Page 8 of Taken (After the End #6)

Chapter Six

Rhen

The fire is bright against the darkness of the night and, if I hadn’t been attacked, bound, and gagged, I might have been tempted to join in on the fun.

It does look like fun.

The humanish females—yes, they do look like people now that they’re all assembled, which makes their sizes look relatively normal and me, the miniscule aberration—are dancing.

I don’t see the demons anymore, the ones who killed the jellybean.

Instead, these almost-humans are clapping their hands and jumping higher than I could ever hope to, spinning and twisting and moving their shoulders to the beat of the drums.

Drums are the only instruments being played, hard, angry sounds, and the dancing is a little odd—aggressive, almost. It lacks a certain whimsicality and sensuality that I always liked about dancing. Dancing makes you feel free. Though, I suppose I’m not one to talk about freedom.

I currently find myself seated in the center of the party with my ankles bound to my hands, which are then bound behind my back at the wrists and elbows.

I can only sit on my knees. The taut, scratchy rope between my ankles and hands is short.

Painfully short, but I did a lot of yoga on the Sucere Chamber with nothing else to do, so I should be okay for a little while longer.

Maybe an hour. After that, I’ll cycle back through screaming, crying and begging.

Even though those tactics didn’t work the first time around, I’m optimistic for round two.

The sand is hard beneath my shins and knees, but my Sucere uniform is thick enough to stop the individual granules from gouging into my skin, mostly. The smell of smoke is thick, but pleasant. Reminds me of home. Not the war and the fires, but the bonfires and the cookouts.

Electricity was so hit-or-miss and, before the end of my time on Earth—before the bunkers, I mean—nonexistent.

Natural gas supply and delivery was never stable.

So, eating outside, all together as a neighborhood, was how we dined most nights.

The fishermen still went out and hauled in fish.

Chickens were still raised by avó Maria and avó Paolina in a lovely little coop on the rooftop of my building. They made the best piri-piri.

There’s something about this party that reminds me so exquisitely of home.

I inhale deeply and look around. If I die here—when I die here—I suppose it won’t be so bad.

It’ll be like…how it was supposed to have been.

Like I died all those hundreds and thousands of years ago.

My short weeks awake will have been just a blip in nature’s failure to erase us.

Erasure.

A funny word. Humanity was supposed to have been erased, but clearly, we weren’t.

We’re thriving, in a sense. I glance around at the dancers.

Certain women—females—are doing an extra-special dance.

Twisting and stomping their feet, they’re also carrying heavy-looking objects and passing them out to particular people in the crowd.

Every time a warrior receives an item, the warrior exalts and the surrounding crowd cheers.

All except for one male wearing what looks like scaled armor on his shoulders, seated several fires back from the main ring, who simply waves them off.

The final remaining tokens are dispersed between the two other warriors here who are also wearing glimmering blue-green scales on their shoulders. Unlike the taller, bulkier scale-wearing male, these two release wild screeches up into the sky every time they receive something.

One of them is swarmed by females while the other sits in a group of mostly males.

I cannot figure out what they are, where they came from, how they relate to the other beings here.

I also can’t figure out if there’s any type of leadership structure here, which makes it hard to know who to appeal to, who to make big sad eyes at.

So instead, I look around at them all, watch as they dance—if you can even call it that—until eventually that leads to uh… more exciting debauchery.

Occasionally, a male will rise from where he's seated and tackle a female, kissing her and…doing more. I watch two males fight over one female, beating each other until blood is drawn. The winner then shoves the female onto hands and knees, flips up her skirts and starts rutting into her immediately. And she’s fucking loving it.

An intimate species, they kiss and love on each other often and freely.

Well, not kiss so much as bite, and not love so much as rut.

Like their dance, it’s an intimacy seen through the lens of aggression.

That anger, that rage, that violence seems to coat everything here like the shimmery fabrics of their tents.

I’ve been trying to figure out what it is, what it’s made of, the material that comprises their tents and these other large sheets tied to huge posts that remind me of the sails of pirate ships, fluttering so lightly in the breeze.

Their purpose I have yet to make out, but their aesthetic is undeniably beautiful.

The lovely camp is sprawling, but I can’t see anything beyond the fire’s farthest edge. Whatever there is, I hope I get to paint it at some point.

If I survive the night. But the entrance to the Sucere Chamber is far from me now.

I look up at two females and a male warrior clustered a few paces away, staring right at me, and smile.

They giggle and, when one of the females says something to the other two in a tongue I can’t even begin to interpret, they all laugh riotously.

The female who made the other two laugh claps her hands together so loud I jump, almost tipping to the side, but forcing my weary stomach muscles to clench because I know that if I do fall, I won’t be able to get back up again.

Goddamn, I should have done more crunches in the Chamber. My lungs are tired, my body’s tired, the sand is grinding into my knees through the fabric of my pants. I’m tired. And all I’ve got to save me is a positive attitude and a robot in my wristwatch who probably hates me now.

Lovely.

The female is very attractive, with dark bronze skin and jet-black hair that falls dead straight all the way to her waist. Like molten onyx, it glitters in the fire’s light when she claps again, and when the crowd still doesn’t give her its full attention, the male beside her pulls out a strange bone and blows into one end.

A horribly tinny whistle sounds out into the world, sounding an awful lot like the shriek of that gross worm beast. It’s as the crowd turns its attention to the trio laughing at me that it hits me—that is one of the jellybean’s bones.

All of the items that were being passed out among the warriors were bones.

Yucky.

The crowd settles and the female makes a short speech, her words met with hisses and cheers.

Some applaud while others make sounds of disapproval.

I want to know what’s being said as it seems like it’s got to do with me, what with the way people are staring and the way she’s pointing at me intermittently, but I don’t dare try to speak to Pam in front of so many eyes.

I wonder if she understands this language.

Even if she does, if they take her away, then I’m totally adrift at sea.

Not that she’s talking to me anyway. Last we chatted, she told me the Sucere Chamber had been boarded due to my carelessness, that many of the supplies had been ransacked and that the water levels within the Chamber had been compromised—as if humidity was my largest concern as I was dragged across the dry-ass fucking desert.

That’s the only thing she had time to say to me before I was hog tied, thrown over one of the scaled monster’s shoulders and then brought here, to this cluster of tents made of that gorgeous fabric.

Dining and dancing started up around a single massive bonfire, though I was offered neither food nor water.

I swallow hard. I’m gonna die tonight.

I mean, was there ever really another option? Only now, I’m nervous. Death may be inevitable, but the how is what concerns me now.

Maybe, I can negotiate. Because I’ve still got my green bean seeds in my back pocket.

People don’t need rehydrated food if we can grow here.

I’ll show these beings my green beans and they’ll welcome me with open arms. I’ll grow them a huge and bountiful garden before I convince these people to go back and wake the Sucere Chamber pod people up, and they’ll sing my praises, and it’ll totally make up for the fact that I’ve done every single thing wrong to date and ruined the Sucere Project…

Don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry. You’re not a murderer you’re not a murderer.

An idiot, maybe.

The female makes a proclamation and the crowd roars and starts looking around.

I search with them until my gaze finds the male everyone’s attention is on.

He’s seated on a rock near the innermost edge of the dancing circle, maybe thirty paces away from me.

He’s got tan skin and the same dark brown hair everyone else has, but he’s also got a pretty hectic-looking bandage tied around his middle and another around one of his legs.

On closer inspection, I’m surprised to find that I recognize him. He’s the male who grabbed me out of the Sucere Chamber. Our gazes lock momentarily, but then he clenches his teeth and shakes his head.

He says something to the crowd, who responds with nods. The female speaker then says something else. She and the male beside her repeat it several more times and people begin to shift, parting until a male becomes visible seated on a log a short distance away from the bonfire.

It’s the same male with scales on his shoulders who received many of the teeth tokens. Even from here, I can see a small stack of them on the log by his hip. He’s not handling them. He’s ignoring them. He’s ignoring everything.