The next evening has your father returned to you right away, the sound of a motor in the distance told you something about the stranger right there. Your father takes a few looks around to tell if he was followed, then when satisfied joins his family.
The evening meal between all of you is utterly silent as he decides what to say, and something about the look in his eyes told all of you to not push it until he was ready. After the meal was all said and done he decides to talk.
"I. . .think this is a decision we need to make together. I can't believe I'm even considering this but since the bombs fell I have a hard time finding other options.
The good news is that the group we found has about 40 people in it. Farmers, a few engineers, a few doctors- a good wide range of skills. They have guns, working gasoline motor vehicles, a protected main camp, even some medicines that could help us a lot. It's not pre-bombs safe, but from outside threats it's the safest we could ever expect to be.
The bad news is that it's. . .well, there's no other way to say it- it's a rape camp. The women are all housed in the middle of their settlement and as far as I could tell they each and every one of them was raped at least twice a day. More if they were thought to be able to have children." you father says plainly, looking at your mother and sisters.
"And once a day all the men who were fertile were rounded up and told to pick the name of one of the women from a hat- and told to fuck that woman whether she wanted it or not. If he didn't want to, he was made to at gunpoint. They didn't care if the two were related as far as I could tell." he adds, looking at you.
"There are rules in place to keep everyone involved from getting too violent, but their leaders are obsessed with the idea of shoring up their numbers. I don't know if there's a safer place to be from threat outside a group, but inside. . .I don't know. I think we need to make this choice together." |