Misconstrued, p.5
Misconstrued, page 5
“Come with me,” he said, just before the door closed.
“Where are we going?” I asked through the narrow gap in the door.
“To get a towel.”
I ended up back in the girls locker room with a towel and a clean coverall. The nutrition pouch was reduced to just a leathery flap. I wondered, as I was climbing under the water, if that would be absorbed, too. I poked at it and gave it a tug. It was a little bit loose, and that was a whole other layer of horrifying. If I pulled it off, was I going to have a hole into my abdomen behind it?
I ignored it and tried to wash the rest of me.
As I bent forward to wash my feet, it crumpled, then fell off when I stood up. The skin underneath was bleached white and wet looking. I carefully washed that, too.
Eventually, I ended up sitting on a bench, wrapped in a towel, looking at a square foot of something that looked like a piece of leather or one of those scobies people used to use to make kombucha.
I shuddered, just glad it wasn’t attached anymore.
I toweled off and got dressed and left it in the shower to go ask Iago what I was supposed to do with it. He came in and picked it up. It was floppy and gross, and he took it back to the medbay.
It went into one bin and my dirty laundry went into a bag.
Iago and the medic had a long conversation that I couldn’t understand before I was taken back to the garage.
I thanked him politely, expecting him to stay on the house side of the door, but instead he followed me inside.
“It’s cold in here and it smells bad,” he announced.
I stared at my feet. He was right, of course, but I didn’t want to lose the privacy the space allowed.
“Come this way,” he ordered as he turned and went back into the house.
He walked into what had been the master bedroom and had a long conversation with the six orcs bunked down in there. He looked at them as he talked, but they kept looking at me.
“Iago? I don’t want to make trouble,” I whispered as softly as I could.
That made all seven focus sharply on me. I ducked my head and hunched in on myself a little, trying to be as non-threatening as I could. I shouldn’t still be here! I had learned a lot of things about them. The medical device wasn’t on me anymore. I should be planning my escape.
“If they give you this room and take the garage, will you spend time with them?” Iago asked.
I tensed. I was pretty sure one of them was the guy who had propositioned me earlier that night. “What do they want me to do?” I whispered.
“Help them teach the other humans how to wash,” he suggested.
“I don’t want to be naked in front of all the other humans either. And I don’t know if they will listen to me, now that I’m not living with them anymore.”
“Try!” Yeah. That was Mr. “Want?” from earlier.
“If you just let me go back to live with them—”
Even the six who were being kicked out of their room thought that was a non-starter.
I clenched my teeth and tried to think of a diplomatic way to frame what I wanted to say. I wasn’t sure there was one, so I went with straightforward instead.
“No.” They blinked at me in varying degrees of disbelief. I sighed. “I’m not bothered by living in the garage enough to want to owe anyone favours to move out. It already bothers me that four of you own me; I don’t want to make it ten.” I turned and went back to the garage then, closing the door behind me.
It was cold and it smelled like a garage. I would rather have been in my tent in the school yard and much rather have been in my tree house by the river or the abandoned building I had lived in before that. I didn’t have those options just now, so I was making do with what I had. I just needed to think. Staying here and playing pet wasn’t my goal. I had information about how they worked now, it would be easier to avoid them in the future.
I was half-suspecting that our little tour around the neighbourhood was supposed to be some great show of strength, but instead I had been able to spot a few likely candidates for exits. They had told me they had something going on “for families” by the river, but if I stuck to the burnt out houses, I should have a clear run out of town, then I could follow the abandoned train tracks east. The iron rails had been dug up years ago, but the path was still there if you knew where to look.
I just needed to get out of here.
And hope I wasn’t stuck with some hidden GPS tag.
Argh.
Fuck.
Okay. The only way to find out if I had been GPS tagged was to get out of here and find someplace to hide for a couple of months to see if they came after me.
I wondered, again, how I had let myself end up in this position.
I was prepared to blame the lack of nutrients we hadn’t discovered yet, because I should have hopped the fence weeks ago.
Still, I had learned how their camps were organized. How their barracks worked. How their showers worked. I realized maybe the issue was less about willful cruelty and more a case of neglect. The food thing was weird. They ate better than we did, which was no surprise. Except that they kept telling me that the human food rations were balanced. I didn’t know what to think about that when we were all hungry and had lost weight.
Mind you, human nutrition seemed more like wishful thinking rather than science. Every time a great study was released, it contradicted something that had been revealed as truth five or ten years before. And it would inevitably be proven wrong if you waited a couple of years. Or it would turn out that the study had secret funding from a food industry. Were the orcs basing their meal planning on our science? Or worse, our diet books? Because I was prepared to believe that was the problem.
I was starting to nod off, despite myself. I felt like I was still awake when I had a dream where Mac came into the garage and made love to my body with his mouth. When I woke up, I was left frustrated in so many ways.
That night was full of uneasy dreams of orc hands touching me. I wasn’t dreaming of being groped, it was more sensual than that. In the way that dreams make no sense upon waking, I was somewhere warm and dark and being caressed by large grey hands belonging to unseen figures. In the cold light of morning, I could rationally process how it wasn’t real. The four didn’t touch me. Ever. I could maybe recall Tybalt having his hand on my back once, but even that didn’t feel like a real memory.
They had certainly reacted the one time I had touched him.
Yet they weren’t above catching me by my clothes. Romeo had grabbed the back of my shirt to keep me from leaving. But that wasn’t exactly the same as grabbing my arm. I didn’t understand what they were doing or why. I had no idea what they wanted, and I was too afraid to ask. Nonetheless, I couldn’t deny that they seemed to be working to make my life better.
Which made sense; people have a very different attitude towards the family pet than they do towards a wild dog. Maybe it was easier because I wasn’t being aggressive. The boss orc had described me as “defective”; were they being nice to me the way people were to a three-legged dog at the pound?
When I did get out of here, no one would believe they were kind to me. I thought back to that old Outer Limits episode where the soldier caught as a P.O.W. in space ended up bonding with a woman, only to find out she was one of the enemy aliens all along. Maybe it was like that, maybe they were just being nice to me to get at the other humans.
Maybe the whole point of this was for me to “escape” and lead them to where other free humans were living. It had been long enough that I wasn’t sure I could still find them. If there was even anyone left.
When the knock came in the morning, it was Romeo. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t say anything to me. No, the surprising part was that I was taken back to the school yard and left standing in line for breakfast.
It was green, not beige rations, and I noticed that Miriam received a larger portion. That was something, at least. When I was looking for a place to sit, Erika flagged me over.
“Well, you’re looking well-scrubbed. What happened while you were gone?”
I told her the whole creepy, unexplainable story, and felt somewhat justified when she was shocked that the free-standing toilets were also showers. After we turned in our trays, she had me show her. She immediately cornered a random orc and demanded a towel. He looked shocked, but after a little bit of organization, one was supplied.
She had a bunch of us women huddle around to screen her from prying eyes and she left the door open in case anything went wrong. About the time she was finished, an orc I didn’t recognize sidled over and passed a clean set of clothing down the line for her. Erika was over the moon; we found a clear space and I helped her finger comb out her hair.
“So,” she said, looking hard at me, “the food is better. You get to shower every day. You get your own room, with a door—”
“In a garage,” I interrupted.
She shrugged. “—free healthcare,” she continued, “and no one is molesting you. How the hell do I sign up?”
I stared at her for a long moment. “Damned if I know. Maybe if they come to take me away again, you could just go instead, if you’re so keen.”
Erika snorted with laughter. “They might all look more or less the same to me, but they are definitely keeping an eye on you.” She nodded over my shoulder and I turned to see Mac watching me. To my surprise, she waved at him, and he waved happily back.
“Really?” I demanded.
“What? He isn’t even close to the ugliest troll I’ve dated,” she laughed.
I resisted the urge to give her a shove.
“Which one offered to eat you out? That’s the one I want to meet.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake!” I grumbled.
“Exactly!” she teased. “That’s the point. I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, but all the nice guys are taken around here.”
I closed my eyes, as if by not looking at the world I could make it not exist for a moment. She was right, of course. Men were more likely to join the army and go out to be killed. That wasn’t any different than the male to female ratios after either World War. It wasn’t as though we were starting in an area with a surplus male population in the first place.
There hadn’t been any world news since they landed. I wondered, again, how many camps like this had been set up around the world. Had any of the countries with nukes managed to use them?
- - - -
I had lunch and dinner in the school yard with everyone else. There were a few more people willing to try the showers. Night had fallen and I was on my way back to Erika’s tent when Tybalt turned up.
“Come now?” he asked, and it was a question.
“Do I get to say no?” I countered.
He just looked confused. “Yes?”
Erika gave me a gentle shove and failed to notice Tybalt getting tense over it. “Oh, go on! You know a garage is better than a tent.” Then she looked at Tybalt. “You make sure you bring my friend back to visit, understand?” she ordered.
Tybalt nodded solemnly. I rolled my eyes.
He turned to lead me away when she shouted, “Hey!”
Tybalt went very still and looked at me, not her.
“You’re a good guy, right?”
Slow nod.
“If I need to ask an orc for help, who else is a good guy?”
He blinked, then turned and looked at her while doing a fairly good impression of a stunned bunny.
“Someone who won’t hurt her,” I added softly.
He looked hard at me then. I avoided looking at him until I couldn’t anymore. Once he had my attention, he looked around the yard before nodding at an orc with three scars crossing his jawline.
“I think,” I said slowly, “that he tried to be helpful the other night.”
“Really.” Erika wasn’t asking it as a question, but rather she blurted it out like a particularly salacious piece of gossip.
I shrugged, then turned to Tybalt. “Does he live in the same house as you?”
“Same house as us,” he agreed.
Erika leered. I shook my head. “Don’t do anything stupid, okay?”
Erika laughed. “Yes, mom!” Tybalt jumped at the last word. She noticed. “You should get going, you’re making the dictators nervous.” She laughed at the look on Tybalt’s face, then hugged me tight. “Go on then! Take that cat king home and put him to bed.”
I rubbed her back. “G’night!” I waited until we were out of the school and most of the way to the house before I whispered, “Please don’t let anyone hurt her for that last joke. We’re all trying to adjust to the new world as best as we can.”
Tybalt just grunted. After another few steps he said, “Want you to sleep in my bed.”
I stopped walking. He took another step before he noticed I wasn’t moving. I just stood there looking at him.
He gritted his teeth. “Mine. Not everyone’s. Mine.”
I seriously considered turning and running. Instead, I tried to keep my voice even when I contradicted him. “No. Not yours. I am mine.”
His eyes went wide, then he nodded.
I tensed for the next bit. “I’m not sleeping in your bed, but I’m not sleeping in anyone else’s either.”
Nod.
“Do I have to worry about you forcing the issue?”
Shake-shake-shake.
“Good.”
- - - --
I noticed something was up as soon as I reached the house. They all were standing around grinning at me. All of them, not just the original four. Well, three, since there was no sign of Iago. I swallowed and tried to keep my tone light when I asked, “What did you do?”
I would have to say they chortled because their voices weren’t exactly built for giggling, but it was a matter of range rather than expression. I wasn’t sure what to think of a house full of giddy orcs. Tybalt held out his hand to me and looked really hopeful. Some of the other smiles in the room got a bit tense about that.
Okay.
The bottom line was, however nervous Tybalt made me, the whole rest of the house was worse. The ones who were tense about him offering me his hand were complete unknowns. All of that flashed through my brain in an instant, and I took Tybalt’s hand with barely a pause.
He beamed at me like Christmas had come early. It wasn’t exactly comforting.
“I don’t know what you’re up to, and it’s making me worried,” I explained. “I don’t like surprises. ‘Surprise! You’re fired!’ or ‘Surprise! You have an incurable disease!’, there are just too many ways to—” I stopped, because we had gotten to the master bedroom. It had a door and there was a paper stuck to it. Looking closer, I realized it was a page out of the magazine I had been reading earlier.
“Not set you on fire,” Mac protested.
I felt like I should address that, but I wanted to just find out what was going on. “Um, good? Can I just go to my room now?”
“Open door!” Mac shouted, making me flinch. Tybalt was only moments behind him in saying something similar, albeit with a lower volume.
I pushed open the door. The room inside didn’t exactly match the one in the picture, but I could see where they had tried. The walls were now painted navy. The room didn’t have wide baseboards or crown molding, but a surprisingly good facsimile had been painted on the walls. The furniture was crisp and white, the linens were white, there was a navy and white throw blanket with a pattern that reminded me of my grandmother’s china on the end of the bed.
There was a dog bed in the corner, just like in the picture.
“Are we getting a dog?” I asked the question, then looked over my shoulder to be confronted by a sea of nervous faces. Someone elbowed Tybalt forward. He gave me a sickly smile and shook his head. “Okay. I was just wondering.” I went to look into the dresser drawers. They were empty. Apparently, they were trying to match the look without really understanding the function. There were two mirrors over the dresser, making it look like a two sink vanity without the sinks.
There were a lot of gold accents including the knobs on the dressers, the round frames on the mirrors, the lamps that were gold toned glass, and the piping on the dog bed. I turned the switch on the light; that didn’t work either. They were all watching me expectantly.
“It’s very pretty,” I suggested, not sure what to say.
Romeo pointed at the ensuite.
It could not have been the standard issue for the house. The whole thing, floors, walls, ceiling were all covered in something that wasn’t human made. It had been made to look like marble tile. There was a human toilet and sink, and the shower had been reworked to have an orc rain ceiling installed. The whole wall behind the sink was mirrored.
