New Beginnings – Pt 1 Ch 4 by dank

“Let me out!” Alicia screamed down the empty hallway. She shook the bars of her cell door. They rattled noisily.She anxiously paced the length of her narrow cell a few times, then plopped down on the bare, ratty mattress.

‘How the hell did I get into this fix?’ she asked herself, fuming, and closed her eyes, thinking back…

When the rest of her family had moved into their underground retreat (the one she’d built for them under the mountains), she decided to take one final tour across the country – take in the sights one more time before they left.

Well, that wasn’t entire true – she blew off after hanging around for a couple of years with nothing to do, missing the social life she’d always enjoyed in the ‘Hub’ and later in Boston. When she heard about the New Confederacy, that was it. She wanted out. She took her own personal flitter and headed for the coast. Upon reaching the Atlantic, she turned south, searching for an inhabited city.

All the original coastline cities were underwater by now. That didn’t make much difference because most of them were radioactive craters anyway. Searching the new coastline, Alicia made it to Macon just as she ran out of fuel.

She soon discovered that women were definitely second class citizens in this new Confederacy – and valued somewhere between livestock and property. There was a bond system through which every female was processed upon entering. She couldn’t enter the city without registering. Once registered, she was required to stay in a communal facility (read ‘jail’) until she accepted a contract from a bondsman.

Accepting a contract meant that she would owe her bondsman a certain amount of money, which he was expected to put forward to set her up in the community. The higher the amount of the bond, the higher her social status would be. She would be the property of her bondsman until she paid back every cent declared in the contract plus every additional coin expended on her care and, if needed, education and medical treatment.

After a month of living in the communal facility and not accepting a single offer, she was ejected from the city and threatened with execution should she return. No one was interested in feeding her if she wasn’t pulling her weight, no matter how beautiful she was. Alicia was happy to leave, not even slightly interested in being owned by anyone.

At that time, the Confederacy was setting up its capitol in Nashville. Alicia took advantage of the fact that she could go anywhere she pleased during the daytime since there was no one around to stop her and decided to go there. Along the way, she found that food and drink were plentiful, though it was mostly out of irradiated cans. Neither the radiation nor the raging sun bothered her because of her heritage.

It was a long, slogging walk to Atlanta, as many of the roads were under a foot or so of seawater. The Georgia of the twenty-second century was mostly shallow salt lakes and swampland, with mosquitoes the size of her hand swarming her at night and twenty-foot long dinosaurs stalking her during the day.

It was hot, and the noon sun was cooking her. Half blinded by sweat in her eyes and exhausted from wading down the middle of the highway through ankle-deep water, she never even saw it coming, and didn’t realize she was being stalked until her legs were yanked out from beneath her.

Alicia screamed as she splashed down into the shallow stinking water. Her scream was as much in pain as it was in surprise. Something large had her whole leg in its mouth and was dragging her backwards, very rapidly, into the deeper water at the side of the road.

Screaming, and clawing madly at the mud, Alicia was pulled under the tepid, foaming water, where the monster released her for an instant, then chomped down on her legs and hips. Satisfied with its new grip on its meal, the monster dove down and swirled Alicia around, bashing her head and shoulders against the bottom of whatever body of water she was in.

Disoriented, terrified and desperate for air, she fought as hard as she could, striking its long, hard jaws with her hands and trying to jerk out of its vice-like grip. Its teeth hurt terribly and the water was red with her blood. The monster spun around again, bashing Alicia’s head against something hard. She watched the bubbles of air from her lungs rush away toward the light, then everything was dark.

In her nearly unconscious state, she could feel her body being wedged into a tight space as the monster’s snout almost lovingly pushed her under a submerged log. She could see in the monster’s mind that it was decidedly pleased. In a few days, she would be ripe and ready to eat. Feeling surprisingly comfortable now, Alicia let go and the darkness surrounded her.

Alicia sat down in her cell, remembering waking up in the middle of a violent storm, lying face down in mud with her body half-in and half-out of a raging river.

She had no idea how she survived the attack of that giant crocodile. From the half-healed tooth marks and the deep gouges in her legs and lower belly, she estimated that the attack had occurred only a few hours earlier. This was the same day.

It was barely daylight beneath the raging storm she found herself in. Realizing she had to get to higher ground or risk being swept away in a flash flood, she forced her cold, stiff muscles to move and staggered further up the shallow hill she found herself on. When she reached the top of the hill, she could see all around her. There was nothing but water – water and scraggy little tree tops, some of which were moving, having been uprooted by the flood.

It got totally dark shortly after she woke up, and she spent the night curled up against the driving rain and a fierce, cold wind. Sometime after midnight, the rain stopped and the wind died down, but the total blackness continued until daybreak.

It was two more days before the water went down and Alicia could continue her journey toward Atlanta. During that time, she caught a colorful, orange snake, killed it, and ate it raw. She was actually pretty proud of her wilderness expertise in being able to eat bloody, raw snake until she discovered the snake’s last meal, the partially digested remains of some sort of rodent. Then she threw it all up.

Sitting in her cell, now, Alicia thought it strange how some memories seemed so vivid, like that croc attack and eating the orange snake, and how hard it was to remember the faces of her old family. She could see the outlines and hear their voices, but the exact appearance of her parents, her brother or her late husband, for the time being, anyway, eluded her.

She lay down on her jail cot and closed her eyes, continuing the journey through the memories of her mind.

There were still small groups of survivors in the larger towns, living off whatever was left to scavenge. After her first encounter with survivors, she stayed clear of populated areas. In Athens, she’d been gang-raped and left out in the sun to cook. Another roving gang found her, raped her repeatedly, then stood her up against a wall and executed her, firing squad style. They left her corpse at the side of the road as a warning for others to stay away.

It had taken her two days to recover from all the bullet wounds. After that, she was more wary and wasn’t caught again. This new ‘lifestyle’, traveling and thieving during the day, then holing up at night when the Normals came out, became a new and intense game for Alicia. She’d spent most of her life being a social creature in a social society and this was a real challenge of her ability to survive. She began to understand the thrill that her son, Jake Hedron, and his wife found in doing security work, and search and rescue operations.

Not knowing her way around the country (that what computers are for, after all), she eventually arrived in Memphis, another Confederate city. There, she was also required to register for a bond. This time, tired of hiding and eating out of cans, she was offered and accepted a 10K promissory note. Thus, she entered her new profession as a bond girl (not James).

The tall, willowy blue-eyed blonde quickly filled out again after having walked several hundred miles over a period of about two years, and became Arnold Baker’s favorite. Over the next ten years, she actually paid off the 10K she owed, but stayed with him anyway, until one day he didn’t come home. Two other people did, however, and took her with them.

After several weeks of sexual abuse in her new captivity, Alicia was left unguarded at the edge of town. There was nowhere she could go, of course, unless she chose to go topside and be cooked by the sun. The next night when they came to get her, she was gone.

“Don’t bother,” her captor said. “She went topside. She’ll be dead by the time we find her.”

There were more people traveling in Tennessee than she’d seen for awhile as the Confederacy had set up underground and basement lodges for people to stay in as they moved from town to town, reestablishing a form of caravan commerce.

These underground lodges actually made it easier for Alicia to steal food and water, as well as fresh clothes. She traveled during the day and hid out at night when everyone else traveled, just like before. Each morning, people and their animals went underground, often leaving their supplies stacked at the entrance of whatever underground lodge they chose for the day. After all, who in their right mind would risk sun poisoning for a few supplies?

Alicia found pickings really easy. During her entire two-month walk to Nashville, she was only shot at twice by guards. She was never chased. A person would have to be a fool to go out in the sun these days, even to recover stolen goods.

Arriving at the outskirts of Nashville, it was impossible to tell that the city was inhabited. No one was out in the daylight, of course, so she established herself in a nice house and lived there comfortably for about two months until she discovered that her body monitor had ceased functioning sometime in the last year or so. She discovered that when she noticed she was several months pregnant.