Survival/Apocalypse14 min read
"I Said Don't Eat Them!" — How I Woke Up in a Village and Stole the Sky
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"They said we should eat the big one tonight."
"They said the small ones are tender," the other one hissed. "The old woman can wait."
"Don't—don't eat—my girl!" the scared voice broke.
I snapped upright, hands clamping empty air. "Don't you dare," I said before I even knew I spoke English in a different year.
They froze with the knife halfway down. I smelled rot, fear, and sweat. I pushed up, and the oldest of the two kidnappers watched his grin die: "She's awake."
"You—" the thinner man spat. "She came back to life. Creepy."
They turned to the woven baskets at the doorway. Two babies lay curled in one, a man bound to a pillar groaning, and behind all of it my hands felt wrong and small. My throat was dry; my head buzzed like I'd been spun in a circle.
"I can't let them eat—" I said. I didn't mean to sound cold. My training did it for me.
"Sit still!" I told the father. "You, grab that pole. Make noise if they come."
He blinked and obeyed. I read the room the way I used to read a room of injured men in a war zone. I blinked. My hand slid down to where a wooden knife hung and instead found a real metal kitchen cleaver lying in reach. "Perfect," I told myself.
The thin one reached for the baby, and something in me snapped clean. I moved before I thought.
"I said stop," I said, and then my hands were a blur. I palm-snatched the cleaver, spun, and struck the thin man's neck with the flat of the blade. He folded like rotten cloth.
The broad one lunged. I blocked, pushed, and my training took over—drop, twist, pry. The blade jumped from his grip. My fingers closed on it. I reversed the blade against his wrist. He dropped screaming. Within a breath both were tied to a post, gagged. The father wept and laughed at once, like someone who can barely believe he's still breathing.
"You're a soldier," he said, touching my arm like I might break.
"I used to be," I said. "I'm still a medic."
The babies slept. The sun bled through the cracks in the thin roof. I took three pieces of dried bread from the bad men's pockets and polished the coins clean with my sleeve. "Take these," I told the father. "You can buy small things. Hide. Don't come out until night."
The father nodded, dizziness and gratitude mixing into his expression. He called to his children in a voice that belonged to a man who hadn't believed he'd hear them again. I sat with my back to the wall and thought: I had died for others in my world. My last memory had been a blast and a hope to save people. Then—black. Now waking up with hands that smelled of ash and someone else's skin.
My name? I didn't remember announcing it. "I'm Veronika," I said finally, because I couldn't help my mouth. I had been Veronika Keller in the unit. That name fit like a habit. The body I wore answered to "Megan" once—"Megan" the village had called her. I could tell from the scraps of memory that had slid like fog into my mind: a village called Meng—no—Great Yan? The words were old, but the feel of earth and drought was clear: I had not come back to a modern city. I had landed in a world gone dry.
"Don't be daft," the bound man mumbled finally. "I won't leave. We have to eat—"
"Shut up," I said. "They're not food."
That night we left the broken house with two babies wrapped in rags, a foolish but kind father who smelled of sweat and hope, and a village that had lost green years ago. I tested what should not be possible: I whispered, "Bread," and a small warm bun slid into my palm, like a secret dropped there.
"Where did you get that?" the father whispered.
"I don't know," I said aloud. I didn't know how to say it without sounding like a lunatic. I put the bun into my small pack and didn't taste it. I had made a soldier's promise once: live to fight again. This, too, was a battlefield.
"What's your name?" the father asked.
"I'll call myself the one who won't let you die," I said. He laughed through tears.
Two nights later, I learned the whole town's story. Drought had stolen crops. Bandits had stolen carts. The river had become a trail of salt and skeletons. Families moved like ghosts toward a capital far away, and some never made it.
"Why did they come for you?" the father asked over low coals.
"They were hungry," I said. "And they forgot what hunger had meant when they were human."
"Come with us to the cluster at the old orange grove," he said. "Everyone promised to wait three days for those who were lost."
I agreed. I'd promised myself to find the family, and to find them I would use whatever I had, including the very strange blessing that kept putting bread and water into my hands. I discovered later to call it "the pantry," this impossible, never-empty place inside me. For now, I used it like a field medic uses one extra syringe: sparingly and with purpose.
We found them. The reunion made everyone weep. Children called "Aunt" and "Grandpa" and bodies folded on one another, way too soon for the human year we lived in. I kept to myself mostly. The father—Gideon—was kind, simple; he trusted with easy faith. He called me "Kid" at first and then "Rosa" when he found out my given name didn't fit the new body. I let him.
One day a carriage came down the road. Thick curtains hid the occupants. The boy inside shouldn't have lived. His face was blue-white and lips black at the edges. Men insisted, whispered names. "They must have poison," one said. Another said "Find a healer."
"Find a healer," a man repeated. I looked at the child and felt instruments of surgery return to my hands.
"Who is responsible for the caravan?" I asked, and the guard bowed.
"Sir Victor Zimmermann," he said. "Young master son of the Zimmermann house."
I had no reason to help the rich. I had every reason. A child was a child.
They opened the curtains for me with suspicion. I smelled linen and perfume and water like a lost thing. A thin man with a sharp face watched me like a hawk. "Who are you?" he demanded.
"A healer," I said. "Move back. Give me space."
"You will see a physician," the man said. "You will not touch—"
"Listen," I said. "If you trust a line of ancestral pride more than a child's breath, you'll find fault later. Let me look."
They wanted proof. I had a trick: the pantry, the little miracles. They bargained, threatened, and finally, with no better option, let me take the child.
"Please," Victor Zimmermann said softly. "His name is Marin. He is my nephew. My household cannot—"
"Do not talk," I muttered. "If my hands tremble, it's because I need them to be steady."
Two hours later, after needlework precise as a surgeon's, some herbs, water from the well that had appeared in a seller's courtyard when the pantry matched it, I breathed the child's heat back into him. He coughed like a fish and opened eyes that were too bright to be his.
"He's stable," I told them.
"What did you do?" the sharp man asked.
"Kept the poison from the heart," I said. "I neutralized the binders, removed the toxins, and gave him fluids."
"You owe me," the man said. Victor's jaw tightened.
"I asked only for the boy's life," I said. "Safety for my family on the road: water, salt, food. And nothing more."
Victor looked at me as if he weighed every word I said: either I was a witch, or I was honest. "We can spare water," he said finally.
He told his man Cabot Davidson to give us a small sack of rations, a skin of water, and a bundle of preserved meat. "And a pair of lamps and a small telescope," he added. "May help you at night."
"A pair of lamps," I repeated, but my voice trembled with a level of calculation that would make any field medic proud.
They left. The caravan turned away down the road. Marin waved weakly. The world had given me a favor. I gave my family what I could—salt, torches, a small spool of bright cloth. They thanked me like I'd given them a found god.
We moved. The road ate days. We traded for small things. We hid the biggest miracles of the pantry like contraband. I learned to wrap bread in rags and pass it like a secret blessing. People who had been dull with despair began to sing quietly again. Old women called me "that girl who keeps bread to teach the rest of us how to hope."
We kept traveling toward the meeting place the old man had ordered. Night fell one evening and with night, like moths to flame, a group of grand carriages rolled into our small camp. The tires—or wheels—rustled. The lead carriage's curtains parted. There she was.
"Lady Artemisia Zimmermann," someone said. The name tasted of iron to me. I had bits of a memory that were more than rumor: a woman of a powerful house with a pinched smile who had once made a young girl kneel and shouted at her for being "tainted," for being poor. The memory arrived like a bruise. I saw colors: opal rings, silk, a face that had ordered, with small cruelty, the dismissal of the weak.
She stepped down, slow, supported by servants. Her eyes found me.
"You," she said—not as a greeting, but as a brand.
I had never been the sort to forget. The body I wore came with the old girl's grudges. But I had my own. I tightened my jaw.
"Lady," I said softly. "You should not be here. This camp is full of refugees."
Her laugh was small, like someone cracking a bone. "You are a village dog, aren't you? Do you have the audacity to speak? You will make room."
"Make room for what?" I asked.
"Food. Pigs. Our carriage is low on water. We will not die."
A hush. My hands curled. I felt every face in the camp move like tide. The dust around us rose. Gideon stood beside me, wide-eyed.
"Lady," I said. "You could wait for dawn. We have already promised to share out what we found. We'll keep you safe. We won't come between you and life."
She stepped close enough that the edge of her gown brushed the dust where I had placed a child's blanket earlier. "Sweet. I like this poet." She smiled like someone who'd practiced the cruelty of smiles. "You heroes of rags talk big. We pay men to make sure we get what we need."
A servant stepped forward. He had bright buttons. He reached into his pouch.
"Lady," I said, "do you know what this land is like? There are children who've eaten clay. There are people who've dug up graves. If you bring your men through and take what you will, you will leave a village of ghosts behind. Is that your plan?"
She fixed me with poisonous eyes. "You are no teacher of life," she said. "Do not act as if you keep from starvation. You are dirt."
A voice near the carriage startled me. "My lady," a young woman said. She was pretty, with a face like a doll. "Should we go? The men—"
"Do as I say," Artemisia said. "We will find what we need. These peasants owe us."
At that moment, the air tightened like a rope. I had seen these faces—her and her daughter—once before in a memory that felt worse than an old scar. I could not leave it be.
"I will remind you of something," I said to Artemisia. "If you take from this village, you will be remembered. Not with the golden threads they used to wrap your hair, but with blood and names. People will speak your name and hiss it like a warning."
She laughed. "Threats from a peasant," she said. "I will have you trampled."
She motioned just then and two of her guards moved to seize water skins from the men at the edge of camp. They were smooth-suited and ugly with a hunger for being obedient.
"Stop!" I shouted.
One of her guards balked, raised a hand. "Back away," I warned. "You want water? Pay for it."
"Pay?" the guard mocked, hand on club. "You have nothing to give. Throw her out. Teach the village."
He reached for the young father who stood protesting, and my second snapped like a controlled grenade. I stepped in front of the father and ran forward with a pushing motion that broke the guard's balance. Stone and flesh met. The guard fell with a cry.
Artemisia smiled thinly. "You will make a spectacle of yourself," she said. "Your kind is not allowed to boss us."
I had kept a list of wrongs in my chest like bullets. If she would not see sense, she would see pain.
"Listen," I said. "People here have been made to starve. They have watched children die and they have watched those who had hands and guts take what they wanted. If you take from us, you leave us dead."
"Enough words," her daughter, the pretty one, sneered. "Take the water. The woman can not stop us."
I looked at her—delicate and cruel—and an image rose in me. I saw the young woman in my memory laughing while other girls were punished. The heat in me went cold.
"Do it," I said. "Take it, all of it."
The daughter nodded to her men. They grabbed leather skins. They were pulling them when one of the old men—Gideon—stepped forward and knocked a skin to the ground.
"Don't touch it," he said.
"Old man," a soldier said, "you will teach your kind to be stubborn."
The soldier tried to step over the old man. I moved. I did not move alone. The villagers were mine now. I had given them medicine, bread, and hope; they trusted me to keep them alive. They rose as one. Not with swords—those we did not have—but with the thing people in a desperate world have a lot of: the will to survive.
"Back," I told Artemisia. "Leave now."
She raised a hand and called for her men to seize us. The moment she did, some women started calling names. They called places, and they called what had been done: names of people Artemisia had banished, of children she had sent away in rumors, of ties she had broken. Someone had a list; someone else had a story. Voices rose. The man from the carriage swung a baton toward Gideon. I stepped in, blade low, and in a breath the camp erupted.
Men and guards wrestled. I swung. I did not kill; that was not the purpose. I wanted the world to open and see the truth. I wanted a public reckoning.
I grabbed Artemisia's arm and pulled her forward into the sudden circle. Her servants froze. "You took from us and you called us names," I said, loud, first-person always, because people needed to watch and hear it come from me. "You turned your head when children went empty. You—Lady Artemisia Zimmermann—ordered people from this region to be thrown aside when harvest failed because you said they were poor and useless."
She flushed, denying. "You're a liar," she spat. "You have no proof."
"I have witnesses," I said. "I have names. You took silver and told men to beat any who came to your gates. Your daughter sent poison in a child's drink as a favor. Who will speak now? Who will tell? Do you deny it?"
She opened her mouth and tried to deny. That was when Gideon stepped into the circle, his knuckles bloody but his eyes like iron. He pointed at the carriage.
"One winter," he said, voice breaking with memory, "they came demanding our boys. They said they would employ them for the house. They took one who was ten. We found his shirt by a ditch. They said he ran away and died on the road. They called us liars when we came asking to know. My wife—my wife went mad."
A woman near me sobbed out a name.
"You're a liar," Artemisia shrieked. She snapped toward the carriage, and the young daughter cried, "Enough!"
"Proof!" I said. "Bring me your ledger. Bring me your records. Bring me your steward. Prove you fed these people at your gates."
The crowd pressed forward. Voices swelled like rain. The carriage guard hesitated. Cabot Davidson stepped forward like he always had, calm and looking for ways out of trouble. "My lady," he said, "this is—"
"Bring the ledger," I said.
"You're mad," Artemisia said, but under her breath, her hands trembled. She barked orders, and a steward produced a wide book, leather cracked. They thought to hush things. They thought they could sign a false sheet and leave.
I asked the crowd to listen. I asked Gideon to repeat names. He did. The women named crops and places. One by one, village by village, people told of men who never returned after being taken to the estate; of favors promised and lost. They named a steward's tricks: a false order here, a stolen plate there. Then someone found what would deliver them beyond gossip: a scrap of cloth, a ring, a child's shoe. The village produced it like a conjurer producing proof.
Artemisia's face paled as the artifacts were held up. The steward's voice failed. Men in the carriage shifted. Cabot's eyes went cold.
"It can't be," Artemisia wailed. "It's slander."
"Then explain this," I said, and I held up the shoe. "Explain how my cousin's shoe ended up in your fields with the mark of your signet in the mud."
She reached for it. "That is not—"
It doesn't matter how the truth comes. The crowd smelled its own power. They no longer bowed. They circled and pointed. The guards started to twitch, to think of their families, and the thought broke their loyalty.
"Get down," someone yelled. "Get down, lady."
I pushed forward, a step that said I would not stand down. I gripped her gown. "You will kneel," I told Artemisia. "You will face them. You will own what you've done."
She struggled at first. "I am a noble," she hissed. "I will not—"
"Then men will do what nobles do," I said. "They will be remembered for their sins."
The first blow came not from a villager but from the look on a woman's face: a woman who had had her child taken. She slapped Artemisia across the face, and the sound broke the spell. Others moved. They did not assault to kill; they wanted witness, confession, and humiliation. A guard finally lowered the carriage curtain. Cabot steadied himself and then, like a man choosing between family and order, set down a small sack of coins. He stepped out in front.
"Enough," Cabot said. His voice was low. "This cannot be solved by blood."
"Then solve it here," I said. "Open your ledger now. Confess. Apologize. Return what you can."
Artemisia sagged for a moment and then, like a thing unmade, crumpled. She slid to her knees in the dirt beside her shattered carriage and put her hands to the soil.
"Please," she said, and it was not a voice of silk any more. "Please, I beg you."
The moment was then utterly, completely public.
"Who put a hand to her?" a voice asked.
"Everyone sees now," Cabot said. "You see? They are human. We will not be above them."
They stood in a circle. Artemisia's daughter began to cry. The crowd pressed in. The old ledger lay open and Cabot, in a voice older than most of the villagers, began to read aloud the transactions, the dates, the names. Each name was like a pin into the carriage of power. The door of lies had split and the rot poured out.
One by one the villagers named what they'd lost. After each name, someone stepped forward and removed a token from the lady: a bit of coin, a ring, a plate. The crowd made a heap. The heap was split. "Let the poor take what they can," someone said. "Let them have the silver to buy seeds."
I watched as one by one the courtiers and guards saw their mistress not as untouchable but as a woman on her knees. Her face changed. It was no longer a face fitted to command. It was a face that had to plead.
"Please," she said again, folding into herself.
Cabot looked at her, weighed the scale in his hands, and for the first time I saw his shoulders drop. He'd done what men like him always did: had power, and he chose, finally, the side of logic.
"You will leave," Cabot said. "You will travel. You will return what we can find in your chests. You will confess in the magistrate's book. You will kneel when you enter the towns you wronged."
"Please," she whispered.
It was not mercy. It was public humiliation and restitution. The village had gathered to see the rich's face when the ledger opened. People recorded the moment by memory. They whispered to one another. They exchanged looks like currency. Some wept. Some vomited from the horror of recognition. Some took the silver and ran with their children in their arms.
Artemisia's knees dug into hard dirt. The daughter wailed. The guards lowered their heads. The caravan made a slow departure under the weight of what it had been forced to give. The crowd watched until the wagon wheels disappeared into the dawn.
After it passed and the dust settled, a hush settled over us like dew. Gideon came and put his hand on my shoulder, fingers trembling.
"You did it," he said, in a voice I had never heard from him before. "You brought them to their knees."
"I made sure they would not take another child's shoe," I said. "For now."
"You didn't kill them," Gideon said. "You humiliated them."
"I wanted them to beg," I said. "I wanted them to flinch when a village spoke their name. That is more than death in this place. They will be remembered."
The camp stayed in a kind of stunned peace. People moved through the piles and took what they'd need. Some of the children cleaned the two small wounds of a guard who had been cut when he slipped. "You are the same as any of us now," the guard murmured. "You made me see."
They forgave the lady nothing. They had not forgiven the world for being empty. But they had met power and forced it to bend. The next day, when I walked through the camp, the old women told stories: "You remember when a girl made a noble kneel? You remember when a shoe brought a house down?" They told the story as if it had always been a part of them.
Months later, when the drought eased a hair and the first green came like a rumor, they told that story to children who had never seen silk or signet rings. They told it like a warning and like a hymn.
I kept pushing forward. We traveled toward a place called the city—the capital. We gathered what we could. Victor Zimmermann's caravan came through the valley later, but without Artemisia. He never asked me for another favor. Cabot sometimes nods from a distance when we cross his path. Gideon sleeps easier now.
At night, when I put the two babies to bed in a hollow between my knees and a borrowed blanket, I whisper so I don't forget who I was. "I used to be a medic, a soldier, Veronika Keller," I say. "I learned to hold men while they screamed and to stitch a heart closed enough to keep it beating."
From the pantry I drew one more treasure—small, simple: a wooden box with two jade pendants. I didn't show it to anyone. I held it to my chest like a promise.
"One day," I told the sleeping babies, "we will build something. We will plant something that grows. I will teach you how to tend it. And if any noble comes by and tries to take what is ours, we will make them kneel and count their ledger, and the village will name them for what they are."
I slipped the pendants into my pocket and looked at the stars.
They were the same stars I'd once flown under. The sky still moved. People still woke. I had come here with nothing and I had found, in the middle of the blasted world, a place to take fire.
I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, the pantry supplied two warm buns. I handed one to the small boy in Gideon's arms.
"Eat," I said. "Eat and remember that nobody gets to decide our fate but us."
He bit into the bread and closed his eyes like it was the first sweet thing he'd tasted.
That night I slept in the hollow of my scarf, with the two babies at my side and the city's lamp glow dim on the horizon. I had come back to life into a different set of hands. I would make them count.
The End
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