Apocalypsis 03 - Exodus

and raise our children - children who will be taught the value of living simply and in harmony with others.”
    I wasn’t all that familiar with the seventies, but she reminded me of girls in my high school who’d tried to be hippies like back in those days. Part of me was mocking her overly-simplistic views, but the other part couldn’t really argue with the logic. So I kept my opinion to myself, hoping there might still be a way out of this mess for us and for Bodo.
    “Are you going to kill the boy babies?” asked Rob.
    She scowled at him. “Are you stupid? Why would we do that?”
    He shrugged. “Amazons killed the boy babies and kept the girls. That’s history; I’m not making this crap up.”
    “We’re the new and improved version of those warriors,” she said, pride in her voice. “We don’t kill babies. And we don’t kill anyone who doesn’t mean us harm. Our world needs less war and more love.” She looked at me. “Your boyfriend isn’t going to be hurt, so long as he agrees to cooperate.”
    I looked up at Bodo, and he was hanging from the column, his upper body leaning forward. I swore I could hear him snoring lightly.
    “He’s going to be pretty hard to … uh … do things with in his current state.”
    She looked over her shoulder, sighing aloud. “Yeah. We might have gone a little overboard with our happy drugs. But they’ll wear off.” She turned back to me. “So unless you want to trade your other friend for him, I’m going to have to decline your offer of taking Bodo away.” She smiled. “He’s pretty fun, though. I can see why you’d want to keep him.”
    I was getting cranky over the way she was talking about him. “He’s not a piece of property, Kiersten. He’s a man, and a good one; and he’s mine , besides, as in my boyfriend . I’m not going to take no for an answer.” I schooled my mind and body to remain non-threatening. I couldn’t let her see me as a challenge for her power. She might be all peace and love and harmony in theory, but she’d found a way to make friends with vicious canners and lived to tell about it. The only way that happened was by sheer cunning. Kiersten was no one to mess with.
    “Unless you have another offer, you hold the losing hand here,” she said, turning to leave us and walk back to the stairs.
    “Wait!” yelled Winky from behind me. She came up beside me and whispered, “We do have something else to trade.”
    “What? Bikes?”
    “No, stupid.” She lifted up her bundle. “The baby!” She grinned at me expectantly.
    I looked at her, aghast at what she was suggesting. “Do you honestly think I’d turn over a baby so it could be molested by a bunch of man-chicks?!”
    Winky reached over the baby and punched me. “Shut up, you deviant! They wouldn’t molest him.” She shook her head. “Damn, Bryn, sometimes you’re so thick. I’m talking about giving them the baby to replace the one they lost!” She gestured with her chin at Kiersten who was waiting near the bottom of the steps.
    I held up my hand towards her, asking her to give us a minute.
    “Are you serious?” I whispered back. “Is that … I don’t know, even legal?”
    “Legal? Bryn, if you don’t stop that crap, I swear to all-that-is-holy, I am going to slap you right in the face. There are no laws here. There are no rules. We are making this junk up as we go along.”
    I pinched her on the shoulder. “I know that, mean girl. I’m just saying, isn’t that kind of bad mothering? To hand over your baby for a trade?”
    Winky frowned at me. “I ain’t this baby’s mother, and neither are you.”
    “Yeah, but we took responsibility for it when we murdered it.”
    Kiersten had come up to stand behind me, overhearing my last statement.
    “You murdered a baby?”
    I turned and fake laughed. “Heh, heh … yes and no.”
    She stood there, waiting for me to explain.
    “So okay, here’s the deal. We were at the canner place, looking for Bodo. And we met this girl there, the Queen of the canners, and she had this baby here.” I gestured to the bundle that I suddenly noticed was seriously ripe-smelling with baby doodles. “And she asked us to kill it by cutting off its head with an axe. She was obviously off her rocker, so we pretended to kill the baby and then took it from her.”
    “Yeah,” said Winky. “And now we have this thing with no diapers, no milk or whatever, and we have no clue how to take care of it; so, it’s probably going to