Project Purple

44 - The Goatwench

Autumn killed the golden summer colors, with harsh winds sweeping the leaves off the branches in a hardhearted act of nature that appeared well rehearsed. It was becoming winter frighteningly fast.

"We didn't kill him," Special pleaded almost every day, the grasping of his culpability in the Badger's death eating at him, "he jumped, of his own accord, off the ledge."

Henri merely shrugged; the semantics meant little to her.

Exactly half of their original fourteen colonists remained-though they were still a community; somehow, they had to get along. They slept in two foul-smelling huts now, primarily for the mutual body warmth, with the remaining structures either abandoned or decimated for the firewood, and what was once their proud colony appeared more as some dark, frontier fortress, with broken battlements and posts.

But they were still a community; somehow, they had to get along. Their dislike of one another became irrelevant; their divisions healed. There would be no more schisms, no sacrifices, no more secrets. Everything was to be shared and everything was to be known.

This would be their strength, their salvation.

As the snow fell, a flag dangled in the soft flakes of the windless morning. It was attached to a wooden pole, which projected from the Preacher's hut. The flag had a rough scrawl on it that said either Fort Henri or Fort Hemi-their team leader's rude moniker for the discomfort that had incessantly plagued her.

"Tasteless," Henri said on seeing it for the first time, coming back from a hunt with a large rat swinging from her belt.

"You're welcome," replied the Bibliothecary with an impish grin, content with the ambiguity.

Their hearts had toughened. And the labor continued. During the shortened daylight hours, they worked outdoors, laboring over what became their bulwarks, their ramparts-the barriers of their fort. Two animals remained in their pens for eventual slaughter, Arnold and Nanny; the day would come very soon.

They squatted and defecated in a new hole that they dug every few days. And they wiped themselves with a stick, or a handful of leaves, no longer caring if the remaining cameras in the trees, or on the circling hawk-drone in the sky, were focused on these private acts or not-because they had changed; their conditions had made them different people.

They were hungry all the time now, the pain starting off as a niggling pester, and then howling inside of them like frenzied alarm bells. Their blood-sugar levels had plummeted and they were tired, and ill tempered, and their heads pounded in concert with their rumbling stomachs. All that remined of their food provisons were prunes, which wouldn't last through the week. Then there would be nothing.

They were alone, lost in some heartless timelessness.

Sometimes one of them would come back with a modest catch-a few small fish or an eel, a squirrel or muskrat, maybe a partridge. And the Matron would commence with the cleaning, and gutting, and food preparation.

They slept long, their only escape. Henri had never been one to dream, but now she had regular nightly visions, no doubt induced by deprivation, and prompting atrocious mental pictures in her agitated sleep, and of which she never mentioned to the others-Over and over again, Henri saw herself ripping, then devouring the nourishing, enchanting flesh of her dearest companions.

The anthropophagic dreams horrified her-the naked devouring of another human. But she felt helpless in her distress; something new was stirring within her, something that worried even Toxic Mommy, something most grotesque and irrevocable.