Chapter One

 

The army of Saida the Lioness, the Great Black Queen, was mustered to her order, ready to embark upon its mission to unify the scattered survivors of the Catastrophe on the nearby mainland and organise them as a nation of simple peasant farmers under her rule.

The former prison island was an armed camp, its harbour filled with a fleet of fishing boats turned invasion transports. The plans that Saida had concerted with the representatives of the Hidden Empire were put into practice. Recruits had been sought among both the islanders and those fishing communities formed by survivors on the mainland coast. In their aerial voyages of investigation further afield, the fanatic advocates of simplicity had recruited more volunteers, single male survivors lured by the prospect of acquiring fertile females for themselves from among the prospective conquests.

A select group of the recruits had been trained to use the special bug-proof weapons, which had been supplied with cautious economy by the yellow folk from their headquarters somewhere beyond the ocean horizon. The remainder were drilled with spear and shield or crossbow and long handled axe.

With the superior weaponry and intelligence provided by the representatives of the Hidden Empire and the even more potent lure of the restoration of fertility to all who submitted to her, the Army of the Lioness, though small, was more powerful than anything the scattered survivor communities could muster and which no village's makeshift defences could withstand for long.

A trickle of additional female captives also came from the aerial patrols, trawled by the yellow men from various sources. Subjected to the discipline of the Lioness, they were soon forced to accept their relegation to the role of following the army as porters. Sometimes they were newly arrived survivors from beyond the tropics, escaped from the ice and snow; mostly they were those who had sought a comfortable survival on the ocean and been caught out by the contamination of hydrocarbons and the failure of plastics. Three of these latecomers, taken up by the airship patrol from a stranded vessel, had actually come there by a long and enforced safari from deep within the desolated continent.

In the beginning on a bright blue African morning, a light cart drawn by a team of goats and escorted by three women had jolted along a little used road towards an almost abandoned town. The road was partly obscured by thick mud and dead vegetable matter and the cart followed two wavering wheel ruts in which the tarmac surface was only occasionally visible. All about them the rolling grassland had long been a seared brown and seeming dead but the women were aware of welcome signs of recovery in the vegetation, which now showed as a faint dusting of green despite the residual smears of salt that glistened in hollows here and there. The trio wore long gowns of brightly patterned local cotton and hand-woven cartwheel sun-hats and used the spears they carried like walking staffs, laughing and chattering casually together.

Susan, Lucy and Alice had once been an all-female UN team assisting local tribal people with a scheme for introducing controlled goat and cattle grazing in an area devastated by a recent civil war. For that purpose a breeding stock of goats and a herd of cattle had been accumulated at the research centre under their charge. Stranded by the Catastrophe, they had survived by culling the weakened livestock and by trawling the extensive salt lakes. Ingeniously they had even saved some of their stock by means of mixing a large reserve of fodder with scavenged animal protein. As the disastrous salt rains turned to fresh, the goats' ability to subsist upon poor grazing allowed them to survive. There was now land enough in plenty for the limited number of survivors, a mix of locals and refugees, so latterly there had been little violence, but goats were valuable enough for the women to go armed, intending to make it clear that they would defend their property from prospective thieves.

They remarked as they passed how the trees by the river had recently begun to sprout new shoots. No one was at work amongst the former fields but that wasn't a surprise. Few of the survivors had the confidence to rely upon planted crops. Hunting over the abandoned farmlands and fishing in the lakes had largely been their means of maintenance. Carrion eaters had prospered exceedingly and humans in turn had preyed upon the scavengers. Goats had so far been too valuable to be lightly consumed.

The outskirts of the little township lay in ruins with broken windows, collapsed roofs and sagging fences, where anything green had long since been consumed by the voracious goats. Here the mud lay more thinly, pockmarked with the footprints of human feet and the cart rolled more evenly. The three women had ventured the few miles from the old UN agricultural station in the hope of finding a source of medicines. There had been a report that one of the rare refugees who still managed a wandering existence had been trading medicines scavenged from some abandoned hospital. Though there were now no more than a handful of inhabitants, the place served as a place of exchange for goods and news.

The small cortege headed towards the former main street where one of the residents kept a bar of sorts, though it only provided home-made beer dispensed in scavenged bottles. Its proprietor occupied his plentiful leisure in blacksmith work mending tools and hunting gear. His fire was glowing in the smithy shed as they turned the corner, but it was unattended and neither was anyone visible in the main street. The attention of the three women was entirely focused further ahead, where on the raised veranda in front of the bar, they expected to find any gathering of locals. The suddenly flung net that descended upon them took them completely by surprise.

A howling flood of weirdly unhuman figures in black and white burst upon them, leaping from walls and doorways. Alice, caught in the act of unslinging the crossbow she carried on her back, fired it by accident, the bolt going skywards and the butt striking her hard under the chin. Lucy tripped and, before she could rise, was felled again by a heavy spear butt. Susan jabbed desperately with her spear at one monster. Impeded by the rope mesh she missed and was swept off her feet by a yank of the enveloping net. In a few seconds all three were disarmed and helpless in the hands of a hideous band of warriors, whose naked black skins had been painted from head to foot with stripes and bars of white clay.

Rumour was made horribly true. They had heard wild tales of the Destroyers, a horde of displaced people who had taken to cannibalism for survival and developed it into a nomadic way of life, preying upon their fellow survivors, appearing suddenly, consuming all and vanishing again like a horde of locusts. The white markings were their reported symbol. Some of these men carried short stabbing spears, some long handled axes; all had vicious broad-bladed pangas unnervingly like butchery tools, terrifying the captives with the threat of sharp slashing mutilation. The only things to be slashed for the moment however were the women's garments. Deep-throated masculine triumph attended the sound of rending fabric as they set about disentangling and then stripping their prizes.

Only Susan was still in a position to put into practice what she remembered of long ago instruction in self-defence. She brought her solidly shod boot heel down upon the instep of the man who hauled her upright. The brute roared and threw her forcefully from him so abruptly that she careered head first into a whole group of his comrades, ramming one of them in the belly. That man bellowed in turn but more by way of amusement, grabbed Susan by the neck and hem of her dress. The thin fabric ripped and parted in successive jerks as she wriggled and twisted, so that she went scrabbling on all fours between the man's black legs, stripped to her single undergarment.

She thought she had got clean away with only the loss of her dress, but horny fingernails swiped down her back and, hooking the waistband of her pants, brought her abruptly to a halt. Before she could recover, she was lifted up off her feet and tipped forward head downwards. She put her hands out at first to stop herself falling and then, as she was carried away like that, dangling helplessly from the man's fist, hard knuckles digging into the cleft of her behind, she paddled desperately on her hands along the dusty road, her bare breasts flopping and hair coming down.

A wooden step appeared ahead of her and she clutched at it desperately as she was carried upwards, not knowing where she was being taken. She caught a glimpse out of the corner of one eye of a little huddled knot of black women and children, probably people she knew, naked, open mouthed and wailing in terror at this fresh evidence of their captors' power. Evidently considered less select captives, they were being herded away by half a dozen young boys with jabbing spears, slighter, less ornamented, but equally inhuman copies of their elders.

Between the jerk Susan's captor gave to dislodge her grip on the stair and her determined clinging to it, the seams of her knickers, already worn and frail, split apart and emptied her head over heels back down the steps, ending breathlessly, stark naked, flat on her back in the roadway. Terrified by the sight of her captor unslinging his chopping knife, she tried automatically to curl up in a ball as he loomed over her. But it was only the utilisation of its leather strap he was after. Wrapping one end of the thick, cured hide about his fist and swinging its length over her, he barking an order.

Susan understood nothing of his language but the meaning of his commanding upwards gesture was obvious, as was what he intended to do with the strap. She easily guessed that prompt obedience was expected, but unfortunately the realisation of the idea was so far from her instincts that she reacted too slowly.

Thwackkk! The strap came whistling down. Susan's mouth flew open in an O, body convulsing as a swathe of burning pain slashed across belly and thighs. She rolled over, clutching protectively at her belly but only exposed fresh targets for him to aim at. The brute made the thick strap hiss audibly through the air. Hard leather fell smacking across Susan's rump and thighs again and again as he repeated his order. Yelling in desperate propitiation, she rolled over onto her hands and knees and then, when the strap smacked savagely across her backside from the rear, she scuttled forward upon all fours towards the steps down which she had just tumbled.

Even in her own distress Susan had been conscious of the screams of her women friends and, halfway to the steps, Lucy came past, preceding her up them on her back, towed by her ankles, naked breasts showing white undersides, long hair dragging in the dust and head bumping woodenly from step to step.

Their brutally compelled progression landed Lucy and Susan together on the veranda of the bar, where already from inside there came the frightening sounds of masculine bawling, breaking glass and screaming women. The last of their trio soon followed them. Alice arrived, transported dangling, kicking feebly, head downwards over the brawny shoulder of her particular captor, wailing in fear and beating uselessly at his indifferent back.

By the time the swift tropical dusk descended, the settlement presented a spectacle both debauched and brutal. Lit by the flames of the surviving buildings, a mob of black and white painted fiends swaggered and yelled in the street and went in and out of the still intact bar, most of them naked, some of them bedecked with scraps of inappropriate finery. Naked or bedecked they were all fully armed. In the roadway before the bar one group tested Alice's crossbow of which they had made a prize, drunkenly firing bolts along the street to the hazard of their fellows. From time to time the smoke drifting along the street carried with it the sickly smell of roasting human flesh.

Outside the bar, along the rail of the raised veranda a row of naked women prisoners had been fastened, bent over it, legs spread, tied angle to ankle and wrist to wrist, heads downwards overhanging the street. Disposed this way for the convenience of their captors' use, the flickering of the flames lent an appearance of liveliness to their hapless posture. The orange-red firelight reflecting from their naked curves picked out in particular the three with pale skins and long hair.

Taken inside, the three hapless white women had joined a collection of other female captives whose only glimmer of hope had been that as long as they were being fucked, they were not being eaten. They had been put immediately to such use, every man who could claim a part in their capture taking his share. Then the initial novelty of their availability having passed, the victorious looters had seen no reason for haste. No organised force now existed that might intervene. The used prizes had been dumped outside in this convenient fashion, kept handy where they might be available for diversion during any lull in the serious business of consuming the remaining stock of home brewed beer.

Within the bar now a drunken group of men squatted on the floor in the flickering light, singing with deep melancholy savagery in slurred bass voices. Another group, scuffling and arguing, spilled out into the roadway, developing the argument briefly into a fight with knives before returning in sudden drunken reconciliation to the bar.

The field was thus left clear for the youthful auxiliaries who had accompanied the Destroyer band acting as servants, carriers of loot and herders of captives. Aspirants to eventual warrior status, they had gathered, giggling and scuffling, in the fire-lit street, eyeing the pinioned females. Aged from puberty upwards, they were eager to assert their budding manhood. Egging one another on in bravado, the boys finally mounted unchecked to the veranda where a row of well lubricated female pussies, anonymous other than by colour, were presented to all comers.

Female groans and whimpers finally alerted the men within to the activity of the juvenile experimenters. Roaring angrily at such impudence, the warriors reclaimed their booty. Preparing to settle themselves for a sustained drinking session, they cleared a space in the middle of the floor and made the women pile themselves one on top of the other, white and black together. It made one mass of black and white bodies and sprawled limbs from which squirming heap a man might single out a convenient orifice from time to time. Even though generally only one woman was being fucked at any time, all were forced to share somewhat, being interlocked into one mass. Clutching at each other, they echoed one another's disheartened squeals so that it was almost impossible to tell which of them was actually being penetrated.

 

The warming sun eventually broke over a ravaged and still smoking township. Beyond the last ruined houses a few morose warriors, hollow eyed and with war paint smeared and soiled, stirred themselves about a makeshift corral where the captures of the previous day, humans and goats, were being assembled by the young herd boys.

The golden oblong cast by the open door upon the dark interior of the bar-room lengthened along the stained and dirty floor until it illuminated an out-flung hand, the curve of a buttock, eventually the pile of still living female flesh, light and dark intermixed in the centre of the floor. Having served their purpose, the women had been left where they had been deposited, exhausted and only half conscious, to await whatever further use would be made of them.

Presently the satiated orgiasts of the previous night began to stir themselves, moving stiffly amid the wreckage of furnishings broken glass and spilled beer bottles. From outside came a long call repeated by youthful voices. Inside, the warriors argued briefly among themselves until one, yawning, lurched over to the female sprawl and kicked here and there with casual and brutal accuracy. Whimpering women were forced to disentangle themselves, struggling to pull stiffened limbs together, to raise bruised bodies and struggle apart, resolved into individual figures.

One by one, Susan, Lucy and Alice were forced by brutal kicks to open fogged eyes, to crawl out onto the veranda and to stumble down into the roadway, followed by the rest of those who had been the night's entertainment. Too stiff to walk more than a few steps, however, they sank down exhausted in the road despite all their captors' kicks. At last one of the Destroyers picked Susan up in his arms, carrying her with ease crushed to his hard flat chest, the strung human teeth of his necklace digging hard into her soft flesh, her head and legs dangling. Laughing, another seized Alice by one ankle and swung her body with windmilling limbs, to land dangling head downwards on his back, both ankles gripped and knees crooked over his shoulders, her long hair sweeping loose below his narrow buttocks.

Grunting men fell upon the remaining women and together joined the exodus from the town, hefting their burdens in whatever fashion struck their fancy like so many carcasses. Carrying their living loot like hunters with captured prey, the Destroyers left the township by the same road the three white women had used to reach it. Striding rapidly in single file, by noon they had crossed the river and approached the old agricultural station, which Susan, Alice and Lucy had left the day before, their home since the Catastrophe.

The station was in ashes.

The Destroyers who had captured the town had been only one of many bands. Their hordes travelled in small parties, pressing ahead of any warning and covering a wide swathe of country, coming together only where more than usual opposition was encountered or a larger quantity of loot in prospect. While the buildings of the station were now gaunt skeletons or heaps of ash and rubble, the fenced kraals were still intact and one was full of bleating goats. Cooking fires were being lit and files of tall, near-naked warriors were still marching in from all directions. The assembly now far outnumbered those who had attacked the town, and trailing after them, followed strings of burdened women and children. The Destroyer horde by now had lost some of its earlier all-consuming ferocity and was turning into a peculiarly savage tribe.