Hey howdy hey everyone!

Let me tell you that being sick is no fun at all... I haven't been contagious in a while but the recovery is kicking my butt!! I am enjoying being moved in to our new place and having a nice clean house (with no boxes!!!) to rest in!

With all this fun cough ridden recovery time I've been taking I have found even more of my old stuff that I want to post. This is a slow work in progress for me. I've been working on some new stuff but I feel, for some odd reason, more comfortable posting old stuff than I am the new stuff I've been working on. Progress is progress though, so I am going to keep posting material in the hopes that my fear of posting will disappear and I can start posting new material!

Ok so this is the first little bit to a story idea I had when the alternate society, post apocalyptic themes were super big.  If anyone read the Chemical Garden series, then this story like will sound somewhat familiar as it was the inspiration to this thought process.

Basically the Government got tired of paying for sick days so they had scientists create a dug to eradicate all illness which, for the men, worked perfectly. However, the women were healthy but stricken with advanced osteoporosis which required them to have a body guard of sorts to ensure they didn't get hurt just walking down the street. This is the intro to the story of Bevene and Drew, a girl and her protector. I'm about 30 pages deep into this story but I don't want to post THAT much. If you want more, ask for it and I can email you the rest of what I have.

As always comments are welcome and enjoy!

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Bevene

            I stood amidst the other girls, feeling like I was being auctioned off. I was standing in a line of girls in hospitals gowns, facing a line of boys standing in all black.

“Number 131, meet your protector: number 37.” A boy and a girl from each side stepped into the middle of the room and made their way to the door to fill out the appropriate paperwork. I knew that having a Protector is a sign of wealth. Luck was on my side when my parent signed me up for a lottery for the less wealthy of the girls in our area for the chance to be assigned a protector.

I scratched my arm, my bone tingling in the process. I could feel a bruise forming just from bumping into another girl in the changing room. I hoped her arm wasn’t too bad.  

“Number 132, meet your protector: number 36.” I gulped. I only had one more to go. I watched the two walk to the front of the room for the paperwork. Tension filled the room, or maybe it was just in my head. We were scrambled, I had no idea which boy would be assigned to protect me from harm for the rest of my life. This would be the only real boy contact I would have in my life beside my father.

I wasn’t allowed to marry. I had known this from the time I was young. The only girls who got married were the ones who were rich or famous. Middle class Protection Lottery winners didn’t marry. That’s just how it was. It’s not that it wasn’t legal or anything, I mean I could get married if I wanted to, but I knew the risks. Marriage meant doing…married things with your husband, and even at twelve years old, I knew that consummating was deadly; a woman’s bone structure could never handle that amount of strenuous activity.

I envied men. The medication that the government had created to rid illness from the population had worked for men. Better than worked. Males had not been plagued by illness in over three generations. For women, however, it worked…but not in the way that was expected. For women, we didn’t get sick, but we were never healthy. The medicine had given every woman a form of what doctors still called ‘osteoporosis:’ a kind of bone weakness that women of advanced ages used to get before the ‘cure.’ Now, every girl born after the ‘cure’ was born with osteoporosis of a much more advanced state. Stubbing your toe resulted in a broken foot. Bumping into an innocent bystander results in dislocation or shattered anything.

“Number 133…” my breath caught. I took a step toward the middle. “Meet your protector: number 35.” A boy stepped forward. My eyes went wide. He was the tallest boy in the room. Long blonde hair wisped to the side of his face and hid his beautifully shining green eyes. His eyes met mine and my breath caught in my throat again. He was so beautiful, and he was mine for the rest of my probably short life.

Someone cleared their throat and I shook my head and blinked. Blood rushed to my face as this grown up, sixteen year old boy appraised me as we walked to fill out the paperwork.

“Name,” a young looking woman said from behind square glasses and a purple cheek.

“Bevene,” I said.

“Last name,” she said.

“Taylor.”

She nodded as she drew a line through my name and number and looked at the god of a boy next to me.

“Name,” she said to him.

“Drew,” he said. His voice made me blush.

“Last name.”

 “O’Connor.” Oh Drew O’Connor.

She nodded again and we walked out of the double doors so I could change.

In the bathroom, my breathing caught up to me in a big way. I was hyperventilating. The room spun around me and I gripped the sink in order to stay on my own two feet. It was staring to hit me that I was going to be living with a boy for the rest of my life. As soon as I left this room, he would move into my room.

My room! Oh my God, I wished I had cleaned my room. My frilly, pink and purple room that Drew was now going to live in…with me! Why hadn’t I thought of this earlier?

My 12 year old self couldn’t handle this kind of pressure. I dressed slowly, dreading now going home.

I knew that all the boys in that room had volunteered to be Protectors. They were willing to sacrifice their entire lives to make sure that we fragile women were safe and protected. So I guess that I should be grateful and I suppose I could redecorate after he moves in but still. I hoped that he didn’t regret volunteering down the road.

DREW

I waited outside the bathroom door for my Charge. She was taking forever. Judging from the amount of blushing that was going on, I hate to see what the next few years were going to hold.

At sixteen, boys were given the option to either serve in the military for four years or serve a lifetime as a Protector. For some strange reason, I would rather babysit a frail little girl for probably a few years until she dies than risk getting my head blown off. Fortunately, the girls aren’t aware of this until later in life. They think that this is out of the goodness of our hearts.

I looked down at my watch. It had been ten minutes already. All of my stuff was packed and ready to go before I got there, and it would be in the boxes and waiting for me at this girl’s house.

When she finally walked through the door, duffle bag in hand, eyes averted, I held out my hand in greeting.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Drew.”

She blushed again. “Bevene,” she said simply.

Alrighty then.

“So, you ready to go then?” I asked her.

She nodded, still looking at the floor.

“Okay, let’s go.”

She nodded again, and took a step in front of me. I turned to let her pass, but her foot caught on mine. She tripped and fell forward, plummeting toward the ground. A small shriek leapt from her lips as she reached her arms out to stop her fall.

In that split second, I reached forward and gently wrapped my arm around her waist and righted her small frame before she could shatter something before we even make it home.

Great, I got a klutz. My life just got way more complex.

“You okay Bev?” I asked, shortening her name.

“Yeah,” she said a little breathlessly.

“Okay, good.” I tried to sound pleasant. “Let’s go then.”

She walked out the door, and led the way to the parking lot. Most of the people who had cars now were rich people, people who could afford the doctor bills if one of their daughters’ was in an accident. I assumed that Bevyn would be that same. Instead we stopped at the most beat up car in the lot. It put put puttered to life as we clambered in and a man in his late thirties sat in the drivers’ seat.

“Hi there!” he said brightly to me. “I’m Jack. Jack Taylor. You can call me whatever you like as long as it doesn’t involve profanity. Sorry that our car isn’t as flashy as some of the cars you’re used to, but rest assured that I am a very careful driver.”

I nodded. “Thank you, sir.” I said, accordingly from my training as a Protector, always treat the parent with respect. On a rare occasion you would meet a mother figure, but hardly ever were we expected to meet the actual birth mother. Giving birth almost always resulted in death. The ‘cure’ made it so. 99% of the women who give birth were assumed to die afterwards.

And yet there always seemed to be some volunteers to give birth. Of course, to get pregnant, the women couldn’t actually consummate. They had to pay a large sum of money to be artificially inseminated and taken special care of during the nine month death trap. Those who wouldn’t volunteer were kidnapped and…well to put it bluntly, scientifically raped.

We call them ‘Pickers.’ They travel around poor cities where parents just desert their kids and ‘Pick’ girls they think will survive and they force them into pregnancy. The government doesn’t really regulate them, because they realize it was their fault that our women were dying off so easily. In their attempt to give people less time off of work for paid sick days, they commissioned scientists around the world to create the universal ‘cure’ that we now know as our daily nightmare.

Trust me, it is nice not getting sick, not having to worry about epidemics and death by severe illness. But I couldn’t imagine what the women in this world have to go through every day. Everything starting out great and the whole world catching on to the ‘cure’ before realizing the effects to the female population.

“Got all that, son?” Jack said next to me.

“I’m sorry, sir. I’m afraid I was lost in thought. Please repeat?” I said. Polite, proper. Everything I wasn’t, but everything I had to be.

“Please, son,” Jack said with a laugh as we rounded a corner to cross into the less than rich but not really poor part of town. Great. I had a charity case. “You don’t have to be so formal with us. If you’re going to be a part of the family, you can talk to us just like you would talk to one of your buddies. Again, though, as long as it doesn’t include profanities. My dear wife, bless her soul, would not stand for it in the house. That’s how it was and that’s how it will stay. Good?”

“Yup,” I said shortly.

“Now that’s better,” he laughed. “Now, I was just laying down the house rules. I don’t have many, but the few I keep, I keep for a reason and I expect everyone to follow them. Agreed?”

“Yes, sir.” I said, reverting back to polite.

“Okay. Now you are to be taking good care of my little princess. I expect you to treat her as such. There will be no yelling or raising your voice at her, or any woman for that matter. Yes?”

“Yes.” That was a given. My dad hadn’t lived long after my ma passed but he was around long enough to teach me how to treat a woman.

“And as for her. I know she’s young now, but she won’t always be. So as she gets older and enters her public school in a few years, I expect you to make sure she don’t get into any trouble. Not with boys or parties and such. There will be no drinking of any sort. I catch you or Bevene doing that nonsense and you can bet your…behinds that there will be some major consequences. To the both of ya…agreed?”

We both nodded in agreement and sat quietly in submission. This was going to be fun.

“And one more thing: no unnecessary risks.”

  

And that was the beginning.