CHAPTER THREE
Savior or Executioner?
Nippy wasn’t the word for it. A cold, blustery wind cut through and around the tree trunks in an endless barrage of coldness. It was only late afternoon, but already the sky had darkened up and I feared that a storm was coming.
The stiff, cold, I could handle as long as I kept moving, but if it started to snow and I got wet I would be doomed. In vain I looked about for a place of refuge, but none was offered.
I would have to make camp out in the open if I didn’t find something quick. There were no evergreens here, though. I had found them to be the best places to stop for the night because of the coverage the branches offered.
In the distance through the sparse forest naked of leaves I saw a green belt of color up ahead and huffing out exhaust I headed for it. It had been three days since I’d left the truck and the best I could say was that I was managing.
I had eaten the last food bar this morning though, and the bleakness of a cold night without food was already settling heavily upon me. At least I would have a fire. That was something.
And I was free. That was the main thing. I could be grateful for both, even if other needs, namely my stomach weren’t being satisfied.
I reached the pines and searched about for a likely spot. I untied the handsaw I had brought from the truck and quickly cut a hole in the understory of a pine no more than 15 feet tall. I made a teepee out of it, sort of.
I then interlaced some of the cut branches overhead of the opening to act as a bit of an awning and the rest of them, I piled up against the base of the tree to serve as my bed. That done, I went about gathering wood, even as snowflakes began falling all around.
It had gotten much darker and I feared for the night I was in for. I gathered twice as much wood as I had the other nights.
With the driest pieces of wood I set about trying to get it lit with some trash from the truck and a cigarette lighter I had found in the glove box. Even though I was sheltered in against the tree as I was, it was still difficult to get the flames to catch hold with the wind currents milling around making strange turbulences. The flames did catch though, just about the time my fingers holding the lighter felt ready to fall off.
Worriedly I fed the flames and the fire got bigger. An inch of snow had fallen outside already. Did I have enough wood?
Worse yet, how many more fires would I be able to make with the lighter? It had started to flicker on me at the end. Did it have enough in it for even one more fire?
The fire well ablaze I huddled back from it and sat up against the uncomfortable surface of the tree trunk. I covered my legs as best as I could with the blanket and sat shivering, waiting for the fire to do the miraculous and make me warm. With time it began to happen, but it was a painfully slow process.
Shaking I clasped my numb fingers together and buried my face against my knees and cried as the snow piled up outside now in earnest. I’d fought a silent war against God in the past few days.
I’d been making out for myself so well the thought of staying on my own had presented itself as a wish in the back of my mind. I hadn’t asked God to make it become a reality, but I had been entertaining the thought. Now however that wish was dead and done and over with.
I didn’t want to be on my own anymore. I wanted to be with the man with warm hands. At the very least, of all he might offer me, I knew that he would at least keep me warm. Sobbing against my knees I begged, “Please God, send him to me quickly! I…… I don’t want to be alone!”
“You weren’t created to be alone Tamara and yet, in your own way, you have been for far too long. I’ve heard your plea and already answered it. Tomorrow, stay where you are and do not leave until it is time to follow.”
Blinking, I gazed bleary-eyed into the fire. As bad as things got my God never left me. He was always there with me, helping me, a constant encouragement. He hadn’t always saved me from my predicaments, but when He hadn’t He had at least enabled me to get through them.
I threw some more wood on the fire and waited for tomorrow already feeling much warmer in anticipation of it.
**********
I stared anxiously at the forest edge off across an abandoned field. Nothing moved, but I felt something menacing just the same. Looking away, I paced my path through the snow back and forth as I had been for the last two or three hours.
It was getting on to midday and the sun was shining. About a foot of snow had fallen overnight and it looked so fresh it seemed good enough to eat, but it was just water. Stopping I held my hand to my stomach as hunger roiled through me.
Movement caught my peripheral vision and I glanced up at the distant forest edge of the clearing I had unknowingly camped beside last night. With startlement I took in the sight of five individuals running across the field toward me. Something was not right!
Apprehension knotted up in me and then coalesced into sheer terror. For starters, there was supposed to be only one man and these men running across the snow-covered field had the appearance of animals in the way they moved rather than that of a human.
A wolf pack on the hunt would be a better perspective of describing them. I turned to run as fear overwhelmed me with the certainty that I might soon be eaten alive.
I made it to the end of my paced line in the snow and stopped as if some invisible force had caught me. A sudden reflection of the evening before reminded me that God had told me to stay put.
I glanced back and saw the men dangerously closer. Surely this couldn’t be God’s plan?
Everything within me screamed to run, but faith said to stay. Faith in God was the only thing I had of value. If I ran I would lose my faith. If I lost my faith, I would lose God. Life without Him simply wasn’t worth living.
Shaking badly I turned back and went to my woodpile of the night before. I picked up a heavy broken off branch and stepped back over to my patch of beaten-down snow. This was it. This was everything put on the line in hope and faith that God would deliver me from a situation I could never hope to do so on my own.
My gaze took in the enemy and I quivered in spirit at the sight of what happens when people stop being human. The bug eyed and glassy vacant gazes of cannibals washed over me with both the desire to mate me and eat me at the same time. Judging from the stories I’d heard they would likely do both.
Panting heavy with mouths open wide like dogs they surrounded me. They were dressed in little more than rags and in their hands they held an assortment of weaponry ranging from dirty machetes to simple pieces of heavy metal for the purpose of clubbing.
They grunted and snorted and mumbled unintelligibly and in shock, I realized that they had even lost the ability to form words. One of them darted in toward me and I twirled about and swung the branch.
The heavy branch caught his hand clutching a kitchen knife and I heard the bone break. Howling like a demented lunatic he leaped back from me and I turned warily in a circle ready to hit again.
The one I took to be the leader of the pack grinned wolfishly and stuck his hand into the rags he wore and of all surprises pulled out a handgun. He pointed it directly at my head and laughed and the others did so with him.
I was dead, it was as simple as that. In supreme anguish I waited for the bullet.
Something whistled past my ear and in a daze, I thought for a moment he had missed me at point-blank range, but instead I received the shock of my life when I took in the stunned cross eyed gaze of the cannibal holding the pistol, who now had an arrow sticking through his forehead. He dropped to the snow and with two more harrowing whistles of foreboding two more of my assailants fell with grunted gasps of dismay.
The other two broke and ran in a bid of desperation to escape. An arrow found the neck of one and he pitched forward with a squeal into the snow as blood sprayed out across it in a wide arc. The last one took an arrow to the hip and collapsed to the ground growling with both anguish and rage.
Numbly I stood as I had been with the club gripped in my hands staying absolutely still. Slowly I turned my head and saw the figure of a man approaching at a swift pace that had woodsman written all over it.
His pace eating stride had him on the scene in no time and tomahawk raised he hacked it down repeatedly upon the wounded cannibal until his cries stopped. Completely shook to my core by the situation and the violence of it, I wasn’t prepared for when the man straightened from his grisly task and threw his tomahawk straight at me.
As it whistled by me by the narrowest of margins and I was just seizing on the reality that the man meant to kill me too, when I heard the bone crushing smack of steel connect with human flesh. With a start I dodged out of the way as one of the first victims fell back down to the snow with the hatchet stuck fast in his chest, which this time had finished the job that the arrow hadn’t completed the first time. He’d been coming up behind me to no doubt use me as a hostage or just kill me out of spite.
I turned back around only to behold the man who had dispatched five cannibals, in what seemed like just as many seconds, standing less than 10 feet away from me. Slowly then he began to approach and I almost felt like screaming, but there was no one to save me.
Coming close he gripped the club I held and tugged and I let it go. I cried out softly then with startlement as he pushed on my shoulder, which caused me to fall backward into the snow, only to land sitting on a boulder that I hadn’t seen was there. Shaking and not sure what was about to happen, I sat still.
The man turned away and started pillaging whatever was of interest to him from the dead. Still dazed, I glanced away from him and my gaze landed on the gun lying in the snow not far from me.
I wanted to grab it and shoot the man as he completely terrified me, but in effect he had saved my life and even as wild as he was he had nothing of a cannibal in appearance about him. However, that was no assurance that he wouldn’t rape me though.
Be that as it may, I let the gun lay where it was. I looked to the man and contemplated my options.
In effect I was at the end of my rope. I needed food, well, I needed everything. I had done alright up till now, but truly I did not know how to survive on my own in the forest let alone in wintertime.
I needed help and like it or not this man had helped me. Would he help me again?
At least he hadn’t killed me yet if that was any assurance of his intentions. Looking down his tall frame I noticed his hands that were now free of the gloves he had been wearing earlier.
They were very strong looking and articulated as if used to doing fine tasks. As a whole the man was very well put together and while he wasn’t what many would call handsome, he had dependable, hard worn strength written across his features, and in this upturned world where survival was everything he struck me as being extremely desirable.
He would father strong children. My children.
The truth was plain to see for me as his hands were the ones from my dream of several days before. Not knowing how to accept and deal with the situation, I prayed quietly for strength to come and firm me up to the inevitable that had my insides feeling like jelly.
Done with his task of looting the dead, he came toward me and I felt an even higher pitch of nervous apprehension radiate through me as I fully took in this man who I knew according to God’s plan would soon possess my body and daily control my fate. Stooping, he picked the gun up. He’d known it was there all along I suddenly realized.
Holding the gun out to the side, he pulled the trigger repetitively and emptily the hammer clicked down in repetition. The gun was empty!
How had he known that? Had he been testing me?
Slowly his fingers reached into a pocket and pulled out a captured bullet and he loaded the gun with it. Raising the gun he aimed it directly at my head and shuddering I fell forward onto my knees in the snow and closed my eyes and waited for the inevitable. Nothing made sense at all!
I waited, but no shot came. I opened my eyes slowly only to see that the man was gone and that the gun was lying on the rock that I had been sitting on. Glancing about wildly I saw the man fading away into the forest and before I could think better about my actions I grabbed up the gun and ran after him.
Catching up to him completely out of breath I came to a stop as he turned to me with a knife in his hand. Breathing heavy I extended the gun out to him handle first and said, “You forgot this.”
He stared at me incredulously for a moment, then taking the gun he pitched it away into the forest. Then he spoke for the first time, “Are you crazy black bitch whore!”
Feeling a calm that I did not claim to possess in and of myself, I said, “I can assure you that I am not a bitch and while I am black I am not a whore, because if I was a whore I would still be in a camp cozied up to a guard and better off food wise than I have been, because of sucking off every sadistic excuse of a man this world seems to be populated with. You sir, however, are not sadistic and that is a relief as is the fact that I’m pretty sure you haven’t eaten anyone.”
His initial rage with me seemed to have departed and now almost dispassionately he asked, “What do you want?”
“I want to come with you.” I managed to force out past my lips even as I felt that I had spoken a lie and yet I knew it was the truth.
His face was completely closed off in terms of readable emotion or at least anything that seemed favorable to me as he said, “I don’t need a woman.”
“I’m not offering to be your woman as you put it. I do however want to be your wife.”
Suddenly his face was nothing but emotion as he exclaimed, “What!”
“You heard me. If that doesn’t suit you then please kill me now. I can’t survive on my own out here any longer and starving to death is not to my liking or for that matter being eaten. Also, I intend to be no man’s whore as I was raised to be a lady and I’ve kept myself as such and if you find me to be any less than virgin you have my permission to slit my throat. While it’s obvious that you are a prejudiced man against people of my color I can assure you that as a female of the same species that I’m still quite beautiful as is attested by the fact of how erect you are right now with the desire to have me even though you deny it with your words.”
The man’s hard gaze shifted away and he looked at a lack for words, as it was impossible to deny how tented out the front of his pants were and the reason for it. In a softer voice I said, “I want you to know that I respect you.”
His gaze came back and with it the force of his presence as he asked, “Why?”
“We are out here alone and there is no force of law or any stricture holding you back from doing whatever you want with me and yet you were going to leave me untouched despite the fact of how much you want me. I know what I’ve said is weird, I mean about being your wife, but everything in this world is different now and I’m just trying to do my best to survive with dignity.”
Tears falling down my cheeks, I continued on with, “I don’t want to die, but I’m not going to give up my faith in Jesus or be someone’s whore just so I can see one more day’s light.”
I stopped talking and a long moment passed by. In desperation, then I asked as the cold wind burned against the tear trails on my face, “So how about it?”
He’d never stopped staring at me, but now he broke eye contact and looked away. His head gave a nod and in surprised shock, I heard him say, “I accept.”
He’d accepted!
Oh God, what had I done!
Not saying another word he turned away from me and headed off quickly into the gathering shadows of the forest. As if coming out of a trance, but not really believing yet that he had accepted my proposal of marriage, I hurried after him in order not to be left behind. Oh God, what had I done?
To some effect that remained to be seen, but I was sure of two things. Soon I would have food and tonight I would be warm.
There was also one more thing that I was sure of. Soon I would know exactly what it felt like to have a man inside of me.
With a quiver that surprisingly spoke more of anticipation than of fear I did my best to keep up with the stranger who had just accepted the responsibility of looking out for me from this day forward. Maybe he wasn’t the man my mother had wanted for me to marry, but he was the best example of a man that I had seen in a long time and while I didn’t know much about him, in some ways I knew enough.
I had no sooner than caught up with him when he stopped causing me to bump awkwardly into his back. He was quite tall and solid as a rock. Both of my breasts tingled from where they had smashed into the hard plain of his back.
Awkwardly, I stepped back and shyly brushed at my hair very much unprepared for the reality that soon this man would be touching the very areas of me that now tingled as if on fire with just the briefest of contacts.
Extending his hand he offered me a clump of plucked pine needles and said, “Here chew on these. Lots of Vitamin C in them, which you’re likely depleted of.” Silently I took them from him and placing them in my mouth I chewed as he had directed.
Speaking around the needles I said, “Thank you.”, even as the rich flavor of pine burst freely across all my senses to an almost overwhelming degree. He grunted and moved on even as I experienced the feeling that maybe things weren’t as crazy as I thought they were.