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She yowled under his palm, but he was not sure whether that was from pain, or anger, or frustration. He strongly suspected it was the latter two. He was not striking her with a hard enough force to genuinely produce the cacophony of noise which escaped her lips. Some of the sounds were not quite human, some were trills and growls, emulations of the natural world.
“If you act out, you'll be punished. If you are violent, you can expect to have a very sore bottom.” He emphasized the point with a harder slap which made both her cheeks jiggle as his hand caught them in its sweeping path. She had a very nice body, toned and shaped from running wild, but with ample curves. Two of those curves were the unwilling recipients of some much-needed discipline, turning pink with the continued application of his palm.
“Bite again and I'll gag you,” he informed her. “And you won't like that, will you?”
The response was a vicious snarling sound which had no communication value other than to make it clear that she was angry.
A tone sounded in the room indicating that the decontamination procedure was about to start. Time to get her into the crate before she panicked and hurt herself. Wrapping his right arm around her midsection, he stood up. She struggled, beating her toes against his shins and her fists against his kidneys. It was with no small amount of effort that he upended her crate and dumped her in it bottom first, slamming the door latch shut before she could burst free.
Yowling and cursing emitted through the vents. He ignored it as he tipped the crate back onto its wheeled base and waited for the decontamination to begin. Everyone coming from the wilds was subjected to ten minutes of ionized spray calibrated to kill bacteria, denature viruses, and eliminate fungi, as well as an additional treatment to counter radiation. Nothing from the outside got into the city. Even small amounts of contamination could prove fatal to the young and the old, and certainly nobody wished the ills of the outside world to be visited upon those who took refuge behind the city's great curved walls.
Miserable and trapped, Sarah raged at her own stupidity. The hunter had been tracking her for just three sun rises. She had tracked vegetables longer than that. If she weren't feeling poorly, she would surely have escaped his trap. It was not particularly clever or well hidden, a simple rope snare much like ones she'd made herself in the past. She'd stumbled into it like a fool and now her liberty was gone, stolen by a great beast of a man whose gleaming eyes told her that he enjoyed the hunt more than most animals.
“Call me William,” he'd said as he bound her on the ground. He spoke and carried himself with a casual arrogance, safe behind the camouflaged and padded armor which protected him from the radiation currents. The people of the cities were always hiding behind this and that. They were weak creatures, only able to survive inside their constructions. Remove the walls, tear off the armor and they would crumble.
She had tried to fight, but it was useless. He was far stronger than her in terms of sheer brute strength and she was at a disadvantage for being caught in one set of ropes already. Carried from her home with no regard, Sarah's fury had only grown with every passing step.
Born a mutant, her family had taken her from the city when she was still very young. Mutants had never been treated well by citizens. They were experimented upon, used for dangerous and unpleasant labor, locked away for much of their lives because they were regarded as being brutal. It was not the life her parents had wanted for their only daughter, so they had escaped into the forests which had reclaimed the old lands where humans used to live before the age of cities.
Her mother and father were long since passed, succumbed to fevers both. With their passing, Sarah was left on her own. She didn't mind that. She could have joined one of the wild tribes who lived further north, but she'd decided to stay where her family had settled, where every tree was a friend and every rock as permanent a marker as the city which glowed in the distance. Very few hunters came out as far as she lived. Those that did were easily avoided and even more easily scared off. City folk were wary of the wilds—as they should be. The forest was no place for people who lived separated from earth and sea and sky.
A grinding sound followed by a loud banging interrupted her train of thought. The cloth separating her cage from the world was drawn back, and dark, scarred eyes became visible through the grating.
