My Name is Stab

Chapter Eighteen - Departure

That evening we all ate down in the military mess tent. They had been intending to set up a feeding station but they were having difficulty finding anyone to feed so they had tons of food and seemed more than happy to enjoy some friendly company. Mike and Sampson seemed to get on particularly well with them though they seemed uncomfortable when Ron, or even Phil, were about though they had, at least, managed to persuade everyone to stop springing to attention whenever Ron appeared. He wasn't quite ready for that yet.

After dinner, Phil called a big family meeting in the farm kitchen and announced that he and his immediate family would be traveling to Australia with the young King the next day. Apparently Ron's father had appointed Phil to be some sort of royal guardian for his son so they all had to go.

Theodora had a slight moment when she realised that James would be leaving but I stuffed her firmly back into her box.

Then Phil asked Mike to do him a favour. He told him about the promise he had made to help me to get my revenge on Deemo's gang. There were reports from the Australians that they were still about.

I was touched that he remembered with everything else that was going on.

"You'd like my help when you go to eviscerate them?" Mike asked me.

"Yes please," I replied. Of course I did. There was nothing more I wanted in the world.

"When you find them..." Phil went on, "feel free to release 'The Beast'."

That drew a gasp from the people round the room and it was then that I realised what it was about Mike that both terrified and fascinated me.

He was like me; he had another person inside him.

Except that my Theodora was a nice person who I had to keep down because she just couldn't cope with the horrible world we found ourselves living in. For example, she certainly couldn't cope with the fact that she had had to eat her little sister.

But the person Mike was keeping bottled up - 'The Beast' - wasn't a nice person. You could probably guess that from the name, I suppose! He was the sort of person who was more likely to make me eat my little sister.

Then I looked at Mike and I looked at Sampson. No that couldn't be right. Sampson was a simple man but he wouldn't have anything to do with Mike if he had that sort of 'Beast' inside him.

Mike's 'Beast' wouldn't make me eat my little sister.

But he would do unimaginably dreadful things to the men who had made me do it.

He would eviscerate them.

Eviscerate - nice word that. I didn't know exactly what it meant but it had a nice ring to it.

In the end, my inner Theodora would have to go and look it up in the dictionary. That was the sort of girl she was - innocent and curious.

Theodora didn't like what she found. It meant chop them open so that their slimy inside bits - their viscera - fell out. She had memories of her Daddy butchering the sheep back at their cottage and how sick it had made her feel.

Stab liked the sound of it, though.

My attention was dragged back by James announcing, "I'm going with them."

I knew I ought to tell him that Mike and I would be fine and that he should go with them and be safe. But I couldn't. Theodora wouldn't let me.

Phil tried to insist that he would be going to Australia with the rest of them but, to everyone's surprise, Susan took control. She gently and mildly invited Phil to come outside with her.

I'm not terribly good at all these human interaction things but even I could see that it was the sort of mild and gentle invitation he could not conceivably refuse.

I don't know exactly what she said to him but it obviously worked. When he returned, he called James across the room to him, looked at him for a moment and then pulled him into a huge hug.

Then I found myself creeping across the room towards them. And it was Stab doing it, not Theodora. Stab wanted to be part of that hug.

The two of them must have sensed that and pulled me into their arms.

Later, Susan summoned me up to the bedroom that she used as her nurses surgery. She sat me down and simply said, "Before I leave, we need to talk about sex and, in particular, contraception. Now, I don't know what's happening there and I don't need to know but..." She paused.

"Stab, look at me!" she said. Up until that point, I had been doing my normal trick of listening carefully to her but not meeting her eye.

It was not comfortable but I managed to do as she said.

"You simply must not become pregnant yet. Before the day, your age alone would have been enough to put you into a high risk category and, with your weight, it is just too dangerous. You know what I went through and I do not want you to have to go through the same."

As, I have no doubt, she intended, that stark warning was enough to grab my attention and, from that point, she was so professional and dispassionate that I hardly felt embarrassed. I left with supplies that would last for the better part of two years. Apparently she had raided the supply cupboard of the surgery where she worked and helped herself to whatever she thought she might need.

The new king left early the next morning with Phil and his family. They flew out by helicopter and, after they had departed, Mike called James and me to join him.

"I intend," he told us, "to leave it a month before we set off. The training you two have received is incomplete so we are going to have to sort that out before we go anywhere. Also we are all badly underweight which means we are weak. A couple of weeks with good food will go a long way towards solving that."

That sounded fair enough.

"But today is Friday," he went on, "and none of us have had a break since 'the day' so I intend to spend the weekend doing absolutely nothing - mostly sleeping. You two kiddies can do whatever you like as long as you don't disturb me. I'll see you first thing on Monday morning."

With that, he headed back towards the guard cottage and his bed.