Chapter 57: The Garden's First Reward
The silence after the celebration was a tangible thing, a thick, woolly blanket that muffled the usual echoes of the warehouse. It was the silence of profound satiation, of bodies pushed to their limit and then gently, messily, over the edge.
We woke to it. Not all at once, but in slow, groaning increments. My cheek was still pressed into the soil of the garden plot. The smell of sex and wet earth was a permanent layer in my sinuses. I shifted, and a deep, pleasant ache radiated from my core, a souvenir of the night’s activities. My belly, once tight and high with the recent pregnancy, felt… softer. Deflated wasn’t the right word. It was more like a sigh of release, the intense, forward pressure eased. I placed a hand on it, the fabric of my ruined police uniform rough under my palm. It was still rounded, still nurturing the new seed, but the urgent, overstretched feeling was gone. For now.
Ellie stirred beside me, a low, contented murmur escaping her lips. She was curled into her lover’s side, his arm a heavy, possessive weight across her ribs. Her blond hair was a tangled web across her face and the dirt. One of her breasts, milk-dried and pale in the now-grey morning light filtering through the dome, was exposed.
“Everyone breathing?” My voice was a rasp, shredded from screaming.
A series of grunts and affirmative hums answered me from around the plot. Nancy lifted her head from her lover’s chest, blinking slowly. Mary was already sitting up, wincing as she cataloged the state of her body with a clinical detachment that was pure her. Our daughters were a pile of limbs and rumpled schoolgirl plaid, snuggled against their respective men, their exaggerated curves looking somehow even more pronounced in the peaceful aftermath.
“We should move,” Mary said, ever practical. “The damp is seeping in. And we’ve got planning to do.”
She was right. The celebration was a necessary release, a recalibration of our strange, symbiotic system. But the system needed maintenance. The world outside our warehouse walls hadn’t changed. It was still a graveyard of rust and dust, and our supplies, while improved, weren’t infinite.
Extricating ourselves was a slow, sticky process. There were groans, not of pain but of overused muscles. There was a lot of warm, spent fluid trickling down thighs. We helped each other up, our movements tender, careful. The men watched us with drowsy, sated eyes, making small, distressed noises when we moved too far from their touch. They were calmer now, the desperate edge softened by obedience and reward. They followed us on their knees as we gathered our scattered, soiled uniforms.
“Shower first,” Ellie declared, sniffing the air. “Or at least a wipe-down. I smell like a barnyard after a fertility festival.”
That got a tired laugh from all of us.
We used the precious stored rainwater, warmed slightly by a coil Mary had rigged to the solar battery bank. It wasn’t a shower so much as a sponge-bath in a large, scavenged livestock trough, but the feel of the lukewarm water on our slick, filthy skin was heaven. We took turns, soaping each other’s backs, washing the dirt and dried milk and other fluids from between our thighs and the crevices of our swollen breasts. The men knelt just outside the curtain we’d hung, their heads bowed, waiting.
Cleaner, and dressed in fresh scavenged clothes—some choosing the soft, plus-sized bib overalls, others the familiar comfort of the office blouses and skirts—we felt more ourselves. The animal urgency of the night had receded, leaving behind the familiar, bedrock layers of who we were: a family, a unit, survivors.
The planning table was in the warehouse’s main cavern, a vast space of echoing concrete and steel rafters. We’d dragged a heavy, oak door from some long-demolished executive office and laid it across two sawhorses. Its surface was a topographic map of our existence, covered in a sheet of clear, scavenged vinyl. On it, we’d drawn in grease pencil the known layout of our immediate surroundings. Our warehouse was a fat, square blob. The ruined school where we’d found the uniforms was a smaller mark to the northeast. The drained supermarket to the west was a large, hollow circle, picked clean.
Ellie lit the kerosene lamp we kept at the table’s center. Its warm, flickering light pushed back the perpetual gloom of the high ceiling. We gathered around, our bodies settling onto mismatched chairs with sighs of relief. The physical reminder of the celebration was a persistent, pleasant throb inside each of us, a grounding hum.
“Alright,” I said, my engineer’s mind clicking into gear, pushing the residual warmth aside. “Water’s stable. Garden’s producing. Protein from the men is… consistent.” I didn’t blush saying it anymore. It was a fact, like the sunrise. “But we’re low on specifics. Vitamins. Medical supplies. Especially with…” I gestured vaguely at our collective midsections.
“Fabric,” Nancy added, running a hand over the soft cotton of her shirt. “This won’t last forever. And the girls are going to need more clothes soon.” She glanced at Anya, whose schoolgirl blouse was straining heroically across her chest, a button perilously close to popping.
“Metal,” Mary said. “For repairs. The solar array needs reinforcement before the next big wind. And my tool inventory is pathetic.”
Ellie leaned forward, her long hair falling over her shoulders. She traced a grease-pencil line on the map, a road that led southeast, away from our usual scavenging routes. “We’ve avoided this sector. The rubble looked dense. But the last time I was on the roof with the binoculars, I thought I saw the shape of a low, long building. Could be a clinic. Or a small strip mall.”
A clinic. The word hung in the air, charged with possibility. Antibiotics. Painkillers. Prenatal vitamins, maybe. Sterile bandages. It was a treasure trove.
“Also,” Bec piped up, twirling a curl around her finger. She was wearing one of the nurse outfits, the white dress comically short, the cap perched jauntily on her head. “If it’s a strip mall, there might be, like, a bookstore. Or a craft store. Yarn would be nice. Or pencils that aren’t just nubs.”
It was such a normal, heartbreaking request. Yarn. The desire for creation, not just survival. Ellie reached over and squeezed Bec’s hand. “We’ll look for yarn, sweetie.”
The planning began in earnest. Routes were debated. Risks assessed. The men, we knew, were a deterrent to most wandering threats—their sheer presence and ferocity kept the lesser infected at bay. But a clinic in a dense rubble zone suggested other dangers: unstable structures, possible enclaves of feral, un-conditioned infected, or worse, other survivors who hadn’t found our… cooperative solution.
As we talked, the air growing thick with strategy and memory, the men grew restless at our feet. They’d followed us to the table and now knelt in a loose semi-circle behind our chairs, their chins on our thighs, their hands resting lightly on our calves. The physical connection was part of the conditioning, a constant reinforcement. Their need for touch was a baseline hum.
Ellie, mid-sentence about secondary exit strategies, absently reached down and carded her fingers through her lover’s matted hair. He melted into the touch, a low, purring rumble vibrating against her leg.
“They’re needy today,” Cass observed, not unkindly. She was in police uniform again, looking official despite her youth. Her lover nuzzled his face into the back of her knee.
“They did good work,” Nancy said softly, a faint blush on her cheeks as she remembered. “They deserve… comfort.”
It was Mary who gave the practical order. “Alright. You know the drill. We’re planning. You provide tactile comfort. No distraction. No sex. Just touch. Understood?”
A unified, guttural sound of acknowledgment came from them. They understood the tone, the cadence of a command they wanted to obey.
What followed was a strange and deeply intimate counterpoint to the clinical planning. As we debated distances and daylight hours, their hands began to move.
My lover’s rough, calloused palms slid up from my calves, under the hem of my overalls, coming to rest on the bare skin of my thighs. His touch was warm, reverent. His thumbs began to make slow, circles on my inner thighs, just shy of where the ache was deepest. It wasn’t sexual, not in the frantic way of the night before. It was a claiming, a soothing, a physical reminder of belonging. A deep, relaxed sigh escaped me, and I found my own thoughts clarifying, the tension in my shoulders easing.
I glanced around the table. Ellie had leaned back in her chair, her eyes half-closed as her lover massaged her feet, his strong fingers working over her arches. Nancy had allowed her man to lay his head in her lap, his face turned into the soft curve of her belly, his arms wrapped around her hips in a loose, possessive hug. She stroked his back absently as she studied the map, her expression soft.
Mary, ever efficient, had directed her lover to massage her shoulders. His large hands kneaded the tight muscles there, and though she kept her gaze sharp on the map, a slight softening around her eyes betrayed her pleasure.
Our daughters engaged in more playful comfort. Anya’s lover was carefully, meticulously braiding a section of her long hair, his monstrous fingers surprisingly deft. Bec had kicked off her nurse’s shoes and had her feet in her man’s lap; he was painting her toenails with a scavenged bottle of chipped, scarlet polish, his concentration absolute. Cass and Dee simply sat with their men’s arms wrapped around their waists, accepting the steady, grounding pressure as they listened.
The contrast was surreal. The gritty talk of survival, of venturing into a deathscape, overlain with the gentle, possessive caresses of our devoted monsters. The kerosene light danced over maps and grasping hands, over furrowed brows and contentedly relaxed jaws.
“So, southeast route,” I said, my voice softer than I intended. My lover’s hands had moved up to my waist, his palms hot through the denim of my overalls. “We take the service alley behind the collapsed bank. It’s narrow, limits exposure on the flanks.”
“But if it’s blocked, we’re bottlenecked,” Mary countered, tilting her head as her lover found a particularly stubborn knot in her shoulder. “Mmm. Right there. Harder.” He complied, and she let out a tiny breath. “The main road offers better visibility. Higher risk of being seen, but also better chance to see trouble coming.”
“The main road is a wind tunnel,” Nancy murmured, her fingers tracing the map. Her lover nuzzled deeper into her lap. “The dust storms whip through there. We’d be blind half the time.”
We went back and forth, the plan solidifying. Two teams. Ellie, Mary, and I would be the primary scouts, taking two of the men for protection. Nancy would stay with the remaining six men, our daughters, and the warehouse. She had a cool head in a crisis. The clinic was the primary target. Strip mall secondary. Home by nightfall, no exceptions.
The decision made, a quiet settled over us. The only sounds were the scratch of grease pencil on vinyl, the soft crackle of the lamp, and the quiet, rhythmic sound of touch: hands on skin, brush of lips against a belly, the whisper of a braid being woven.
My lover’s head came to rest against my hip, his face turned inward. His breath was warm through the fabric. One of his hands slid around to the small of my back, pressing gently against the slight, permanent ache there from old injuries and new burdens. It felt… good. It felt like being anchored.
Ellie watched the interaction, a small, knowing smile on her face. “See?” she said, her voice a low murmur. “It’s not just one thing. It’s not just the fucking and the breeding. It’s this, too. It’s the quiet after. The way they…” She searched for the word, her artist’s mind seeking the right shape. “The way they attend to us. It fills in the cracks.”
She was right. In a world that had shattered into brutal, sharp-edged fragments, this was a kind of mortar. Strange, viscous, born of desperation and grotesque biology, but it held us together. It held them to us. The caresses were a language. A reinforcement. You are ours. We are yours. This is the order of things.
Finally, Mary capped the grease pencil. “Plan’s set. We move at first light. Two days from now, gives us time to prep and rest.” She looked at the men at our feet, at their attentive, placid faces. “You four with us will be on point. You know the rules. Stay close. Clear the path. Protect. Your reward depends on it.”
Their eyes, in the lamplight, glinted with understanding. Protection. Obedience. Reward. It was the cycle that sustained us all.
We sat there for a long moment, just breathing in the quiet, the map of our fragile future laid out before us, the living, breathing warmth of our present anchored to our sides. The deflated, satisfied feeling in my belly was a promise of future growth. The gentle, possessive hands on my skin were a promise of present safety.
It was peace. A strange, hard-won, morally incomprehensible peace. But it was ours.
Ellie blew out the lamp, plunging us into the soft, grey twilight of the warehouse. “Come on,” she said, standing, her lover rising smoothly with her, his hand finding hers. “Let’s get some real food into us. I’m starving.”
As we dispersed from the table, the men fell into step behind us, their touches becoming guiding hands on the small of our backs, steadying presences in the gloom. The planning was done. The comfort had been given and received. Now came the mundane, vital act of living until the next mission, the next need, the next celebration in the dark, fertile soil.
We were ready.