It was Thursday when they came for us.
It was four days after the ATVs had rolled in, disgorging rows and rows of troops faceless in their helmets, bristling with armour. The first day, we cowered inside as they strode up and down the street, expecting the door to be kicked in any minute. The second day, we began to think that maybe if we stayed inside we'd be safe. The third day, a few brave souls ventured out, driven by hunger and thirst.
On the fourth day, they came for us.
All of us, kicking in every door, shouting and grabbing and hauling and herding us out into the street.
They separated the men from the women. At first I thought they were taking the men to work for them, building something, a road maybe, I don't know.
But then they told us that the children would go with the men. Boys, girls, babies, with their fathers and brothers and grandfathers.
Babies can't work.
It didn't go smoothly. Up until then the hope that compliance could buy survival had made it easy for them. After they started to pull children away from their mothers and push them across the street to the group of men ...
They used the stocks of their rifles. When that didn't work, they shot a few of us.
There were more us than of them, but they had the weapons, and those armored suits, that made them strong. They got us into the groups they wanted, and they marched the men and children away. Then they marched us away in another direction.
The bodies they left in the street.
They herded us into the school hall, and they told us they had a special job for us to do.
Our world was theirs now, they said. Things had changed. It would be a new society.
They lined us up and told us, that was their job for us.
To be the mothers of the new society.
They took us, one at a time. I could hear the woman they took ahead of me screaming.
When it was my turn, I didn't scream.
I lay there, and went away inside my head, not to anywhere in particular, just to a nowhere where I couldn't feel them.
Couldn't feel them making me a mother of new Caldari Arderonne.
It was four days after the ATVs had rolled in, disgorging rows and rows of troops faceless in their helmets, bristling with armour. The first day, we cowered inside as they strode up and down the street, expecting the door to be kicked in any minute. The second day, we began to think that maybe if we stayed inside we'd be safe. The third day, a few brave souls ventured out, driven by hunger and thirst.
On the fourth day, they came for us.
All of us, kicking in every door, shouting and grabbing and hauling and herding us out into the street.
They separated the men from the women. At first I thought they were taking the men to work for them, building something, a road maybe, I don't know.
But then they told us that the children would go with the men. Boys, girls, babies, with their fathers and brothers and grandfathers.
Babies can't work.
It didn't go smoothly. Up until then the hope that compliance could buy survival had made it easy for them. After they started to pull children away from their mothers and push them across the street to the group of men ...
They used the stocks of their rifles. When that didn't work, they shot a few of us.
There were more us than of them, but they had the weapons, and those armored suits, that made them strong. They got us into the groups they wanted, and they marched the men and children away. Then they marched us away in another direction.
The bodies they left in the street.
They herded us into the school hall, and they told us they had a special job for us to do.
Our world was theirs now, they said. Things had changed. It would be a new society.
They lined us up and told us, that was their job for us.
To be the mothers of the new society.
They took us, one at a time. I could hear the woman they took ahead of me screaming.
When it was my turn, I didn't scream.
I lay there, and went away inside my head, not to anywhere in particular, just to a nowhere where I couldn't feel them.
Couldn't feel them making me a mother of new Caldari Arderonne.
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