The Pleasure Hound: Part One

Chapter Four

Chapter Four

From the outside looking in, Khial's childhood home resembled a palatial estate befitting his family's ancestry. But from the inside, looking out through a child's eyes, it could best be described as a jungle. A wild, treacherous place where one wrong turn could lead to eminent danger. An empty hall could quickly erupt with adults spewing hot words meant to scald anyone in their path. A man lying wounded in the corner was never a candidate for pity or help. A scar behind Khial's ear proved that. Most importantly, a woman's smile was never a good sign. It was a mirage that could lead to injury or death. 

In the bright morning sun of the ruined city in the Wasted Lands, the dark haired girl came up beside Khial with a tattered bag slung over her shoulder, a crate of books in her hands, and the naive, trusting smile of a wild animal who'd never encountered mankind before. Khial glanced down at the books in the crate to see tanned men, some with long golden hair, others with dark waves about their faces. In each picture the men embraced a woman. The girl, noticing Khial's perusal of her reading selection, smiled shyly. Khial's blood went cold. He turned away from what his past told him was a trap and slid into the front seat of the conveyance.

With the car loaded, heavier by its new addition and the remnants of her solitary life, Khial had a decision to make. He could take the high road, turn on the hover craft capabilities of the car and sail safely through the skies back to the city. Or he could take the low road, which was actually a road. The old highway systems of what used to be called the States of North America. The intersecting tar pavements crossing the barren land were reduced to rubble in most spots, ending at collapsed bridges in others. The pathways were filled with roaming beasts such as lions, bears, and apes, which were once held captive in enclosures called zoos. It was a treacherous place, those wild lands, a jungle where men no longer roamed.

Khial peered up at the clear, cloudless sky. He turned the ignition, and pulled out onto the road.

It was Khial's first time out of the city. He'd wanted to see with his own eyes the ruins of man. Towers touched the sky with half of the face of the building gone. The land lay barren, dry. The few patches of green here and there was evidence of female animals who maintained the favor of the Goddess.

For the majority of the trip, Dain peppered the girl with questions about her origins, and how she came to be in the ruins. The girl only knew that her mother came from the city, the only remaining city on the northwestern continent. A few settlements remained in the southwestern hemisphere, where the land was more lush. The continent of Europa was nearly barren, as well as all of the northern Africas. That part of the world had been blown to bits by nuclear bombs and left mostly uninhabitable by the resulting radiation. The people who did survive fled to the islands of the Australias and Asia.

The girl chattered on, gazing at Dain with stars in her eyes. If the romance novels hadn't already decided Khial's mind about her, the stories the girl told of her mother confirmed Khial's conclusions. The girl's mother had been a female separatist, a small sect of women who believed the female gender were the chosen of the Goddess. Their aim was to complete Mother Nature's work by shutting out men from the cities and leaving them to their own devices to die out in the barren wilds of the earth. It was an illogical argument if you followed it to its conclusion: extinction. Khial did not argue it. He was happy to leave women to their own devices. So long as they left him to his.

It looked as though the girl's mother had been the only one of her sisterhood to put stock in the separatist beliefs and leave the city and its men. What the mother miscalculated was that fanaticism of the parent often leads the child in the opposite direction. Khial ran to the opposite end of his parents' ideologies, straight into Dain's arms. Straight into Dain's open home where laughter burst from each corner, and love flowed in abundance.