Free Offspring by Jack Ketchum Page B

the Boy to play with the Cow in this manner but Second Stolen had perhaps grown tired of hearing it bellow for a while because she walked to the boy and took his poker and whacked him with it once across the bottom. The Boy looked up at her resentfully but did not cry . . . though now he too would have a bruise tomorrow.
    He ran to Eartheater and soon they were playing on the floor of the cave, tossing the sun-bleached bones of a rat in some game they had invented together and which none of the others but the Boy, Eartheater and Rabbit had ever understood.
    The Woman did not mind that Second Stolen had disciplined the Boy. The fact that he was her son and not Second Stolen’s made no difference to her. To her they all were the same. Her children by First Stolen were the same to her as Rabbit, her son of seven summers by the Cow. And Rabbit was the same as Eartheater—so called because she would eat anything, even handfuls of earth when she was hungry—the daughter of the union between First and Second Stolen. And Eartheater was the same to her as Second Stolen’s infant daughter by the Cow, sleeping now in the browse bed made of pine boughs by the fire.
    There was no disgrace in having been fathered by the Cow. That was what the Cow was for.
    As Second Stolen was using him now.
    The Woman smiled. Clearly it had not been the Cow’s bellowing that made Second Stolen chase the Boy away—but this.
    The Woman had no concept of beauty
.
    She herself was not beautiful. Not unless power was beauty, because she was powerful, over six feet tall, with long arms and legs, almost simian in their lean strength. But her wide gray eyes were empty when they were not watchful and she was pale from lack of light, filthy as they all were filthy, parasite and insect bitten and smelling of blood like a vulture. A wide smooth scar ran from just below her full right breast to just above her hip where eleven years ago one of the shotgun blasts had peeled her flesh away. Over her left eye and extending an inch beyond her ear, a second blast had left another scar. Neither her eyebrow nor her hair from forehead to the back of her ear had ever grown in again
.
    She looked as though struck by lightning
.
    The Woman was not beautiful, and had no concept of beauty. But she recognized a certain delicacy in Second Stolen. A mastery of the Cow that was almost beauty and to her as pleasing
.
    She watched the familiar ritual.
    The Cow whimpered as Second Stolen approached—as he had whimpered nearly every day of the eight full summers they had used him.
    Whether the Cow whimpered in anticipation of pain or pleasure the Woman had never known and did not care.
    Second Stolen had just bathed. It was the first she had bathed in a very long time, but it was necessary. Both she and the Cow were naked. The Cow was always naked.
    His breath was coming faster, his chest heaving.
    She watched Second Stolen grip the slack flesh of his belly and twist it for her pleasure, and then reach down.
    Second Stolen milked the Cow.
    The Cow began to rise.
    The Cow was much older than the Woman, yet he could be counted upon to rise quickly—even more quickly than First Stolen, who sometimes allowed himself to become distracted from their need of him. But the Cow had no mind and no distractions. As though the milking were necessary to him.
    She watched Second Stolen wrap her legs around his back, grasp his shoulders and trap him inside her.
    In a matter of moments she shuddered. They were finished.
    It was good, thought the Woman, that she had taken the moment to use the Cow. Second Stolen’s part would be hard tonight. There was pain in it. And Second Stolen had already had pain. She had taken it upon herself when she had failed to find the children the night before and then received it again from the Woman and First Stolen, when they knew what the children had done.
    Not even the spoils of the hunt could allow her to forgive what the children had done. Each had received a