Page 9 of Lawless
With a shaky breath, I picked up a knife and began cutting into a cheese block. I just had to make it through tonight. Then the next night. Then the one after that.You'll survive. You'll survive.
I became so entranced in my cheese-cubing, I nearly jumped out of my skin when something cold and wet nudged my arm.
"Ah! What?" I blinked down at a face with two round dark eyes, pointed ears, and a smiling toothy mouth with a pink tongue lolling out.
"What are you doing here?" I demanded Reaper's dog like he could answer. Hades, I think he called him.
Up close, the animal was even bigger than I initially thought. His shoulder came up to my waist. Sleek muscles across his chest and a glossy coat showed he was well taken care of, neither thin nor overweight. That, at least, was a relief. I'd seen companion animals in far worse conditions since the Collapse. When most people could barely feed themselves or their children, animals always suffered the worst.
"Go away." I made a shooing motion but the dog only stepped closer, nudging my arm out of the way to reach his prize on the counter—cheese.
"Damn it, dog." I covered the food with my hand, looking over my shoulder to see his owner preoccupied with a service girl in his lap.
Hades licked his lips and tilted his head at me as if to say,See? He'll never know. Just one little piece? Pwease?
"This is all you get," I said, holding up a cheese cube between my thumb and forefinger. "But you better not get me in trouble with your human, okay?"
Hades' eyes brightened as he lowered his haunches to the floor like a good boy. I stood stunned for a moment. This dog looked like he would have ripped my throat out the moment he walked in next to his owner. Now he was working the puppy dog eyes and begging for treats like he grew up with a sweet old lady.
"Please don't bite my fingers off," I muttered as I slowly held the cheese out to him.
To my relief, only his tongue touched my hand as he scarfed down the cube in two big, chomping bites. It brought a smile to my face for the first time in weeks. He looked like such a sweet puppy for a moment. I forgot about who he came with and what those big eyes must have witnessed his owner do. In that one innocent moment, I allowed myself to reach out and tentatively scratch one of his ears.
"Hades!" The yell came from across the room and made me flinch. "Get your ass over here, mutt."
The dog trotted back to lay at his owner's feet, Reaper's unforgiving gaze holding me rooted to my spot. Fuck. He must have seen me feed him and pet him. The sick, churning feeling in my stomach told me the Steel Demons president wouldn't take kindly to someone touching his pet.
Turning back to my chopping, I struggled to calm the fearful, ragged breaths in and out of my chest as Reaper's eyes felt like daggers in my back.
Four
MARIPOSA
Iwoke up the next morning to a line of prostitutes outside my door. Not for anything fun, considering I don’t swing that way.
Nope, they heard what I offered and came to receive my services. I got a cup of stale coffee from the kitchen, tied my hair back, opened my pack, and got down to work.
Most of them wanted birth control, as expected. Thankfully I stocked up from the pharmacy I stayed at before coming here. I had pills, patches, rings, implants, and IUDs up the wazoo.
The majority of them preferred the implant like the one I had in my arm. It lasted for three years and was relatively easy to insert and remove. Pills were too easy to lose, forget, or be tampered with. IUDs were invasive and more painful to insert, plus I was not the best at putting them in. While in school, my dream was to be a labor and delivery nurse. I wanted to catch babies as they came out, not shove things back in.
But at this point in my post-Collapse medic career, most of my skills came from straight-up winging it. I’d never implanted a birth control device before until I put my first one in my arm. I never performed any kind of surgery myself until I had to dig shrapnel out of a kid's thigh at the old Texas-New Mexico border.
Sometimes I was lucky enough to learn from other medics on the road. Former doctors, nurse practitioners, and physician's assistants all gave me tricks of the trade I never would have learned in a pre-Collapse job. They made me realize how vital it was to share skills in a world like this. One day I could be pulling a dead tooth from a guy's mouth and the next day, giving methadone to a drug addict. To be truly useful, we had to adapt to everything.
In between birth control implants and morning-after pills, some of the girls talked to me about physical symptoms they were feeling. A few were embarrassed, understandably so, but I heard it all before. I handed out antibiotics and could only hope their infections weren't the kind that resisted medication. With no reliable labs around, I couldn't do blood or urine tests to verify anything.
My line finally started to go down around mid-morning, and my stomach cramped from hunger. I knew there was some leftover stew from the Steel Demons' dinner last night. I yearned for flavorful broth and hearty potatoes by the time the last woman sat down on my bed.
"My stomach's been hurting," she whined, holding her forearm low against her abdomen. I recognized her as the girl having sex on the couch with the two bikers yesterday.
"Okay, for how long?" I asked, snapping on a fresh pair of gloves.
"I dunno, three days?"
I stared at her. "You've been in pain like this forthree daysand still offered your services to those men last night?"
"Save the judgment, bitch," she hissed, teeth grinding in pain. "Last night guaranteed food and clothes for my daughter for another two weeks. Besides," her eyes flashed with hard determination, "if I stayed up in my room, one of them would have come up and found me. And those men aren't the kind you can say no to."
