shirt and her bra, baring her surgery enhanced breasts to his greedy eyes.

              "Very nice," he said, reaching out and giving one a squeeze.

              She winced at the touch but did not pull away from him.

              "Now the rest," he told her, pulling off his own shirt and revealing his skinny chest. "I wanna see that pussy as well."

              Soon she was completely naked and trembling on the edge of the bed. Stinson dropped his pants and underwear, revealing a five-inch cock that was sticking out erectly. "How about we start with a little blowjob?" he suggested, stepping up and sticking it in her face. "That'll get the old juices flowing properly."

              Jessica had never put a penis in her mouth in her life. She had never been laid in anything other than the missionary position. She started to cry as he pushed himself towards her. "No," she told him. "I don't..."

              Another backhand across the face convinced her that she did. She opened her mouth and took him into it. He grabbed her by the hair and guided her motions roughly. Several times she gagged as it was forced to the back of her throat.

              "Goddammit, do it right," he demanded. "Suck on it! Use your mouth, use your tongue, use your hands! I want it to feel good, do you understand?"

              For the next five humiliating minutes, she listened to his instruction and did what he told, slurping and sucking on him, bathing him with her saliva.

              "Now you're getting the hang of it," he told her with a sigh. "A little more hand action, and watch those teeth. If I feel them scraping me again you're gonna get another shot."

              She gave him more hand action. She watched the teeth.

              "You have such a pretty little face," he said. "It's a shame you made me mess it up like that." He pumped a few times, forcing himself all the way in again. And then, abruptly, he pulled out. "Now lay down on the bed," he told her. "It's time to fuck."

              Numbly, knowing that resistance was beyond futile, she fell back on the bed, awaiting her fate. "I'm not on any birth control," she said weakly, her last ditch effort to dissuade him.

              "Good," he said, grabbing her legs and throwing them wide open. "We have to repopulate the earth you know." He gazed at the center of her, nodding appreciably. "Not a real blonde huh?" he asked. "You did a good job of covering it up. First thing in the morning, I want you to shave off all of that hair. And keep it clean from now on too. I like my bitches smooth. Any stubble gets a beating."

              She said nothing, only nodded her understanding. A second later he was atop of her, his cock, still wet with her saliva, forcing its way into her dry folds. She grunted in pain at the entry.

              He rutted atop her for nearly fifteen minutes, his hips rising and falling, his breath panting on her neck. A few times he crammed his tongue down her throat, forcing her to kiss him. His breath was sour, as if he hadn't brushed his teeth in a few weeks. She fought back a gag whenever he did this. Eventually her body acted in a biological nature and produced lubrication to help ease his passage within her. The pain went away but was not replaced by pleasure. Finally, at long last, his pace became erratic and, with a grunt, he came. She felt his seed shooting within her, felt it pattering against her cervix.

              When he was done he got up and began putting his clothes back on. "You need to work a little more the next time," he told her. "I'm not gonna have a bitch of mine just lying there while I fuck her. You need to learn to move."

              She said nothing, could not even look at him.

              "Tell you what," he said, "I'm gonna have you sleep in here tonight. I get off shift at midnight and I'll be home by 12:30. We'll go again with you on top. It'll be your job to make me come. If you need some tips on how to do that, just ask Linda and Cathy. They used to be dead fucks too, now they're the sweetest pieces in town."

              Again she didn't answer.

              He stepped over to her, pulling her head up by the hair again. "Did you hear me?" he asked, glaring at her.

              "Yes," she said quietly, her voice defeated.

              "Then you answer me, you understand? Now get yourself dressed and get this room picked up. Linda will give you some chores to do when you're done."

              Like all of the Auburn women before her, it didn't take her very long to learn the rules. She perhaps had a few more lapses than some of the others did - she was given a black eye on one occasion, a cracked rib on another for speaking without being spoken to or for speaking disrespectfully - but she did learn. Every night for the next three days she was forced to pleasure him in bed but she no longer fought it or tried to control it in any way; not even when he lubed himself up with Crisco shortening and put himself in her ass. And after he pulled himself out, his cock coated with her blood, her rectum feeling like a blow-torch had been lit in it, she wordlessly got dressed and went about her assigned chores.

              The two senior wives, particularly Linda, did not like her. It was obvious they considered her a snooty bitch who thought she was better than they and they seemed to take a perverse delight in ordering her to do the most unpleasant chores in the most unpleasant manners. She found herself cleaning the toilet with her bare hands; washing Stinson's fecal stained underwear in the sink with cold water, a little bit of laundry soap, and a toothbrush. She found herself crawling around on her hands and knees on the carpet picking up pieces of lint one by one. She did these chores without protest. She knew that there were only beatings to be gained from protesting.

              Aside from her household tasks, she also had a community job that she did for seven hours each day. As the most junior of the women in town, she was assigned to the most unpleasant, labor intensive duty. Her job was the community laundry detail. Each day, starting after breakfast, she walked up to the high school and spent her time washing towels and washrags in a cold tub. It was amazing how much community linen a town of 2000 people went through in the course of a single day. Like everything else, she did this without protest, to the best of her abilities. Her hands dried, cracked, and bled from the constant exposure to industrial soap but she carried on.

              She had hoped at first that Stinson was merely an anomaly in the town and that some of the other men would be more like... well like the men she was used to dealing with. Unfortunately she found out that she was right - that he was an anomaly, only not in the way that she had figured. According to Anna and Jean, two of the other women that she saw frequently in the course of her workday, Stinson was actually considered to be on of the nicer husbands among the Auburn men.

              "Nicer?" she said incredulously that first day she talked to them, her face swollen and sore from the beatings she'd received the night before. "You must be kidding."

              "Oh no," Anna said sympathetically. "You must've really pushed his buttons to get him to do that to you. From talking to Linda and Cathy they say he almost never hits, not even when they step over the line a little bit. He's got kind of a reputation of a wimp in fact."

              "A wimp?" she asked.

              "Yep," Jean, standing there with her mop bucket, confirmed. "And they say he's not really into the kinky sex like some of the other ones are."

              "Kinky sex?" she asked. "He put Crisco on his dick and shoved it up my ass. You don't call that kinky?"

              "Not in Auburn these days where they can do whatever they want," Anna said. "Some of the girls say their men are into water sports."

              "Water sports?" she asked, not quite sure what that even was.

              "They like to piss on you," Jean clarified for her.

              "Or in you," Anna added. "I've even heard that some of Stu's guys are into... you know... scat."

              "I don't think I even want to know what that is," she said.

              "Trust me," Anna told her, "you don't."

              It seemed that the greatest fear of any Auburn woman was to be traded to one of the former convicts that had come to town with Stu. So far, of the twenty some-odd women who had been hanged for some offense, sixteen of them had been the wives of one of the convicts. And it was rare to see a wife of one of them who didn't have bruises on her face and arms.

              "They're just bad, bad men," Jean advised her. "If I was you, I'd straighten up and fly right around Stinson or he just might trade you to one of them. Trust me on this, you're much better off where you are."

              Jessica, all of her life, had made it her prime directive to put herself into the most coveted places possible. The idea that she was already in such a place here in Auburn, that she was "married" to a man that other Auburn women dreamed of being traded to, was a blackly depressing thought. And then there was the fact that she could not even imbibe in the most common fantasy that the other Auburn women had; that of escaping to Garden Hill. She had been exiled from there at gunpoint. Even if she could somehow get out of here, there was nowhere for her to go, there was no other place.

              At night, after Stinson had had his way with her, as she lay sore and sometimes bleeding on the bed, listening to his snores, she couldn't help but feel that maybe she had been wrong back in Garden Hill. After seeing life in Auburn, after experiencing what else was out there, she longed to go back home, she longed to take back the actions that had brought her to this place. Had she really thought that Skip, that Paul, that Stacy were evil back then? Had she really thought that?

              It seemed a joke now. Here, in this town, was true evil.

              For the past week Jean and Anna had been making slow, careful preparations for their escape. There were several obstacles that they had to overcome in order to have a hope of both getting away and getting to Garden Hill. The food problem they had handled. Or so they were hoping. As cleaning staff for the high school buildings, the guards and personnel within there were used to seeing them moving from room to room in the building at all hours of the day - in fact, hardly seemed to notice their presence anymore. One such area that they regularly visited was the food storage area. As they were in there each day, mopping and dusting, they made a point to pilfer a few cans of food, usually making the effort to get high calorie and fat items like ravioli or beef stew. They would then put these cans in the plastic garbage bags that they emptied from the wastebaskets throughout the facility, tying each bag shut a zip-tie, which they would then mark by cutting off the excess length of tie that stuck out. It was just a little difference - something that the men who emptied the garbage from the truck into the landfill would likely not even notice, that they wouldn't investigate if they did - but it would make those bags distinguishable from thousands of others in the garbage dump when the time came to recover them. So far they had managed to steal and send out more than thirty cans of food. All they were waiting for now was for the truck they dropped it in to get full so someone would make the dumping run.

              The biggest obstacle to their escape was how to go about getting away from the town in the first place. How could they get past the defenses, especially since the loopholes that the previous escapees used had all been discovered - or at least suspected - and closed? Both of the women spent every waking hour trying to think their way through this and still they had come up with nothing concrete. They played around with and discussed several wild possibilities but ultimately rejected every one of them as impractical or too dangerous.

              "If we make the break," Anna said on the occasions they could talk in privacy, "it has to be with a plan that has a decent chance of succeeding. Granted, it's not pleasant here but we don't want to be stupid and get ourselves killed by taking a wild shot. If we can't get away clean, there's no sense in trying."

              "But how?" Jean, not as good at problem solving, would always ask. "How do we walk out past guards stationed on the hill above us without being seen? How do we get two miles down the Interstate and out of their sight before they see us even if we can get past?"

              "I don't know," Anna would say. "We'll keep working on it."

              Interestingly enough, it was Jean who finally happened across a workable solution to the problem. One of her daily chores was cleaning out Barnes' office. As she was in there one afternoon, dusting the cabinets, emptying the trash, and sweeping the floor, Barnes was having an informal meeting with Bracken and two of the platoon leaders. They were drinking beers and smoking cigarettes and/or cigars and they completely ignored her presence as they talked about the attack plans they were formulating for Garden Hill.