KingOfNowhere

"Aftermath" (closed, but feel free to read along)

“There's one more thing…” Bran stressed to King. “You can't speak of the outside world with anyone but the Elders.”

King found the man's request unbelievable. Everywhere he'd been since beginning his adventures, the people he'd met had wanted to know all they could about the world beyond them. King listened to Bran’s explanation, and while he didn't understand it, he was willing to abide by the demand.

Then Bran spoke of his daughter’s fascination. King followed Bran’s eyes up the hill to find the young beauty spying on their conversation. King had developed a bit of a fascination for Annie as well, though he wasn't about to admit that to the girl’s father.

“You will need someone to help you through your quarantine period,” Bran continued. King listened and watched as the youngest Elder waved his daughter down to the beach.

“My daughter is a curious person,” Bran told King. “I hope you will remember what I have said about new knowledge.”

“I will,” King said.

King studied the young woman’s body as she deftly negotiated the trail to where the men sat together yet also apart. King’s mind wasn't on what he could teach Annie about the world; it was on what he could teach her about being a woman. He clenched his jaws as he remembered that he was still in quarantine and – even if Annie was equally desirable of such lessons – it would be quite sometime before such an education could begin.

As she arrived, though, King reminded himself that he couldn't be certain that the girl didn't already have plentiful womanly experiences. During his short stay at the settlement of Carolines, he'd learned that the sexual education of girls began with their first bleeding. There had been a history of that, of course, if you reached back a handful of centuries, in some cultures much less. Modern thinking had ended that practice in most cultures, though. King was sure he'd learn how things were here eventually.

“Annie,” Bran began, “Mister King here needs someone to help him during his quarantine–”

“I’ll do it,” the girl cut in, smiling wide. “Whatever he needs, Papa.”

King did his best to suppress his smile. Annie’s eagerness was obvious. King only hoped that his slowly growing erection wasn't.

Bran again reminded his daughter of the rules of quarantine, then asked his daughter’s charge, “Can you work with this, Mister King?”

“I can, on one condition,” he responded. “You stop calling me Mister King. King is fine.”

He could have reminded them that his first name was Craig, but he hadn't gone by his given name in forever so he kept it to himself. “I have no problems sticking to the quarantine rules…”

King looked at Annie and smiled again, finishing, “...now that I have someone to talk to.”

Looking to his breakfast, he asked if he could first finish it, then take a walk down the beach to look for more signs of his shipmates having also come ashore.

Bran looked to his daughter with a solemn expression, then looked to King. “We did find some of your traveling companions, King. But … they were dead.”

King wasn't surprised by this news. The storm that had ravaged the ship had been powerful, and King had seen dead bodies in the water before he was swept away from the sinking vessel by the waves.

“Where … how many?” he asked.

“Three,” Bran said, pointing. “Up the beach there. I'm afraid that we couldn't properly tend to them … not knowing whether they–”

“I understand,” King cut off the explanation. His mind’s eye imagined – very accurately, in fact – the bodies of his friends being torn apart by gulls, crabs, and other scavengers. He thought about the options regarding the corpses and realized there really were none. “It's not the burial at sea that they would have preferred, but…”

King returned to his breakfast, remembering his lost friends,

"Aftermath" (closed, but feel free to read along)

King was tickled to hear Bran talk about providing a way to clean up, not having had a bath since before the ship sailed from New Eastport. He was also happy to hear that he was being given the opportunity to stick around here for a while.

"I'm a wanderer, with the philosophy that it's the journey, not the destination that's important," he told Bran. "I like to visit new places, learn about them ... about their people. If this Council about which you speak would allow me to remain for a while, I'd like that.

"I believe in earning my keep, though," he continued. "Right now, in quarantine, I'm not doing that. If there's something I can do during my isolation, please, tell me. I can ... I dunno, fish...? Cut firewood? Clean out the shit pit ... whatever you need done that I can do in isolation ... to keep your people safe until you decide that I'm not a danger."

Whatever Bran selected for him to do, King secretly hoped it would involve the beautiful villager, Annie. He also hoped it wouldn't involve that asshole, Paul. That man had a serious bone up his ass for King.

"Aftermath" (closed, but feel free to read along)

“Mister King," a familiar voice called from beyond the quarantine hut's door, "you may come out.”

Thank god, King thought as he quickly pulled the door open and stepped out into the morning sun. He took a deep breath of air, fresh with a hint of sea salt in it. He complained, "It stinks in there. I got used to it yesterday, mostly by falling asleep. But as soon as you wake up, it's back."

The man who'd dealt with him the most the day before flashed a basket, telling him of its contents. Bran spoke of mate, which King indeed had not heard of before, saying, “It's a hot caffeinated drink, a tea of sorts. You won't like it ... but it grows on you."

"As long as it's caffeine, I'm happy," King said. In Newfoundland, they'd had a caffeinated drink made of mushrooms, originally found in the wild but these days grown in greenhouses, specifically for their caffeine content, though, they did have other uses as well. It had a nasty taste that required a great deal of honey sweetener. King had never had coffee, which a lot of people back during the day had said tasted nasty without additives, too. If he had had coffee, he would have considered it less objectionable than the mushroom substitute.

"I have some sweetener, too," Bran continued. "We trade dried and smoked fish and things made of seashells and the like with a village located inland … over the range.”

King followed Bran's nod toward the mountain range behind them. Bran was fairly well educated in world geography, and he probably could have named this range off the top of his head if he had any idea where he was. He suspected by the vastness of the shoreline and range that he was in Greenland. If he asked Bran to confirm that, would the man do so? King had a sense that the villagers preferred their isolation, something Bran would confirm later in this morning's conversation.

Bran suggested that the two of them take a walk. Stepping away from the quarantine hut, King got his first look at the gathering of people a bit farther up the hill. He was surprised at the vast number of them: men and women, old and young, casually dressed for labor and more formally dressed for, he presumed, official duties that related to the arrival of a stranger from a distant land.

And there was Annie. King couldn't help but smile to the young beauty, recalling their exchange the day before when she'd discovered him passed out on the shore. She seemed to be as excited to see King as he was to see her. That excitement was dampened a bit when King Annie's protector, the man named Paul, stepped out of the crowd and in front of the girl he obviously considered his own.

When Bran joked about not farting into the wind, King couldn't help but laugh. "As badly as I smell, I doubt I'd smell you, sir." King reeked not just of human odor but of the sea in which he'd been lost for what he assumed had been two, maybe three days.

King dug eagerly into the basket of food, marveling at the offerings. There was fresh baked bread that was still warm; sliced meat, both freshly cooked and jerked; cheese and goats milk, the former presumably made from the latter; and berries, some of which he was familiar with and others of which he'd never seen before. He offered some to Bran, getting a polite wave, as he would have expected because of the whole quarantine thing.

The mate was, like the mushroom drink, kind of nasty. King added the sweetener, which turned out to be dried cubes of honey, something he'd never seen done to the bee produced sweetener before. It made the drink palatable, but only barely so. Still, it was caffeine, and he needed it badly. King told Bran about the mushroom drink, adding, "It's caffeine, but it's gross, too."

“Speaking of knowledge,” Bran said with a serious tone, “What can you tell me about what's happening out there in the world?"

King had expected this, of course. In the villagers' eyes, he was a stranger from a strange land. Bran continued, "First, where did you come from? My daughter said something of Newfoundland. Is that where you are from?”

"It's not where I'm from," King said, "but ... it is where I came from."

His answer was rather cryptic, King knew. He clarified, "I travel a lot. My last location was Newfoundland, a coastal settlement called New Eastport."

After global warming had reached its extreme and melted what was left of the world's ice caps, glaciers, and snow fields, a lot of New settlements, villages, and towns appeared. The old communities had disappeared as sea levels rose around the world.

"I stayed there about a year," King continued. "Nice people. Safe community. They fished and grew terraced crops. Before that, I was farther south: Nova Scotia, New England, the Carolines, New Mephis."

King didn't explain that New Memphis, Tennessee, was now a coastal city. Rising ocean levels had driven the Gulf of Mexico north up the Mississippi until Old Mephis had disappeared, first into the Mississippi River itself and then -- after continually rebuilding on higher and higher ground -- into the waters of the unrelenting and expanding Gulf.

"The Bug," King mused softly. "It's still out there, unfortunately. It pops up once in a while. There's good news, though. Most of the survivors today have a partial or full immunity to it. When it does appear, it doesn't normally take many lives, if any at all. At least ... that's been my experience. I've heard stories about entire communities dying, likely from a variant of the Bug. I know this will sound contradictory, but ... the increased lethality of it is actually a good thing. It means that it kills the carriers off before they have a chance to spread it to other communities.

"As far as the wars go," King continued, "those are over. There are still troublemakers out there, of course ... people who would rather take from others rather than work hard themselves. Militias. But they're few and far between.

"As far as population, it's rebounding but slowly," he said between bites of breakfast. "Communities don't get very big, though. Large towns lead to large problems. The old world diseases that had been eradicated by vaccines returned. Measles, chicken pox, even the black plague. They run through communities, killing as much as thirty or forty percent of the people before waning.

"There's a lot of land out there to live in," King said, finishing the mate with a grimace. "Once a community starts getting bigger ... once rivalries and discontent rise ... people just leave ... migrate, emigrate, whatever you want to call it. Rebuild somewhere else."

“Should we worry that – like you – they will be coming here, too?" Bran asked bluntly. "I mean no offense, but … honestly … we're happy with the way things are now. We have no desire to once again be part of that world out there.”

"You shouldn't worry," King said. "I only got here because my ship got caught in a storm and broke up." He looked around, venturing, "I'm assuming I'm in Greenland, right? It wasn't my destination at all. I was trying to get to Ireland ... England maybe."

"Aftermath" (closed, but feel free to read along)

“Annie thinks the stranger might have a big cock.”

Belle laughed, leading Bran to do the same. His laugh was less about her lewd statement and more about the idea that his daughter had said such a thing.

Belle disappeared into the darkness, leaving Bran wondering whether she would even return. She didn't, and eventually another male villager arrived to take his watch over the stranger.

Bran returned home, finding Annie soundly asleep in her bed. He looked down on her with pride for a long time, the light of a single candle flickering on her face.

Her birth had been a miracle, yes, but Annie had been a marvel in so many other ways after that, things that were of her own doing, not her parents’. She was smart, beautiful, athletic, loyal, loving; she was everything Bran could have wanted in a child.

Soon, he thought to himself, she'd be having children of her own. Bran thought again about the stranger, King. Bran hoped the man would turn out to be healthy in every way, of course. He would certainly have knowledge of the outside world that the Elder Council would find of interest.

Beyond that, though, Clan Kyst would look at the stranger as a wonderful source of new blood, an increase in their genetic diversity.

Annie would be of age soon, of course. Would Bran want to see this stranger put a child inside his own daughter? If he had a choice, no man would ever defile his little girl. But that wasn't his choice, nor was it realistic.

Bran turned away from his daughter's bedroom to finish some chores before heading for his own bed. Undressed, Bran found his cock again more hard than not, and he considered finding satisfaction alone, as – unknown to him – Annie had before she, too, went to sleep.

But he resisted, wanting to save himself for his coupling with Belle. Now that she'd chosen him to father her child, they only had to wait for her to enter her moon, which could come in weeks, days, or even tomorrow.

Because she was a virgin, it was incumbent on him to refrain from sexual activity prior to their coupling. The act of intercourse for a pure woman could be painful, so limiting the trauma of intercourse by limiting the duration of it was stressed by the Matchmaker. Bran would show Belle the respect she deserved by leaving his cock alone and lonely until he had successfully seeded her.

"Aftermath" (closed, but feel free to read along)

“I informed Tyka of my choice this morning,” Belle whispered to Bran. “I chose you, if you are willing…”

Bran’s brain didn't immediately comprehend what the young woman was telling him; his thinking was still wrapped around King, Annie, and the latter's apparent infatuation with the former.

When Belle's words finally penetrated his thick skull, Bran felt an anxious chill run up his spine. Without realizing he was doing it, he asked with shock, “Me…? Really?”

Bran really shouldn't have been surprised. As Tyka the Matchmaker had told Belle, Bran really was a good choice to father a child with her. He'd fathered 16 children across five villages over the past two decades, and with the exception of three who'd died young of accidental causes, all were living healthy lives. Four of them – 3 young women and 1 young man – had even had children of their own, making him a grandfather.

Bran’s surprise had nothing to do with whether or not he was a good candidate for passing his genes onto another generation. No, his surprise was simply that Belle, a beautiful, 19 year old virgin who was well-chased by every horny young man in this village and several others, had picked the 43 year old father of her best friend to make a baby with her.

Bran suddenly realized that his cock was getting hard. Arranged breeding wasn't about sexual pleasure, of course. It was about bringing forth the new and healthy generation of Human Beings. Still, how could a man look at beautiful, sexy Belle, knowing he was going to soon be inside of her, and not get hard. C’mon, really?

“You accept,” Belle tempted as Bran’s brain was still wrestling with the reality of it all, “and I'll tell you what your daughter said about the stranger.”

She giggled, which made Bran smile, then laugh. He told her with a sincere tone, “It would be my honor, Belle.”

"Aftermath" (closed, but feel free to read along)

“So, what happened?” Annie asked excitedly of her father. “What did he say? Tell me, please, Papa.”

Bran was conflicted about his daughter’s interest in the stranger. He'd raised her to be curious about the world, but he had had and always would have concerns about the Human Beings infesting it.

Bran had been born after the Bug made its apocalyptic appearance on Earth. His parents and grandparents had all succumbed to it, leaving him in the care of strangers who, fortunately, had raised him as if he were one of their own.

He'd been educated with a general understanding of the pre-pandemic world, alongside an understanding of what previously known technologies, processes, and more were better left forgotten.

That was part of his concerns regarding this stranger. Bran had no idea where King had come from, nor what knowledge he brought with him from that place. The man might very well show himself to be free of any infectious pathogens, only to reveal an understanding of things Bran and the other Elders would prefer were left unknown to their people.

“There's nothing to tell, Annie,” he told his daughter truthfully, as no one had questioned the stranger as of yet. “We put him in the quarantine hut. That's it.”

Bran could see the disappointment in his daughter's eyes. He talked to her about past visitors, only to have her point out rightfully that this one was indeed different.

Annie headed out to do her chores, and Bran warned her about keeping her distance from the quarantine hut.

Sometime later, he found her sitting with her friend, Belle, as the latter stood guard. Bran sent his daughter home, then replaced her on the small section of log that served as a bench. Silently for quite a while, he took his turn just staring at the hut and wondering about its occupant.

“What did my daughter have to say about this man?” he finally asked the young woman next to whom he'd sat. He smiled at her, adding, “If telling me wouldn't violate any sort of confidence, I mean.”

"Aftermath" (closed, but feel free to read along)

"In there," King's escort said as they reached a hut that sat far away from the rest of the village. The man named Paul promised food, water, clothing, and bedding, then repeated the warnings Annie's father had given regarding being a bother. About quarantine, Paul said among other things, "We cannot chance the Bug or anything else getting to our people."

It was the anything else part of which King took notice. The Bug that had nearly wiped out the Human Race wasn't the only microscopic danger threatening people anymore. Nearly all of the old dangers from before the invent of vaccines and medications had returned to haunt Humas: measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, even smallpox were all killing people in high numbers once again. Influenza, too, was taking lives, mostly during the winter months but -- depending on the region -- during the summer months as well.

Paul closed the door, and additional noise and movement of the door told King that it had been locked or barred or both as well. There were a number of voices in the near distance as villagers came to speak to Paul about the stranger amongst them. King tried to listen to some of the conversation but didn't pick up anything of importance.

After a while, the door jostled again, then -- after Paul ordered King to move to the far wall -- opened again. The man tossed in a bundle of bedding, then a cloth bag onto that. "In it you'll find some warm clothes ... food ... water."

He pointed to a small open fire pit, then to firewood near one wall. "You can build a fire if it gets cold. Colder," he corrected. "I don't know how long you'll be in here, but ... I assure you ... you will be taken care of if you don't make a fuss."

"Thank you," King responded with a polite smile. "I have no intention of making a fuss." He started forward for the offerings, then stopped as he saw Paul back up a step. King backed up again, saying, "I'll wait 'til you're gone."

"The girl you met on the beach," Paul said with a stern tone. "You'll stay away from her. Not just during quarantine but after, too. You have no reason to get to know her. None."

I was right, King thought to himself regarding his earlier assumption that King and Annie had a thing together. He didn't speak on his feelings, though, instead only saying, "Of course."

Paul departed and again locked up the door. King went to work making a bed and a fire, cooking some meat and root crops, then laid down to think about where fate had taken him. In less than a minute, he was sound asleep.

"Aftermath" (closed, but feel free to read along)

A dozen or more people from Annie's Clan would arrive, one after another, as the girl's father instructed that King would be escorted to quarantine. Then, he offered, "I will send search parties up and down the beach to look for your friends ... so long as you follow this man's instructions and don't give us any trouble."

This man, of course, was the one standing protectively between King and Annie. It was obvious that there was some sort of relationship there, though, King couldn't know what it was or that it was more heavily felt from the man's side than it was the girl's.

"If you do ... give us trouble, I mean ... Paul has permission to put his spear through you," the man in charge said. "Do you understand? I can't take a chance that you are infected with the Bug."

"I understand," King said, raising his arms to his sides in a surrender gesture, before slowly letting them hang to his side again. "I understand your caution. I really do. Food, water, and blankets would be great."

He gestured to his lack of clothing -- raggedy denim shorts was all he'd had on when the Elizabeth had struck a reef or shoal or whatever -- and asked, "Maybe something warm to wear, too?"

"We'll get you something, yes," Bran said, looking to Paul and nodding to indicate that the man was to see to it.

As he headed up the trail, the villagers hurried to maintain a distance from King. He paused at the bottom of the big boulder on top of which the girl still stood. Smiling up to her, he said, "See you again soon, I hope."

The sun was behind Annie, so King couldn't see her reaction. He headed up the trail as ordered, looking back to find Paul following him at a respectable distance. Down on the beach, Annie's father began giving instructions and dividing the villagers such that each of the searching groups had some armed men included.

"Aftermath" (closed, but feel free to read along)

King’s heart leapt as Annie blew into the horn; he knew immediately, even without her explanation, that she was reporting him to others.

“I'm not going to hurt you,” he told her. “I'm not a threat.”

Whether she believed him or not, King couldn't tell. She simply stood there tall over him, watching him, the bow in her hands.

A figure appeared in the distance behind her, a man. He stopped a moment at the sight of King. Then, after speaking to someone King couldn't see, the man hurried Annie’s direction, a pair of spears clutched in one hand. He covered the rough ground easily and quickly, both familiar with the trail and simply nimble.

Others began to appear, from both that same direction and from up the beach. King noted that nearly all of them carried weapons, either bows, spears, knives, or a combination therein. He wondered whether they were for combat, hunting, or both.

When the first man arrived, King repeated, “I'm not going to hurt you. I'm not a threat. I'm just a survivor of a ship wreck. I'd like to search for my companions.”

"Aftermath" (closed, but feel free to read along)

"My name Annie."

“Nice to meet you, Annie,” King said with a smile.

When he asked about the others aboard the Elizabeth, Annie said, "You are the first person to come from the sea. Did you swim here?"

King laughed. “From Newfoundland…? No.”

He noticed she didn't react to his mentioning of the island from which he and the others had departed. He wondered if she had ever heard the name. Another time, King told himself.

“Can we walk the shoreline?” he asked. “I'd like to see if anyone else made it. I can't believe I'm the only one.”