Free Refugees from the Righteous Horde (Toxic World Book 2) by Sean McLachlan Page B

bag of flour had taken ages to fill. They’d gotten so weak that it was a monumental effort just to turn the hand mill one rotation. Each little trickle of flour from the spout seemed to mock them. The bag sagging in its limp emptiness on the floor looked bottomless.
    Yet at last they had finished. Back in the barracks they ate in numb silence and slept until dinner. That evening another group was t aken out to work. Susanna noticed that the guard who took them was the same who had touched Donna. When they came back a couple of hours later the look on one woman’s face told Susanna all she needed to know—Abe would stop the guard if he saw him try something, but Abe didn’t want to see.
    When the guard appeared, Donna turned her face to the wall and covered herself with her blanket. Susanna’s heart ached for her. During the march she’d been shared around by some of the Elect, especially one brute named Jeb. Susanna had been Jeb’s servant, shining his boots and mending his clothes by the fire while trying not to hear what was going on in the tent just a few feet away.
    The sun set and the interior of the barracks grew pitch black. Susanna and Donna huddled together in one bed, using their two blankets and their own body heat to try and keep warm.
    “We have to get out of this place,” Susanna whispered to her friend.
    “How?”
    While Susanna couldn’t see, she imagined the look of despair on Donna’s face.
    Yes, how? They were too weak to run. They had no weapons except for whatever tools they could pick up. They had nothing.
    No, that wasn’t quite true. They only appeared to have nothing. The guards around them were careless. If Abe hadn’t come in she would have smacked the guard with that wooden handle and tried to get his gun.
    And then what? Fight her way out? The guards would have slaughtered them all.
    She had to think. The guards would probably get more cautious as she and the other porters grew in strength. The time to act was now. Soon, anyway. First build up some strength, and don’t make any moves unless that guard or one like him forced them into it. Then, if a similar situation presented itself, she could get a weapon and use the guard as a hostage. Demand food and safe passage. That might work.
    She was amazed at her boldness. She’d always been the quiet one, rarely giving her opinion and even more rarely listened to. Back at her settlement she had farmed and cooked and kept quiet, letting others make the decisions and take the lead. She had always been pushed around. Not in any nasty way, the others at the settlement had been nice enough, but they had always assumed they could tell her what to do.
    And they’d been right.
    So what had changed? Susanna thought for a moment. It had been Eduardo. It had been that moment when she looked at Eduardo’s corpse and chose starvation over cannibalism. Others would have chosen to eat him. The self-styled survivors. The pushy ones. The greedy ones. The ones who didn’t have a line they wouldn’t cross. The ones who thought she was weak. She wondered, if the roles had been reversed, whether Eduardo would have eaten her.
    That didn’t matter. The fact remained that she had drawn a line and put herself squarely on the side of decency. So what if she lived in a fallen world where decency was considered a fault? She was going to be good anyway.
    That goodness might get her killed. The lawless ones were right about that. This wasn’t the kind of world that rewarded goodness.
    The hard knot inside her that had first formed when she had thrown away her firestriker clenched even tighter. So what if the world didn’t reward goodness? Goodness was its own reward.
    It had to be. Otherwise life wasn’t worth living.
    She drifted off, her last fragmented thoughts still turning over her place in this sad world, morphing into dreams in which she was someone different, a hero from one of the old stories, fighting on the side of right and vanquishing evil.
    She