The Gift

Chapter Seventeen

 

We’d stopped for the night so I put my great escape plan into action.  Since so much of my travail had been affected by the fact that I’m a female, I decided to use this to my advantage.  Miles had once confided that he believed women were actually the stronger sex.  He claimed that men would never be able to deal with having a monthly period, let alone nine months of pregnancy and actual childbirth.  He told me of a Sergeant Major that he’d known before the blackout.  The man had seen more combat than he could tell you about and had more medals than even he knew because so many were classified.  He’d been shot, RPG’d and he’d fallen through a roof.  He had so much shrapnel in him and had been rebuilt by military doctors so many times that he was practically a cyborg.  Yet he freaked out when his wife just mentioned the words menstrual period.  The man had been bathed in the blood of his and his fellow Marines but he was still terrified of his wife’s monthly visitor!  I just hoped these men were as squeamish as Miles had claimed.  If not squeamish, then at least terrified of a hysterical woman.

I took a deep breath and bit the inside of my lip as hard as I could.  Blood filled my mouth.  I smeared it on my hands and pants.  “Oh God, not now!”  I bellowed, hunching over.  I whimpered and wailed for all I was worth.  The commotion drew Captain White and three of his men to me within moments.  I continued to whimper and moan as if in great pain, clutching my stomach. 

“What?  What the hell’s wrong with you?”  I sat up and they saw the blood on my body.  Immediately they stiffened and their lips went white. 

“My lucky day.  First you guys and now this.”  They continued to stare at me.  “My time of the month,” I added.  They looked shocked and slightly afraid as though I were some kind of ticking bomb.  I doubled over again in mock pain and started wailing even louder.

“My wife gets like this,” one of the militia-men confided.  “Blood everywhere and she wails like a banshee.  She has to spend the entire week in bed sipping whatever alcohol I can get my hands on.  And I spend the entire week hiding from the psycho, drinking whatever’s left of the alcohol.  We’re in for a hell of a bad ride.” 

“Fuck”  was all Captain White could say.  “Fuck.”  He looked at the men around him, then back at me shaking and wailing away, then back at his men.  “Crimmins, take her into the woods, let her clean up a little at the stream.  Don’t uncuff her.  Whatever she can manage to do cuffed is as good as she’s going to get. 

Crimmins looked terrified.  “Captain, maybe you should send Scott, he’s got the experience with the crazy wife.”

“I’m not sending Scott, he’s a fuckup.  It’s bad enough I have to babysit him.  Now we’ve got to deal with her.”  I wailed again for emphasis.  “Go.  Now!”  Crimmins and Scott helped me out of the wagon but they did so with terror in their eyes.  Scott dropped me, but Crimmins picked me up and gingerly helped me into the woods.  I felt genuinely sorry I was going to have to kill him.

Crimmins helped me limp into the forest to a stream a ways back from the make-shift camp.  I fell down onto the ground next to the stream, still concealing I’d picked the lock on the cuffs, and rinsed my hands in the cool water.  I needed to get Crimmins to turn around so I could sneak up behind him.  I bent over, wailing again, whimpering, “Oh God, that’s so much more blood than normal.  And it won’t stop.  Look at it,” I told Crimmins.  That did it, he turned his back to me in record time. 

“Just hurry and clean up.  Captain’s already mad” he mumbled to a tree in front of him.  As soon as he’d turned his back I had the cuffs off and had picked up a long thick tree branch I’d crouched down beside.  Quietly I slipped behind Crimmins and pulled the branch over his head and against his neck.  I pulled it as tight against him as I could, stifling any cries he might make.  And not too long after, he went slack and I lowered him gently to the forest floor.  I stripped him of his weapons and jacket before slipping his hands around a sturdy tree and clamping the cuffs on his wrists, tethering him to the tree.  I cut a piece of fabric from his shirt and gagged him.  I could have killed him.  I should have killed him.  But I couldn’t.  Now if it had been Scott….  

Speak of the devil.  I had just slipped on Crimmins’s coat and strapped his sword and knife to my belt when I heard Scott stomping through the forest.  “Crimmins!  Hurry it the hell up!  She just needs a bit of a clean up, she’s not going to the prom.”  Fuck, I thought.  I guess I’m gonna have to kill Scott after all.  I hid behind a tree, my blade raised, and when Scott came into the clearing I swung my sword and hit a home-run.  I stripped him of his weapons too.  No need to cuff him, I thought idly. 

As I was working my way through the forest underbrush away from the militia, a troubling thought occurred to me.  I really was due for my monthly visitor.  In fact, she was more than a month late.