The Savage Horde

Chapter 16

Sarah, her hands stabbed into the squared pockets of her dress, walked. She felt the high grass against her bare legs, felt the sun warm her chest and back. She was changing—she knew that, had realized it from the first time she'd picked up her husband's gun when they'd left the house on the Night of The War. Known the change was irreversible since she'd shot the brigands that morning after. She had killed.

She had killed many times since then and no longer did she vomit in her first moment alone afterward.

Almost absently, she wondered if John had changed. Always his guns, his knives, his obsession with being prepared. For what she had never understood—and now she understood. Was he at his Retreat—would she ever find it? Would he ever find her?

She stopped, standing midway in the long field made narrow by the natural foundation of the ground, a ridge crest at its far end, trees there rising to the higher ground beyond the shallow valley. She saw movement. Before the Night of The War, it would only have been the movement of a bird, perhaps a squirrel who'd misjudged his weight and landed on a branch too weak to support him—but the movement now she saw as something else—the branch had bent low.

She listened, feeling it in the stray wisps of hair that had not gotten caught up in the rubber band-like pony tail

holder which held her hair. Her fists knotted in the pockets of her dress. She licked her lips.

Movement again—a man.

She stood there, assessing her options, finding herself coldly professional about them, smiling as she thought again -of the change in herself.

Two hundred yards at least to the end of the field, the ground slightly uneven but runnable for her. Another hundred yards or more from the edge of the field to the house. There was an AR-beside the door of the kitchen. If she could get that tar.

She cursed herself for being stupid and leaving the house—so far from it—without a gun.

"Sarah," she whispered to herself. She turned and started walking, not too slowly, but slowly enough that she hoped no one would think she had spotted the movement in the trees.

It might only be the returning resistance fighters—but they wouldn't hide in the trees.

It might be Soviet forces moving through—she doubted that. They traveled with greater fanfare.

Brigands.

A woman caught alone in the open—she couldn't He to herself as to her fate if they got her. She had seen what they did to women, to little girls—even to little boys. But to women most of all.

She felt a pain in her, below her abdomen. She would have put the twinge down to ovulation—but it was fear instead.

She quickened her pace, snatching up a piece of high grass in her hands and using that as an excuse to turn around.

Men—six, then six more, then more than a dozen others. There seemed to be more each time she shifted her gaze. She watched them—they watched her. Big—long haired, some of them. The clothes, the weapons—"Brigands." She whispered the word to herself. Then she screamed it. "Brigands!"

Sarah Rourke started to run.