Free Lucid Dreaming by Lisa Morton

could keep going all night if I liked, and I don’t.” She waved Johnny over.
    â€œTie ’em both up.”
    Â 
    At least Johnny didn’t try anything other than tying us up. Well, he did cuff Teddy around a little, but stopped when Teddy made me proud by threatening to bite off his other ear.
    Colby came again in the morning to untie us. She brought us each a plate of eggs, milk…and beef. What a surprise.
    Fuck it, I thought. We need our strength. I ate my portion of meat and Teddy’s, and gave him all my eggs. He wasn’t nuts about even eating eggs, but he knew he had to.
    â€œI’m supposed to fill you in on some of our rules today,” said Colby.
    â€œYou don’t sound too thrilled about it.”
    She shrugged. “I don’t exactly have anywhere else to go for better rules.”
    â€œYeah,” I said to her, “I know, what with that asshole Hank keeping all the car keys and stuff…”
    Colby laughed, kind of bitterly. “Oh, that part wouldn’t be a problem—Hank’s my husband.”
    Oh, I thought. “Oh,” I said.
    â€œIt’s okay. He is an asshole. Or at least he is now. We were having problems even before all this; in fact, I was about to file for divorce. He was a mechanic back in Amarillo, and I was a waitress. We did have a nice little house, but Hank, he…” She trailed off, since she didn’t need to explain any more.
    â€œSo how’d you wind up here?” I asked.
    â€œDid Mama mention that her daughter-in-law was a pharmacist who figured out the thing with the Prolixin ? That was Judy. She was one of my best friends.”
    â€œâ€˜Was’?”
    Colby toed some cowshit in the dirt and nodded. “She was kind of like you—smarter than the rest of ’em around her. It may have been Mama’s idea, but Judy was the one who found this place, got enough of us on the Prolixin to come out here and fix it up. But she and Mama didn’t see eye-to-eye, and they started to fight about a lot of stuff, like who got Prolixin and who didn’t. Finally Judy said she wanted to leave, and Mama said she couldn’t. So one day she got in one of the trucks and tried to take off.”
    She exhaled a long, shaky breath, and then added, “Hank shot her.”
    Teddy and I exchanged a look. Jesus, how much worse could this get?
    â€œHer husband—Mama’s son—was Johnny.”
    It could get that much worse.
    Â 
    So we became part of “the family.” We worked and obeyed the rules just enough to make sure that we got fed and sheltered.
    They stuck me in a sort of outbuilding that served as a dorm for the working single women. They had a similar building for the men, but none of the crackers would sleep with Teddy, so he got his own little shed.
    There was a lot about what they’d done already and were planning to do that was pretty cool, actually. Mama’d really thought it through, I have to give her credit for that much. They had plenty of meat, but were taking good care of their herds to make sure they lasted; likewise the dairy. They were working on getting farming going, to provide grains and vegetables, and the greenhouse could be used for herbs and things like tomatoes. They had a well, so water was plentiful, and there were half a dozen working oil derricks around, so they had fuel. They had medical supplies and one woman who’d been a registered nurse, who was almost as good as a doctor. They had music and movies, and even a working still.
    But they were seriously fucked up. They were fucked up in terms of religion and education and art. There were no books in that entire huge house except Bibles, and Colby once told me that Mama had had all the other books burned after she’d moved in (“said those books had filled people’s heads with bad ideas for too long”).
    There was the way they treated Teddy, even while claiming that he was