Torturous Existence
by Candace Smith
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Candace Smith
Strict Publishing International
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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PROLOGUE
Fall and Winter 2012
December twenty-first two thousand twelve… the day the world was going to end. An ancient tribe in South America carved a calendar in stone thousands of years ago declaring the world would end on that day.
And, of course, people panicked. Even those that had ignored the doomsayers prediction that the Y2 bug would end it all, eventually panicked, because things were already pretty messed up by then. There were depressions, recessions, radicals with bombs and bio warfare… so, why would it continue? Of course, it would end.
‘Conscientious Citizens’ stopped making payments in September to creditors and banks. People quit jobs they had held for twenty or more years, and they traded in their IRAs and life savings for one last vacation or to fulfill one last dream, just in case the damn stone calendar was right. Not that it did the Mayans any good… they had been extinct for centuries.
People woke up December twenty-second, in debt to countries that were economically destitute and to jobs that no longer existed. Ironically, it was not the doomsayers that were upset. They merely shrugged and decided they would live to move on to the next crisis date.
No, it was Mister and Missus ‘Conscientious Citizen’ who had blown their life savings and bankrupted themselves, and as they struggled in debt that could never be paid off during their lifetime, the overwrought people seemed almost pissed off that the good old earth still revolved around the sun. They would not be upset for long. The Mayans were only off by six months.
A scientist at Bersus Laboratories joined the ‘Conscientious Citizens’ who had quit their jobs and drained their life savings, and he took his wife on that once in a lifetime world cruise she had always dreamed of. They decided to spend the last days at home… and on doomsday, his panicked wife took a handful of pills. She did not wake up to see the earth revolve around the sun on December twenty-second, and the scientist decided the world had cheated him.
‘Conscientious Citizens’ are not used to dealing with the aftermath of making poor decisions, even if they were based on the belief that the world might actually end. When the world kept on spinning, some people begged for their jobs back, some begged for the banks not to foreclose on their homes and earnestly promised to make up mortgage payments from the salaries of their non-existent jobs.
Some, like the bereaved scientist, left a little ‘bug’ in the countries they had visited on their once in a lifetime world cruise. In all fairness, he did have good intentions. He figured whatever was left of the world after the ‘event’, would make for a torturous existence, and he would help mankind end its suffering. He buried his wife on Christmas Eve day and he put a gun to his head Christmas morning. He never told the world about the favor he did for them.
Little gelatin capsules placed in thick, black, sun-absorbing plastic bags on rooftops of hotels around the world, began melting in May. The warmth helped the ‘bugs’ flourish, divide and multiply. The experiment… the favor to the world… was a success.
There was no odor, no warning, and no prolonged illness. Within one minute after meeting one of the little critters, the host died, and now, it was the doomsayers who panicked. Their prediction that an antidote would not be found was correct.
As with any ‘bug’, some people were just naturally immune, even when ninety seven percent of their family, friends and the ‘Conscientious Citizens’ were not. The scientist had been right about one thing… it was a torturous existence for those that were left.
CHAPTER I
Spring 2013
It had all happened so quickly, and Sabrina Marsh looked around the office in shock. Less than ten minutes ago, her co-workers’ cubicles were buzzing with the familiar chatter of associates trying to re-build their clients’ fortunes after the disastrous fall and winter.
Sabra had been one of the smart ones. At twenty-three, she had been a junior assistant to an associate with less than a year under her belt at one of the largest stock firms in New York. As the associates up the ladder had resigned when the overwhelming panic of the world’s impending doom approached, Sabra found herself quickly being promoted into positions she was not trained for.
She probably would have quit too, if she had any money or resources to squander. Instead, the brutal pace of the firm as the ‘Conscientious Citizens’ called in to liquidate their holdings, helped to keep her mind off the wild stories circulating with more voracity every day. And then… nothing happened.
The few brokers who had come crawling back for their positions were, for the most part, ignored for their lack of allegiance when the company had needed their expertise so badly. Sabra had kept her position as a full associate, as there were not many people left who had resources to invest and very few companies secure enough to invest in. It had been a rough winter and spring trying to begin the re-building of a collapsed economy.
Sabra stared at the gray dividers and her co-workers who were flung across desks and chairs and sprawled on the blue-carpeted floor around her. She stepped gingerly over Brad Thompson and walked down to her office. She sat down at her desk, and after a few minutes she nervously rose and approached her tenth story window. She stared down at the street, and the magnitude of what she was seeing, or, more precisely, what she was not seeing, began to sink in. She started to shake.
Cars had stopped, or crashed, and people littered the sidewalks. So many people. Sabra could almost see the alarm in their eyes as they mutely gripped their clogging throats while their faces turned blue and their eyes began to bulge. They gave a final gasp, and then they fell over. At least, that is what had happened in the office.
She silently picked up her purse, shrugged into her jacket and checked her office mirror. Her shoulder length wavy auburn hair surrounded a pale, shocked face, and her green eyes were so wide they looked too big for her face. She continued down the hallway, took the stairs down to street level and, after scanning the clogged street, she decided to walk home. There was no way she was going to be able to navigate the blocked streets, even with her small compact car. As she carefully maneuvered around the bodies, she had a crazed notion to just wait on the bench at the bus stop. It sank in pretty fast that it would be a long wait, and she continued the twenty-seven-block hike to her apartment.
In the entire time it took her to reach home, she never saw another person moving. By the time she opened her door, silent tears were flowing over her pale cheeks. Sabra had no idea when she had begun to cry, but she thought it might have been when she passed the mother clutching her toddler to her chest. When was that… six blocks ago?
She poured herself some sweet tea and sat on the sofa. It seemed like barely a few minutes, but it must have been longer because the sun was setting when Sabra picked up the telephone to call her folks back in Oklahoma. The phone rang and rang until her mother’s cheerful voice announced they could not come to the phone, and to please leave a message. “Mom, it’s Sabrina. Please give me a call when you get this.” She placed the phone gently in the cradle, knowing it would never ring. There was no way, on a Tuesday evening, that her parents were not at home watching the news before dinner.
Sabra stayed in her apartment the next day, looking out the window past the edge of the curtain. She thought she heard gunfire around noon, and she became anxious at the thought of criminals breaking into apartments, now that there did not appear to be any law enforcement to restrain them. She had called everyone in her address book, and had begun to go through the phone book calling hospitals, police departments, the fire department… it did not matter. She was even put on hold when she dialed nine one one. In the evening when she lifted the receiver, she quickly pulled the phone away from her ear at the screeching buzz that came from it. An irrational angry thought flashed through her mind that she had stayed home Saturday night because she had used the last of her ‘play money’ to pay the phone bill.
During the morning of the second day, it was finally sinking in that she was alone… or that she was one of the very few who had not succumbed to whatever had happened. She decided that some country had really pissed another one off, and the result was a dirty bomb that swept, for all she knew, worldwide. Even the animals were not immune to the germ, as Sabra saw one police horse and several dogs lying down below. No one would ever learn that it was a well-meaning scientist’s final act of kindness that had effectively decimated the population.
By day three, the lights were sporadically interrupted, and Sabra was already smelling the noxious odors of decaying bodies from the late spring sun. She realized she would have to leave the city, or risk being overpowered by the retching fumes or new toxic germs. After removing the last semester college books that had remained in her backpack from when she had graduated a year ago, she packed it with some underwear and a second pair of jeans and a top, a few toiletries and some small memorabilia. It was funny how unimportant the possessions she had worked so hard to accumulate seemed right now, and she felt no mourning over leaving them behind.
She doubled two plastic grocery bags, filled the sack with food, and walked down the two flights to Gerry Dodson’s bicycle that stood unlocked just inside the security door.
Sabra guided the bike out the door, settled herself onto the seat, and slowly pedaled past corpses as she made her way out of the city.
She had been riding for three hours before she heard a man’s voice call to her from behind a row of skewed cars. Sabra’s stomach knotted, and she clutched the butcher knife she had been squeezing between the handlebar and her white knuckled fist. If the man had a gun, he could have already used it, so she turned towards the voice and kept one foot on the pedal, prepared to take off.
It took her a few moments to locate him. His fearful expression was pale as he stood up with his hands raised in surrender. The man looked to be about sixty, and he was wearing a dirty wrinkled dark suit. That’s probably what he had on when everyone keeled over. In addition to his outfit, the man now sported a white rag wrapped around his head with a slight pink tinge of blood, and there was a crack in one of the thick lenses of his glasses. “Who are you?”
The man’s voice faltered. “Mike… Mike Tennison. I was in the city on business when this,” he swept a shaky arm around, “happened. Do you have any idea what’s going on?”
This guy’s scared to death. Sabra ignored the question and asked, “What happened to your head, Mike?”
He took a few cautious steps towards her and glanced anxiously up and down the littered street. “Two men mugged me.” His hands rose to the bandage. “Can you believe it? They can walk into any bank or jewelry store, or into the pockets of anyone here, and instead, they fuckin’ hit me over the head after taking my wallet.”
“I guess this whole situation has a few people overloaded, and they were just doing something that felt normal to them. Where are you from?” Sabra began to relax. The man was obviously just as confused as she was, and even more frightened.
“Dallas. I was here on a marketing trip. I was giving my proposal when everybody just started choking. Oh god, I didn’t have any idea what to do. I got the hell out of there because I thought it might have something to do with the office, then I saw the same thing going on outside. I tried to call my wife a few times before my cell phone went dead, but I kept getting the answering machine. Do you think whatever it is made it out of New York?”
“My folks didn’t answer in Oklahoma, either. I’m heading back there anyway, just to make sure,” Sabra replied.
“Can I travel with you…? I mean, at least until we get out of here?”
“Yes, I think it might be safer. Let’s find you a bike. You might want to change into something easier to travel in.” Sabra leaned her bike up against a car, ignoring the form crumpled in the seat behind the wheel. While Mike ducked into a store, emerging in new jeans, a sport shirt and sneakers, Sabra found a sturdy bike less than a block away. She stared at the wheels as she pulled it out from under the rider.
Mike and she stayed together for a few days, with Sabra making the decisions on their route and walking into the stores for food while he watched the bikes. About the only thing Mike was good at was constantly staring at the scenery and jumping at every sound. At least she did not have to scan for trouble. Mike was covering that.
They had a small pop up tent and sleeping bags strapped to their bikes. The first evening, she had tried a small house and left quickly after one whiff of the odor when she opened the door. She told Mike she was not going to try another one.
On the fourth day, Sabra woke up to find Mike staring at her. “You ready to take off?”
“Yeah, sure. You’re up early.” Something was different about him, but Sabra could not figure out what it was.
At noon, Mike said, “Stop here. Let me see if I can get us something to eat. The walk-in might still be cold enough to have kept some sandwiches fresh.”
Sabra’s brow knit as she watched him walk into the convenience store. It was the first time he had not been the one to stay outside guarding the bikes. She tried to convince herself that his subdued nature before was just due to shock and that he was now coming to terms with things. Somehow, she did not think that was all that was happening.
Mike did the same thing at dinner… leaving her outside… actually, almost ordering her… while he collected food. The next morning, she woke up to him staring at her again, and she was sure there was something different in his eyes. When she climbed onto her bike, she reached in her pack for her knife and it was gone. She looked up at Mike to ask him if he had borrowed it, and he was holding it in his hand and smiling.
“You did pretty good getting us this far. I’ll take care of it from here. We’re going to head south to Texas. Like you said, there wasn’t any answer at your folks’ house so there’s not much point continuing on towards Oklahoma.”
Sabra did not say anything. She was petrified something had snapped in the man’s head, and his eyes were staring at her with such intensity she was afraid he was going to go crazy and attack her for what had happened. She silently climbed onto the bike, planning to take off when they stopped at a store or when she saw the sweat beading up on his head. She knew he did not have her stamina.
She made her move at noon, pedaling furiously through the small town they had stopped at. Mike ran out of the store screaming at her while he climbed onto his bike. “Sabra… wait. It’s okay, I’m going to take care of you.”
Sabra looked back at him, knowing she could outdistance him. He continued to scream. “Sabra… what are you doing?” There was a moment of silence and then he yelled, “You bitch… get your ass back here. Stop that bike now.”
She was shaking, but she continued to ride hard and taking side roads off the main highway until she finally could not hear his voice any more. She had no idea what had caused his mind to unravel, unless it was the stress of everything that had happened.
A few days later, she was on the outskirts of a small town and she stopped her bike when she heard voices. She parked it by the side of a gas station and slowly crept towards the people.
There were two men and a woman, and the woman was glaring angrily at them. “I’m telling you, Paul, cut this crap out.”
A man stepped up and slapped her across the face. “Shut up, Betsy. I told you I’m going to take care of you, so stop being such a bitch. For god’s sakes, it isn’t like you haven’t fucked before.”
Sabra’s eyes widened and she grabbed her new knife. This one was a regular hunting knife used for skinning animals, and the weight in her hand gave her a little confidence. The woman looked like she would be able to help in the fight, so Sabra crept closer. She saw the same intensity in the men’s eyes as she had seen in Mike’s, and that was unnerving.
The men did not appear to have any weapons and one of them was on the small side. Not Paul… he was about six feet. He was also reaching for Betsy’s shirt. The woman batted his hands away. “I told you to get the hell away from me. You think I should screw you and your little buddy in exchange for walking into empty stores to get food? Or maybe to protect me from all the dead people. Get your hands off of me,” she ordered.
Again, his hand struck across the woman’s cheek with a loud smack. “I told you to shut your damn mouth.”
Sabra licked her lips and tried to figure out a plan. The woman now had angry tears, but she was quiet and staring around her while the man continued to glare at her and issue orders. Sabra managed to catch her eye when she glanced in her direction, and she held her finger to her lips to keep her quiet. The woman gave a tiny nod.
Sabra remembered her fear when she had heard the gunfire after the event happened. Fourth of July was a few weeks off when the epidemic hit, and Sabra counted on that when she backtracked her way into a small department store. She scooped up a handful of firecrackers from the small display, grabbed a bike that looked in good shape that had been parked out front, and made her way down the opposite end of the block from where the woman and the two men still faced off in the street.
She left as long a fuse as she could, lit it and pedaled like crazy back to her own bike. The first pop sounded as she climbed off and dashed back to her hiding place.
“What the fuck?” Paul said as he turned to the sound. “Get her inside.” Paul shoved Betsy towards the smaller man and ran towards the blasts while edging along the building across the street.
“Now,” Sabra hissed.
Betsy had no problem pushing the smaller man’s arm off her and followed it up with a strong knee to his groin. The man doubled over gasping, while Betsy ran to Sabra. They jumped on the bikes and rode off as the man finally managed to yelp, “Paul… Paul, Betsy’s taking off.”
Betsy gasped, “Follow me.”
Sabra followed her onto a small path at the side of the road leading through some trees. “I’m Sabra.”
“Betsy O’Conner, thanks. Paul’s probably going to get that big truck of his. If he figures out I took the trail, he’ll be on foot.” The trail wound through the woods and there were several small branches to it.
The women finally slowed down about an hour later and emerged on the side of a bridge leading over a small river. “I don’t know what the hell got into him. The first couple of days he was okay… I mean, all three of us were freaking out about what was going on, but he wasn’t all crazy about ordering me around and stuff.”
Sabra relayed what had happened with Mike. “Do you think it’s another affect of what happened?”
“I don’t know. I think it might be a good idea to avoid people for a while, though.”
CHAPTER II
Winter 2013
“Sabra, I need you to check on the guards at station three. They were due in half an hour ago. Betsy’s damn watch probably froze up again, but she should have reported back by now.” Irene was the confident fifty-year-old woman who led the band of two dozen refugees. Her steely eyes and dominance was never questioned, as she seemed to be the only one with any kind of a plan.
“Yes, maam.” Sabra shrugged into her parka and grabbed her long knife. The women did not bother with guns, as the noise would only attract attention. The men did not want them dead; they wanted them captured, so the girls knew they had to stay hidden and it was agreed the silence of a blade worked best. The girls trained daily for hours, twisting their bodies around hanging manikins and learning the moves to quickly slice throats and thrust deathly blows.
While Sabra left the old Arkansas farmhouse to walk to the corner of the southern cornfield, she thought about what had transpired over the past eight months. After she had met up with Betsy, the two women decided to head towards Oklahoma first to check on Sabrina’s family, and then move on to Arizona where Betsy was from.
They barely managed to get away from a band of four men who had chased them for days, promising to take care of them and help them. It was not difficult to figure out their true motives. By the time they had reached Arkansas, there were five women in their group, and all of them had stories about the irrational behavior of any men they had come across. It was a haphazard stroke of luck that they had run across Irene and the seven women traveling with her. Her take-charge attitude quickly had Sabra’s group joining her.
It took Irene a dismally short amount of time to convince Sabra and the others, that nothing waited for them back home. Sabra reluctantly admitted that she knew it the first day when she could not reach her parents on the phone. Her determination to go back to Oklahoma was based primarily on having no idea what else to do.
The women decided to spend the winter at the farmhouse. They had managed to stock plenty of food and there were already candles, canned goods and the rest of the resources they would need to be fairly comfortable throughout the cold months. There was even a large pile of chopped wood for the fireplace in the large living room where they all slept.
In the three months they had been there, there had only been two small groups of men come through. They were now lying in the ravine separating their homestead from the farm next door. The women were perplexed by the men’s almost cruel advances. At this point, any one of them would have welcomed the strong arms of a man to guide her through this, but the men were different now. It was difficult to explain what exactly had changed, but the men were a frightening species to be avoided.
Irene was the one who had suggested the ‘bug’ had altered the men somehow, and after Jocelyn, a doctor from Topeka, had joined their ranks, they managed to get a blood sample from a man right before he died. Five armed women accompanied Jocelyn to town, and with the aid of a powerful microscope at the hospital and a few other tests she could perform without the advantage of the long-ago relinquished electrical supply, she discovered their was a huge change in the dominant levels of the testosterone in the men that had survived.
The women’s long range plan was to head south to Florida when the weather warmed, and if they found no signs of civilization on the way, they were going to discuss rigging up a sailboat and actually trying their luck in another country. They figured South America might be a good place to start, as no one seemed to be looking their way with anger or fear when the outbreak happened. Of course, they did not know that one of the places the scientist’s wife absolutely had to visit was Chile.
Sabra stood behind the abandoned hay wagon and looked at the place where Betsy should be standing. Other than the drifting clouds of the light snow, there was nothing. Sabra felt the hair on her nape stiffen and she watched silently, feeling there was something wrong. A hand wrapped around her mouth and she instinctively reached for her knife when she heard Jocelyn say, “Ssh, quiet. Okay?” Sabra nodded and Jocelyn dropped her hand.
“Where’s Betsy?” Sabra asked.
“She’s down by the rock pile in the ravine. We figured Irene would be sending someone out for us, but they’ve blocked the way back to the farmhouse. I swear, when I saw you come walking up the field, I thought they were going to get you. I guess they were distracted by the activity at the house,” Jocelyn said.
“What are we going to do?” Sabra asked.
“Let’s get back to Betsy. I think her hiding place is better than where we’re at. All they have to do is send someone back this way and they’re going to find us.”
Sabra agreed with the doctor, and they crouched low and waddled until they made it to the culvert fifty feet away, where Betsy’s large brown eyes stared up at them. “Have they made it to the house?”
“No, but they’re close,” Jocelyn answered. She lowered her fur-lined hood and ran her fingers through her short-cropped blonde hair. “There’s no way to warn Irene without giving ourselves away. Shit, from what I could see, there’s about fifteen of them. We can’t fight that many.”
The women had been huddled in the cold for about half an hour when Sabra said, “Dammit, come on.” She began to quickly travel the length of the ravine.
“Sabra, what are you doing?” Betsy asked nervously. They were approaching the stretch of the trench that ran directly behind the farmhouse.
“We need to get to station two before the guards walk back in looking for their relief,” Sabra puffed. It was awkward trying to run in the cold bent over.
Jocelyn asked nervously, “What about one and four?”
“I don’t know how we can get to them without running out in the open,” Sabra replied.
Betsy added, “Jocelyn, I think the men came in closer to station four and that’s why they didn’t see us. They’ve probably already got them, and station one.”
Jocelyn reluctantly admitted Betsy was probably right, and they concentrated their efforts on trying to save the two sentries ahead of them. They managed to get there just as the girls were giving into their grumbling about their past due relief and had walked twenty feet towards the house.
The five women huddled in the ravine and listened to the painful screams and shrieks of the friends who had become their family. By morning it had stopped, and the women risked peeking up over the side of the gully and could barely make out the forms of people moving across the field in the other direction.
It took another two hours of no sign of movement, before they nervously approached the house. They wished they had just run, instead. Lucy lay just outside the master bedroom door, naked and still holding onto the knife she had plunged into her own stomach.
Irene had been stripped and literally nailed to the wall by the fireplace with thick iron nails, like railroad spikes. The welts on her torso bespoke a brutal beating, and the blood running down her thighs had their minds wandering to the unspeakable acts that must have been done to their leader. Sabra gasped when she saw Irene’s head move. “Oh my god, she’s still alive.”
Jocelyn quickly ran up to her and checked her as best she could. Angie ran to the barn to get a pry bar to remove the nails. When they finally got her down from the wall and laid her on some quilts, Jocelyn worked quickly to seal the obvious wounds, and investigate the not so evident injuries.
Irene rasped, “Jos, Jos, is that you?” Sabra gripped Betsy’s arm to keep from shrieking when Irene opened her eyes and what looked back at them was an opaque cloud covering her steel gray irises.
Jocelyn’s hand trembled and she caressed the woman’s cheek. “Irene, it’s Jos. I’m here.”
Irene actually tried to smile. “We didn’t tell them. They kept asking if there were more and nobody said a word. I’m so proud of you girls for not getting caught.”
All five of them were silently crying and feeling guilty about what their friends were going through and what the brutes had done to Irene. Jocelyn studied her eyes and looked closely at the coated orbs. “Irene, is it wax?”
“Yes, it hurt like a bitch. I don’t suppose there’s anything we can do about it,” she suggested hopefully.
“I don’t know. I don’t want to try anything until I can read up on it. Optometry was not my specialty, and I don’t know if it’s burned you, or how much more damage I’ll do trying to remove it,” Jocelyn replied. “Is there anything else I need to know about?”
“I could probably use a good douche. I must have had ten pricks up inside of me.” She gave a little laugh. “Feast or famine, I guess.”
In the end, it was probably Irene’s attitude that helped her survive in relative comfort for another three days. Jocelyn never tried to get the wax out of her eyes, because whatever they had raped her with had cut her up so badly that the doctor could not stop the bleeding. They buried her beside Lucy and slowly walked west.
CHAPTER III
Summer 2014
Jocelyn had become the leader of the women after they had left the farmhouse. She was not thrilled about the responsibility, but the five women had voted, and with the exception of Jocelyn’s vote for Sabra, the rest of them had voted for the doctor.
The young women had made their way to Wyoming and had picked up no more stragglers along the way. Either there were bands of women hiding so successfully that their group never detected them, or they had been captured by the men.
Jocelyn spent hours on theory as to how the men had changed to have such a dominant nature, and eventually the other young women convinced her to stop obsessing over it. There was no way they knew of to change the situation, any more than they could turn back to wheels of time and undo the epidemic. Their pet saying about the drastic things they could not change was to toss back: “Deal with it.”
As unlikely a destination as Wyoming was, the girls decided the weather was not the greatest and most of the survivors would opt for the balmier locations. The cabins in the mountains were built to withstand the elements and already designed to support people without the benefits of electricity. There would be fireplaces, game and, best of all, acres of woods and mountains to hide in. It seemed like the perfect solution to them… and to the group of cowboys who had survived the epidemic and loved their mountains.
The women had barely made it to the foothills of the Rockies, when Emmy heard the horses and screamed. They were surrounded by flatland and sagebrush with no place to hide, and even as they formed a circle and faced out to the nine men with their knives drawn, they knew it was over for them.
Sabra’s green eyes darted from man to man as they ran their horses in a circle around them. She anxiously licked her lips and threw her long auburn braid over her shoulder as the panic set in. One man was not joining in the teasing play, and he slowly walked his big gray horse around the outside of the other riders. He stopped when he was directly across from Sabra, and her fearful green eyes met his piercing blue stare. “That one,” the man’s deep voice boomed, and he pointed to Sabrina.
Sabra gripped her knife tighter as she prepared to fight off whoever came in too close. The men riding around them picked up their pace, and as the terrified women watched the dust kicking up from the horses’ hooves, they had not seen what the riders were doing until it was too late. Ropes dropped over their heads and were tightened when they sunk below their breasts, pinning their arms to their sides and immediately rendering their weapons useless.
As they twisted and turned in panicked chaos, more ropes dropped over their heads, not stopping the descent until they reached their knees where they were pulled tight and the women toppled to the ground. Jocelyn hissed, “Try to hide your weapons.”
Sabra managed to work her long knife into the side waistband of her jeans, diagonally so that the tip was pricking the top of the opposite thigh. Angie was sobbing and apologizing, while Emmy and Betsy’s frightened voices tried to tell her it was all right to be scared. Jocelyn was trying to calmly give directions and all Sabra could do from her prone position, was to stare in terrified silence at the man on the gray horse.
The men dismounted and propped the bound women to a seated position. They kicked away knives from the three women who still grasped them because they were unable to bend their arms to get them hidden in time.
One of the men said, “Not a bad hunt, Taylor.”
The man on the gray horse dismounted, took off his cowboy hat and slapped it against his thigh to dislodge the dust before settling it back down on his long wavy jet-black hair. “No, Sam, not a bad hunt at all.”
“You sure you want that redhead? I think the blonde dikey-looking girl is the leader,” said one of the men who was watching Jocelyn.
“No, you can have her. The green eyed one is mine.” The tall man continued to walk towards Sabra, and her legs frantically back-pedaled into Betsy’s back. The man never stopped, and when he was in front of her, he reached down with one strong arm, grabbed the rope tightened under her breasts, and lifted her to her feet. There was a cruel lust in his blue eyes that made her gasp in fright as he studied her and said, “Yep, this one’s mine.”
With one hand gripping the rope under her breasts, he used the other one to grab her braid, and he yanked her head back until Sabra was staring into the face looming over her. He smiled and leaned down to whisper in her ear, “If I have to take that knife out of the front of your pants, I’ll be using it on one of your friends.”
The dam broke open and Sabra’s tears began to fall. She slid her hand over to the hilt of her knife and slowly pulled the ten-inch length out of her jeans. In a last futile effort to save herself, she tried to twist her wrist to stab him. With her arms pinned, there was no strength behind the move and he just laughed as he batted it away. “That has earned you your first punishment.”
“Owners, get them secured,” he ordered.
Owners? What the fuck? Sabra saw various cowboys walk up to her friends, and the frightening tall man in front of her took a piece of leather that a man had retrieved from the saddlepack of the gray horse. The blue eyed man, Taylor, wrapped the piece of leather around Sabra’s throat and tied the laces in the back.
Jocelyn was using her no nonsense voice on the man who was attending her, Angie was still sobbing, and Emmy and Betsy were cursing. Sabra was silent. Apparently, the man who was in charge of the renegades had focused on her, and he scared the shit out of her.
Taylor laced wrist cuffs around her pinned arms and roughly pulled them to her back, causing rope burns as they scraped along the line until he managed to lace them together. He removed the lassos, and her paralytic silence was finally broken as she began to kick out at him. “Get away from me you bastard.” She attempted to run with her hands bound behind her, but she had made it less than three feet when he hooked an arm around her.
He leaned down and said with almost a breathy arousal, “That has earned you your second punishment.”
Sabra was dragged over to his horse. Angie had finally stopped wailing, and when Sabra turned to look at her, she saw some kind of leather gag strapped onto her face. Her attention was diverted by the cowboy when he clipped a long leather lead onto the ring on the front of her collar. He clipped the other end to a ring embedded into the back of his saddle and mounted his horse.