Page 1 of The Commander

CHAPTER 1 - CARA

This had to be one of those levels of hell her dad had told her about when she was a kid. Cara spent the day combing through the dead brush around Dalewood, unting for for food and searching for escape routes to get back home with an increasing sense of entrapment. Time kept moving and she had nothing to show for it.

She didn’t expect some convenient idiot to leave a vehicle lying around, ready to hijack. Vehicles were rare and well guarded. But she’d hoped for a horse or a pushcart, at least something with wheels.

She’d been confident when she’d set out earlier, but an utter lack of anything edible caught her off guard. It wasn’t looking good. Sparse trees stood scattered through the area, their leaves yellow and withered. Most of them looked dead. Brush took over the ruins of old buildings—prime territory for a stupid rabbit or two, right? Apparently not.

No greens, no mushrooms, not a single weed worth chewing. She tied together some string to set snares in the brambles before heading to the rocks next to the river to check for fish. Though the water ran clear, there were no flashes of silver.

Not willing to give up, she got wet building a rock barricade, hoping to corral something. Since that would take time, she sat down to wait, keeping her hands busy using the tall grasses near the river and her string to make a basket trap. It might catch a bird. If one was dumb enough to go under it.

Dad had been better at making baskets. Her fingers turned red and raw, trying to construct something that would hold a rat or a rabbit. By the time it was finished, she still hadn’t seen any fish. No little minnows. The area outside of Dalewood was barren. As toxic as the town.

A sinking sun stretched her shadow across the ground like the long hand of a clock. It was time to go. Staying out after dark wasn’t an option—not unless she wanted to deal with alien patrols.

Dominating the planet long before Cara was born, invading alien forces had set curfew laws for all humans. Lawbreakers disappeared fast.

Once, when she was little, Dad forced her to watch what happened after dark from the window of an abandoned building. “So you’ll know,” he’d said.

They came like starving wolves, dropping to all fours and running faster than any human. Attacking with terrifying speed, teeth flashing, and ears pointed sharply forward. Barricaded inside the building to escape a band of wankers, they watched alien patrols appear out of nowhere and drag the screaming men away like rag dolls.

The memory stayed with Cara. She never forgot the lesson. She didn’t need another reminder to avoid getting up close and personal with the ugly, hairy armed aliens.

As she returned to camp someone’s noisy sobs broke the quiet. Was that Brenda? Sounded like it. Cara was more familiar with the sound of her friend’s tears than she wanted to be. Ithad been a hell of a few days for them both—bad choices, broken trust, disgusting men, and terrible propositions.

Leaning against the foot of a tree, with her thin ash blonde hair snarled around her shoulders, Brenda wept as if her life was ending. Maybe it was. They were both in a horrible position now.

A few years older than Cara, lacking any survival skills, Brenda had grown up soft in an alien occupied town. Until now, Brenda had never lived outside the protection of a town or gone without factory sealed food packets and perfectly tilled community gardens. She was vulnerable in the free world, but Cara had left Brenda behind thinking she’d be safe with the other people exiled from Dalewood.

Unfortunately, Brenda wasn’t thinking clearly. She’d lost her mind over another man. That man, Andy, turned around and betrayed them the first chance he got. Waiting for Brenda to react, Cara carried a boulder of impending doom between her shoulder blades. Had it dropped the moment she’d left her friend alone?

Before Cara could ask what happened, Mighty Joe—the self appointed leader of their sad little band—got up from his spot near the fire and stomped toward her. He bragged about being forty years old, but deep lines around his mouth and bags under his eyes gave him the appearance of a man closer to eighty—a tired old rooster. He jabbed his finger at Brenda and screeched, “Your friend got into Dalewood somehow!”

Brenda didn’t look up. If anything, she sobbed louder.

“She did? What happened? Did they hurt you?” Cara took a step forward towards Brenda.

“Went to confront her boyfriend. She’s trying to get us all killed,” Mighty Joe got between them before Brenda answered.

“Brenda, you talked to Andy?” Cara’s voice shot up an octave. She couldn’t help it.

Why would her friend still want to do that? That scumbag had dragged them out of Springfield with promises of safety and better work. They’d come in his busted-up bucket of bolts—a farm-engine mash-up-vehicle that rattled with every crack in the road. Cara had been terrified the thing would break down, leaving them stranded. They’d survived all that to walk right into Andy’s trap.

Andy and his buddy had been so proud of that piece of junk. They bragged about hiding it from the local “bluey” in charge of the area. Cara didn’t know what the hell a bluey was, and honestly, she didn’t want to find out.

But she should have asked Brenda more questions. She should have askedso manyquestions.

Now, because of the nighttime curfew and no transportation of their own, they were stuck. Andy had known it would happen, as had Danov, the pig of a mayor of Dalewood. They’d been tricked and dumped here, where the promise of easierworkinvolved trading their bodies for food.

When they refused, Danov kicked them out, cutting off their rations and health supplies. No food. No shelter. Nothing.

“That’s right. He caught her in his room and threw her out. Saw him drag her out past the gates. They know we’re here. But we ain’t supposed to be here. I don’t think you understand how much borrowed time we’re living on,” Mighty Joe ranted, his voice rising with every word.

“We won’t be here long. I told you I was looking for a way to leave,” Cara snapped back.

“You’re shortening the ticket, missy. I’m a good guy, but I can’t let you two pretties get us killed!” His jabbing finger struck the air between them like a dagger.

Cara tried not to roll her eyes. Mighty Joe’s group had to be the saddest collection of people she’d ever seen. It was obvious why Dalewood had tossed them out. They couldn’t workin the processing plant, couldn’t pay the alien tax, and didn’t fit the mayor’s twisted idea of “sex slave material.” Their rations had been stolen, their belongings stripped away, and they’d been left to rot.

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