Survivors - Jean Lorrah [1]
So at age twelve, the girl had no skills worth the trouble of a gang to feed and protect her-and so she set out to learn to protect herself. She had a weapon, the old woman’s knife that was all her legacy, “And more than ever I got o’ me own mother!” the girl had said upon finding her companion dead when she awoke one morning. She had not been able to make herself take her clothes, but had gone through the pockets. The old woman would have expected it. After all, she had no more use for the two coins, the scrap of bread, the three pins, and that all-purpose knife, the blade honed to half its original width, left from her gang days.
But the day the rape gang found the girl, just two days after the old woman’s death, the knife did her little good. Perhaps sorrow had made her careless, inattentive to the movements in the shadows. The knife was wrenched out of her hand by a laughing man who used it to force her to submit.
They had tied a hood over her head, so she could not see to fight, could not bite, could not see what was happening as she nearly suffocated while they took their turns at her. And then, when it was over, the leader pulled the hood off and scornfully tossed her knife down beside her, knowing she was too weak and terrified to use it.
She had learned from that experience. Care for a dead woman had let her be caught, so she would not think about anyone else, ever again. She made no attempt to befriend the packs of urchins who scorned her as “The ol’ witch’s slavey.” She was no match for a man if he once got his hands on her, so she would learn to throw the knife, to kill from a distance. That she could teach herself, and did; within weeks she could hit a fixed target every time, and more and more often she skewered the rats she aimed at, even when they scurried in the dimness.
Some two years later, when she rescued the cat from a pack of wild children intent on setting its tail afire, it eased her loneliness a little. She didn’t really care about the animal, she told herself, except that it was useful. Like her knife. That made it all right to feed the cat, stroke it, be comforted by its purring when she woke from restless dreams.
The way the children had scattered, despite the fact that they could have taken her by virtue of their sheer numbers, gave her confidence. The added wariness she had developed after her painful experience stood her in good stead as she picked locks and crept into the market at night to help herself to the best food, instead of trying to filch whatever she could, along with all the other urchins, in the daytime.
The rape gangs never took her again, although they pursued her. Twice, when she had eluded the bulk of them, one member continued to dog her. She doubled back and lay in ambush, killing silently with her knife, tossing the body down the bottomless shafts that were just another danger in the ruins. She grew bigger and stronger-and then her body betrayed her by blossoming a woman’s curves, even though she remained thin and wiry.
It was time, she decided. She would approach one of the women’s gangs, show them her skill with a knife, tell them of killing two rape gang members-offer to show them how she did it, for of course the women’s gangs and the rape gangs were deadliest of enemies.
She set her sights on the Hellcats, who controlled four blocks of ruins and had electricity working in the building they lived in and guarded like a fortress. Surely, like all the buildings in the ruins, that fortress had rats. She planned to offer the cat along with herself, as a parcel, for in the rat-infested