Page 29 of His to Take

15

“Dad,you have to stop this. He can’t be serious! I’m not marrying an alien!” Ann said as soon as the man left, all of the women still too stunned to offer any kind of refreshment to the supreme commander of them all. She paced in front of him, where he still sat, merged with the couch to all appearances.

“He’s very serious, Ann. So serious, he’ll kill us all if you refuse or try to run away.” John’s words were little more than a whisper by the time he finished.

“What?” She sat back down on the couch, her pacing at an end at that news.

“If you don’t agree, every man and woman in this district will die. I tried to remind him that he needed all of us, and that there were other women, some being found every day, but he wants you. And insisted that you were the only one he wanted.” He was too ashamed to look at her.

So, she didn’t need to be saved by a marriage to a man, her brain stupidly thought, she needed to save her district by marrying the man. Her parents, the Wolfsons, all the other families that worked at their place, and lived in the surrounding area, they would all die, if she chose to be obstinate or refused to marry the man. Alien.

“Damn, Dad.” She took his hand and squeezed his fingers; she knew it wasn’t his fault and couldn’t be mad at him.

“I’m sorry, honey, I tried to change his mind, I really did.”

“You didn’t try hard enough!” Mary cried and threw her hands out in front of her body. “Look at all of this stuff, it’s for her wedding to Rex! Not some crazy, giant alien!”

“Mom, Dad can’t do anything about it. And neither can we.” She’d given up already. There was no way around this. None at all.

“I’ll tell Rex, Ann. It would be better coming from me. You know how he’s been lately,” Amanda sighed as she let the dress slide from her fingers and back into the bag.

Like all of her dreams, suddenly useless and unnecessary, she thought as she watched Amanda put the dress away. I won’t need them anymore now. I’ve got to go off and marry this alien. Sure, he was a great lover in her dreams, but pleasure wasn’t always the best thing to build a marriage on. There was no trust, no loyalty, and no friendship. They were strangers, and more than that they were two different races of human.

He’d said it more than once, your race of humans. As if they weren’t the same. She had to guess that was what he meant. Just like Neanderthals were a separate species, maybe she was different from the aliens. She didn’t know and couldn’t figure out what it all meant, other than the fact that it meant her life was over.

She didn’t care about his power, or who he was, he wasn’t Rex, and that’s what she cared about. So, Rex was an asshole a lot of the time, he’d calm down once she showed him what it was like to be loved by a woman. He’d come to see that women weren’t useless. Or he would have.

“I’m going to check on dinner,” she said and left the grown-ups alone in the room. She wanted to scream, to cry, to beat her hands against the walls and refuse it all. But there were so many lives on the line. That brought calmness to her like nothing else could.

She could marry Rex, in a fake little sham of a marriage, or she could marry this alien. One wedding could bring about her own death, and that of Rex and any children they might accidentally have and kill off an entire district. Or she could marry the alien and save them all some grief. She didn’t want to, the thought of it made her skin crawl, but she would do what she had to do.

If that meant throwing away the only real hopes she’d had in life, then so be it. But she’d make sure her family, her district, received the fruits of that sacrifice. She would make him pay, every single day that she was his prisoner wife, one way or another.

“Amelia, what’s for dinner?” she called out as she came into the kitchen. Amanda went out to the back door and her parents had gone up to their room.

“Chicken and dumplings, Ann. Something your mom asked for.”

“She’s always cold in this house. It’s the air conditioning. When I was little, she’d make that on rainy days, in the summer, because we’d all be so cold in the house, but if we turned off the air it would be too hot. She’d make it in the wintertime, too, but it was always nicest in the summer like that.”

“It sounds like a good memory.” Amelia, a wolf that had survived in a bunker somewhere in Colorado, was on her own.

She didn’t talk about her past or her family, but she enjoyed hearing Ann’s stories.

“It is. We only had MREs down in the bunker, but she’d tell me to pretend the chicken stew dinners were chicken and dumplings when we found new boxes of them.” That didn’t happen often; chicken hadn’t seemed to be high on the list of things to stick in an MRE, but they’d all enjoyed them when they found them.

“I had cans and cans of food. Took me years to get through them,” Amelia said softly. “And then I started on the MREs, that’s when I started to wonder if it was worth living, if that was my future.”

Ann didn’t say anything, she just let the woman speak. She’d mentioned her past so little that Ann wanted to hear more. She wanted to know the woman’s story. A thought occurred to her then. Maybe they should write these stories of survival down, just in case there was a future generation.

“I’d collect water from this stream that melted into the bunker my grandpa had dug during the cold war. It kept the place dry and gave me water, so I didn’t complain about it. Probably didn’t do me any favors, that water, but I’m still here so it couldn’t have been too bad.”

Ann’s family had so much water they thought they’d never use it. Bottles of all sizes, barrels, all sorts, stored water down in the bunker. It had kept them alive and was clean. They hadn’t had to worry about that at all.

“It doesn’t sound too bad,” Ann said softly and sat down at the table.

“It wasn’t, just lonely. For a while, I’d talk to people on the radio, the CB, but after a while, the tower must have come down. I couldn’t find anybody, no matter how hard I tried. Maybe it froze and shattered, I don’t know. After that, yeah, I think I went a little crazy.”

“But you didn’t leave it?”