Stephani said she escaped out the back and never looked back, wearing only the clothes on her back. She was wearing shoes when she’d fled, and told Jared the bikers took all the women’s shoes so they couldn’t run far if they managed to escape. Stephani said she hid inside a different house every night as she tried to orientate herself with the direction of home. She didn’t eat for nine days at one point, only drinking water she found in pools and ponds.
At one point Stephani said she was walking up a street and the two bikers came out of nowhere, tackling her and dragging her back to the house she’d been found chained to the wall in. Stephani told Jared she was sure the worst nightmare she could have imagined was about to become her reality, but it never came to fruition. Confusion was the next thing to set in until she’d been at the house for about a week, watching how the two bikers interacted with one another.
The dead biker at the house’s gate had been a bit emasculated in the relationship, while the other man was definitely the dominant of the two. Stephani finished with her story and sat back, her mind drifting back to the past few months. What happened to my world? she wondered. The place had gone off its rocker in less than a quarter of a year, reverting back to days of slavery. She doubted anyone was organized enough at this point to maintain a large stable of working slaves, but if they were kidnapping women at the two-month juncture, then she was sure organized slave trade was soon to follow.
Jared looked at his windup watch, stretched, and got to his feet. “Let’s wake up the other two. You can take Dwight’s bag and I’ll grab Barry’s.” He didn’t wait for her to get edgy about the sleeping arrangements before he slipped off to nudge the other two men into wakefulness.
Without a word, Jared slid into Barry’s still-warm sleeping bag and turned away as Stephani was approaching in the darkness. He could feel the woman hesitate, but he remained turned, his head facing the opposite direction, eyes wide open. After not hearing her slip into the bag, Jared rolled over to see Stephani staring down at him.
“What?” Jared asked in a voice barely audible.
Stephani didn’t say anything; instead she crawled into the sleeping bag next to Jared’s, propping her head up on her hand, elbow on the ground, facing him. Their faces were no more than two feet from each other.
“I was a bitch to your friend John. He didn’t do anything wrong. I think it’s just all that’s happened, and I unloaded, and now I feel bad.”
Jared smiled in the darkness. “He’s a big boy.”
“I can tell, and he was a perfect gentleman showing us how all the guns worked. You guys seem like people from the before times, and, well, I met you, you left us with Devon, which is a whole separate story, and now we’ve actually spent a day with you guys, and I think you are all decent guys trying to make it through this, just like Claire and me.”
“Pretty much sums it up, Stephani,” Jared breathed, feeling his body starting to relax after coming off the night watch.
She stared at him for a moment longer, smiled, then rolled over and was soon fast asleep, her breathing coming in long breaths as Jared lay wide-awake, wondering how the four new people were going to mesh with Shannon and Calvin. Three women and five men, well, maybe four men, Jared thought. Would Calvin be in the mix when it came to the woman-to-man ratio? To Jared’s knowledge, Calvin had never been a politician, so he conceivably wouldn’t try to bed a twentysomething. Jared chuckled at his second inside joke of the evening. There didn’t seem to be too many elderly men, or women for that matter, left in the new world, so Calvin might have to go without opposite-gender company. While Jared lay awake, working out different relationship scenarios in his head, he put Shannon with John, Claire with Devon, and Stephani with him. Stephani was attractive and seemed wicked smart, so he couldn’t think of a good reason why this wouldn’t work.
Then he remembered John telling him Shannon and he had nothing going on, so he rearranged the partners again. This went on several more times, with Claire always ending up with Devon. Soon Jared slipped into a deep slumber.
The following morning the seven people ate a quick breakfast before departing the shop. Jared spoke to Devon at length about coming with them, stressing the importance of surviving as a group. In the end Devon agreed to accompany them back to the ranch, where he was promised an abundance of squirrels and turkey he could prey on for not only himself, but the betterment of the community as a whole.
Barry and Dwight stayed close to one another, speaking in hushed tones nearly at all times. Neither John nor Jared felt compelled to stop the two since they were almost assuredly scheming about the battery situation. Jared had been part of that tech culture, but as society slipped further and further into the abyss, he felt more and more detached from his former life and culture.
People who clung to a world that was dying with no indication of a remedy were fools in Jared’s opinion. There was no doubt he could use knowledge from his life before the event in an attempt to make life easier and safer, but change was upon them all. It wasn’t much different than Jared’s former profession in the tech community. If tech failed to evolve, people would have continued carrying around cellular phones the size of
