This tale is a continuation of “Genesis,” found at
https://www.freecatfights.com/forums/index.php?topic=121607.0Anna’s mind returned to her body as the sun rose. Her body, tacky with dried mud and dried blood, ached so deeply that she wished her mind away again, to no avail. She shifted her arms, an inch at a time, until she fell from where they’d hung her to her knees. She crawled through dawn’s long shadows to the livery stable. They had taken her shirt and left her bare-breasted, her left breast swollen and sagging, so she pulled a saddle blanket across her shoulders. She drank, deeply, from the water barrel, her throat parched and raw. She mounted a peaceful paint mare and rode slowly from the town, each jarring step the mare took reminding her of death. Unlike Lot’s wife, she never turned. There was nothing there for her to look back upon.
The men were all dead at the next town, and the next, and the next. She took a shirt from a clothesline on a farm outside the first, and she took the coins she found in the house. The woman who had shot herself in the kitchen some weeks before wouldn’t miss either. Anna reached the River and rode upstream. Her body slowly healed, but scars remained. Towns were far between now and Anna began to avoid them. In the aftermath of the Plague, women had turned. Civilization was frayed. She had paused in one to watch a fight no less brutal than the one she and Tabitha had shared, and she found she had no impulse to stop them.
She wondered if Tabitha knew she was alive.
She did stop in the last town before the desert. Its name was Kemet. She bought a whisky and an hour with the saloon whore. Anna had never been with another woman, but as her mother had said, need makes do. The whore was kind, and gentle, and she held Anna in her arms after the violence of her climax. Her name was Lila, and she whispered to Anna that the town was overtaken by evil and that she should go, while she could.
But Anna stayed, and after that first night, Lila loved her freely.
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The evil in Kemet was domination akin to slavery. With the Plague, one woman of powerful will had risen to control the town. Her name was Phara, and her rise had also made her cruel. In a world so harsh, what place was there for kindness? She and her eldest daughter, Serena, ruled with iron fists. Every woman in the town feared them. The domination of many by a few is a pathology that finds fertile pastures in end times such as our own.
Anna was no longer really capable of either love or fear. She moved through life in Kemet like a ghost. This, Serena noticed. She watched the new arrival carefully; she saw how Anna’s beauty and calm attracted not only Lily.
“She’s trouble,” Serena told her mother. Phara gazed back until Serena looked away, her face flushed. A mother’s contempt is a wellspring of hate. “So I’ll deal with her,” the daughter muttered, and Phara nodded.
And so it came to pass that Serena stepped into the saloon one night as Anna stood at the bar. The room fell silent.
“You need to go,” Serena said. She was taller than Anna by an inch or so. Her body was curved steel.
Anna held her gaze. “I will go soon,” she said. “With Lily, and anyone who wants to go with me.”
Serena shook her head. She had tied back her hair and the motion flicked her ponytail from side to side. Anna took a deep breath. She might’ve thought of God’s will, if she believed in such a thing.
“You go alone,” Serena said, and she unbuckled her belt. The leather strap slid through the denim loops of her jeans with the soft hiss of an asp. “After I finish with you.”
Anna stepped free of the bar, unbuttoning her shirt. Such things are done in this new world. Serena’s eyes took in the scars on Anna’s breasts, healed but still too fresh. She nodded and unbuttoned her own shirt as Anna slid her belt free. The citizens of Kemet stepped to the walls of the saloon. Lily blinked away the tears in her eyes.
Serena’s strong arm flashed and her belt whipped across Anna’s face. It cut her cheek just below her eye. “Perhaps you’ll go blindly,” Serena hissed, as Phara stepped into the saloon.
Anna spoke no words. Her belt scythed into the side of Serena’ neck. Serena screamed in both pain and rage. Her mother’s face didn’t change, for her heart was stone. Anna’s arm flashed again, and her leather sank into Serena’s tits, a line in her flesh just below her erect nipples.
They circled, the only sounds were their boots on the worn floor and their heavy breathing. Serena’s belt flashed again. Anna’s forearm took the brunt of the blow but the very tip of the leather slashed at her eye again. A thin sheen of blood turned Anna’s vision scarlet. Serena lunged in and drove her free left fist into Anna’s right side, where her liver lay. The pain made the blonde woman moan. It made her stagger. It made her helpless long enough for Serena to whip her in the tits once, twice, thrice. The belt cut Anna, the last time through her areolae.
Anna went to her knees, her head bowed. Serena’s whip cut her bare back. The daughter’s lips were pulled back from clenched teeth now, a feral snarl. She reversed the belt in her hand and this time it was the brass buckle that slammed into Anna’s spine. Anna’s body arched, her head flying back, her teeth clenched as well, but in agony rather than fury.
Serena circled her. “Are you a heroine?” she snarled. “A prophetess, arrived from the wilderness?” Phara smiled as her daughter whipped Anna’s back again and then her tits, the leather biting her like a wolf. “Who wants to follow this cxnt?!” Serena roared to the silent room as her arm slashed again and again. There was no answer but a choked sob from Lily the whore.
At last, her frenzy spent, Serena formed her belt into a slip-noose, the leather threaded through the buckle frame, the prong flapping loose, catching nothing. She dropped the loop over Anna’s head, and pulled in tight around her neck. She dragged her to the wall, where a horseshoe hung balanced over a single thick nail. She lifted Anna upright, and forced the nail through one of the holes in the belt. The leather noose dug deeply into Anna’s neck as her body sagged, her head tilted to the side, her hair across her face.
Serena’s fist arched up into Anna’s body, under her rib cage.
“This,” said Phara, her voice loud as her daughter’s fists thudded into Anna’s body, into her ribs and belly and breasts, a metronome counting Phara’s words. “This is the fate of those who don’t accept our rule.” Serena turned her entire torso into a blow to Anna’s ovary, useful only for torture now with no men to bring sperm to egg. Anna’s body thudded against the wall. A strangled moan burst through her blueing lips. Serena grinned, her eyes turned to Phara, seeking the approval she thought would surely be there.
But that cruel blow also tore the nail from the wall. Anna fell to her hands and knees. Instinctively, she flung herself sideways, into Serena’s knee. The snap was like a dry branch breaking. Anna rolled away to the sound of Serena’s shriek.
Phara could have stopped them then. She could have given Anna and anyone else her blessings to leave. But there lies in every world a perverse philosophy that such Grace is Weakness. She watched instead as Anna crawled back to Serena and gripped her ponytail at its root and drove her face down into the floor.
After a moment Anna stood, unsteadily. Serena lay at her feet, blood bubbling from her nose. Carefully, precisely, she ground her boot into Serena’s knee and drew sweet pleasure from her scream. She lifted her face to Phara’s. “Your first-born,” she said, and the mother nodded. Anna stomped Serena in her chest, her boot heel like a smith’s hammer on Serena’s breastbone. It might have stopped her heartbeat for a breathless second. Only now did Anna remove the belt around her neck. She wondered what could be broken in a woman to make her so uncaring of her own daughter, and if she herself was that broken now.
She let Serena stand, one-legged, white-faced, before she drove her knee into her belly and dropped her again to the saloon floor, dry-retching.
“Let us go, or I’ll kill her.” Anna barely recognized her own voice. It was harsh, like a brushfire. Phara didn’t answer. She only turned away. They all watched her go. Whatever might have been human in Serena died then, with her mother’s abandonment. From her knees, her eyes aflame with madness, she drove her fist into Anna’s belly again. Anna fell, and Serena was on her like a desert panther, fingers digging into her breast, arm locked across her throat.
They grappled and twisted on the floor. A few flies mindlessly crawled in the blooddrops they spattered, uncaring of their small role in human conflict. The two women clawed each other, fingernails finding the whip-lines in each other’s skin, opening them wider. Anna’s head dropped to Serena’s stomach and she bit, deeply, at the waistline of her jeans. She could smell Serena’s musk, as rich as Lily’s when they fucked. Serena clawed at her face, her eyes, but Anna only bit deeper. Her left hand crushed Serena’s breast; her right hand forced its way into her jeans and invaded her pussy.
It was a deathgrip. Serena screamed, first in pain and then in panic. Anna only left her belly to bite her breast, the one not purpled and weeping lymph and blood. She had no thought of mercy; that had been Phara’s to give and it had been withheld. Serena begged, and bargained. She pleaded for Anna to go.
Too little, too late. Mythology is rife with such stories.
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They crossed the River at midnight and entered the desert. No chariots followed. Anna, and Lily, and twelve others set their faces to the East. They saw the mountains in the immeasurable distance as the yellow sun rose. What is life, but a trudging journey to an unpromised land.
