Dear readers, I thought I would try my hand at something a little different to my normal style. This is a very slow burn romance story set in a post apocalypse world where law and order have ceased to exist.
There is no actual sex in this chapter, that will come later.
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Part one: Blondie
Outwardly she looked like any other scavenger. Dishevelled clothing and back pack, covered in a layer or two of fine mud and sand, flavoured with the occasional splatter of blood from one of the wilderness's creatures or from something more dangerous. The rusty, battered looking assault rifle that hung from the combat harness looked like it had seen far better days. Instead of the masks that that the plains wanderers wore to filter out the particles of dust, she wore a simple scarf fastened over her mouth and nose, and a pair of ancient looking sunglasses with scratched red lenses covered her eyes.
The reality was far different from the appearance. The patches on her worn leather trousers hide hardened steel plates, providing a modicum of leg armour. The long duster coat had scavenged ballistic Kevlar sewn in to the lining. The faded, tattered cap that bore the letters L and AοΎno doubt referring to the city that had existed before asteroid Zeus had struck EarthοΎwas lined with hundreds of interlocked steel rings, painstakingly formed by hand. The face scarf was double layered, with a changeable gauze filter sandwiched in between. The sunglasses were augmented with pre-Zeus military technology, giving her a vision enhancing HuD overlay, and the rifle was very well-maintained and only painted to look battered and rusty.
From her understanding, the human race had just been getting on top of the problems it had created for itself when Zeus had entered the solar system. The asteroid had not been big enough to be a planet killer but big enough to knock the Earth slightly off its axis and alter the weather system drastically. Billions had died in the following cataclysm. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and storms claiming many, the disease and starvation that followed took many more. Of the initial survivors, some people said that the planet would recover eventually, others said differently. Many just made the most of the chaos to do whatever they wanted, killing, raping, and taking what they needed from the weakest to feed the strongest. Or better-armed at any rate.
In the wake of Zeus, continents that had been tropical were now deserts. The polar regions were allegedly thriving areas of plant life, the rich soils that had been locked under the ice caps for millennia, now exposed to the air. The once thriving cities and population centres were inhospitable ruins, rife with disease and decay. The majority of the landmass was a mess of swamp and dust wastes where living was hard, and it was easier to take what you needed than work to get it.
Blondie had been a young child when the reavers had come to her parents' farm. She vaguely remembered screaming and flames, but not much more than that. A small part of her was grateful she didn't remember, but mostly she hated the various reaver gangs that now roamed the deserts and ruins of what had been civilization. That part was what led her to the path she now walked.
That of the Hunter.
For ten years the Red Right Hand had kept her, firstly as a living mascot, dragged along on a chain by the gang leader, then as she grew older and the leadership of the gang changed, she had been used as a personal slave to the new boss, a large brutal man she had only called Master.
He had treated her brutally and raped her more times than she could remember, until one night she had cut his throat while he slept. Normally he would have chained her up when he was sleeping, but over time had gotten careless, misled by her feigned submissiveness. One night, while everyone was asleep, she stole his knife and opened his throat, watching emotionlessly as his life blood flowed from him like a river.
She could have left the camp there and then. She may have even got away. Instead, she had walked out into the camp wearing nothing but spilt blood and a gun that was clumsy and heavy in her young hands.
A bounty hunter, who had been tracking the marauders, found her three days later. Half-naked, half starved, and still covered in the blood of her kills, her eyes full of hate, distrust and a feral wildness.
There were days when Blondie wished the man had put a bullet in her but instead he had taken care of her, clothed her, fed her, taught her how this new world worked. How to survive. How to hunt.
Kane, the bounty hunter, had died two years previously. What had begun as a cold had gotten steadily worse. He had been considerably weaker than when he had first found Blondie over twelve years before and the infection quickly grew until he was racked with fever. Blondie had stayed with him until the end, then buried his body and moved on. There were no tears shed. He had taught her, that to feel such emotion was a weakness, and weakness would leave you dead in the mud. Besides, the pack they had been hunting had been getting further away and Blondie never gave up on a hunt.
She was hunting a similar pack now. A group of five, three men and two women. They had attacked a settlement seven days ago, killed half a dozen traders and farmers then made off with supplies that were crucial to the settlement's survival.
It had been coincidence that Blondie had stopped at the settlement, and as a stranger had been singled out as another possible threat, one she quelled when she offered to hunt the murdering thieves down and return the supplies. The only demand she made in her offer was a few meagre rations to get her to the next town.
The trail Blondie was following wound along the base of a rocky gradient covered by coarse brush. The tracks the reaver gang had left had been fairly easy to follow up to now but ahead the spoor had vanished. Pausing in her tracks Blondie stooped, back-tracking to see where she had lost the trail. An echoing gunshot reverberated from somewhere past the gradient and Blondie rolled in to the bushes by the side of the trail, seeking the meagre cover the foliage offered, the barrel of the G36 lifting as smoothly as she dropped and the targeting Hud coming to life as she looked down the reflex sight. The shot meant someone was fighting someone or something else. No one wasted ammunition frivolously this far out in the wastelands. Blondie scanned her surroundings, trying to discern which direction the gunshot had come from. Above and ahead the rocky scrub rose gently, the bushes giving way to a small copse of withered trees that clawed the air, attempting to keep a hold on the land they had fought to grow from. The trail she had been on was well worn, but now she was among the spikey thorn bushes she could clearly see another path that threaded its way up the ridge until it vanished from sight. It was an obvious route over the rise, and if the reavers had taken that route, which the gunshot indicated they had, it would be foolish to follow the easy path.
Cutting to her left, Blondie slipped through the bushes carefully, her booted feet moving silently, edging slowly up the sloping ground until just below the crest where she dropped to her belly and crawled the remaining few metres. Below her rested a shallow basin, positively green with vegetation in comparison to the surrounding area. Nestled in its centre was a single-story house, possibly from before Zeus by the look of the architecture, but no doubt protected from the cataclysm by the natural surroundings. The perfect place for a small family to live in relative safety. Or for a reaver gang to hole up.
Scanning the area below, Blondie could just make out movement around the low building, but not clearly enough to distinguish any detail. The building could be an isolated homestead, but it could also be the base of operations for a band that the five reavers belonged to. She needed to make a full reconnaissance before doing anything further.
Slowly, Blondie eased herself away from the ridge line and as silently as a breeze and traversed her way to the small copse of half dead trees that overlooked the area. Working as quietly as she could, Blondie slipped off her pack, extracting a sturdy case from inside. Her hands worked from muscle memory, snapping the catches and withdrawing the items secured within, swiftly assembling the rifle the case had held. A ten-round magazine slipped carefully in to the receiver and a round fed into the breech. Crawling forwards once more Blondie nestled in behind the telescopic scope then unrolled a fine grey green netting from under her coat's collar to mask any sight of her location.
The building jumped in to detailed definition as the pale green, upturned V panned over the scene.
The first figure she saw was a female reaver dressed in dirty jeans and t-shirt with layered leather pads on her arms and thighs lounging on the porch, while drinking from a grubby bottle.
