I've wanted to write this story for a while and some of it is already written. I felt like posting this first chapter even though the story is not finished, just to see if people liked my idea. This fic is AU and the story is inspired by the tv series called The Tribe. It is probably set in today or a not so distant future, but something has happened to the world as we know it.

Nobody noticed the day the world changed. There was no explosion, no grand reveal, there were no aliens or supernatural takeover. The day the world changed people went to work, quarrelled with their spouses, kids teased each other, babies were born and in a laboratory in an unknown town a medical researcher looked into the microscope and found that the virus they were using to trying to create a new medication had mutated.

Kurt rounded a large pile of garbage that nearly blocked the street to find to find two little kids fighting over what looked like a dead pigeon. It was impossible to say if they were boys or girls, they both had long dirty hair and were dressed in rags. If he had to put an age to them Kurt would say they were eight, maybe nine, years old. The two of them were probably strays, easily discerned by the state of their clothes and their age. Kids that young had been born right at the end and it was a miracle that they had even survived. Most of them were wild if they hadn't found a tribe that would take them in.

Very carefully Kurt started to back up to get out of their sight should they notice him. Sure, they were little kids, but there were two of them and there was something definitely feral about them.

His foot brushed up against something, making a rattling noise, and the heads of the two kids snapped up in his direction. It was a motion so eerily animal-like that Kurt didn't think, he just reacted. Spinning around, he took off down the street, skidding around turns and running flat out until his vision started to blur. In the beginning he thought he heard small feet chasing him, but then all he could hear was the sound of his own heaving breath.

Kurt threw himself against a wall, his chest heaving and heart beating unnaturally fast. It seemed like he had lost his two pursuers, but he had no idea where he was. Carefully looking around he found a red dragon head marked on the corner of one of the buildings opposite him. Good, at least he wasn't too far away from his own tribe. The Dragons were a tough crowd, but they were loyal to the Amazones and their leader, Lauren. Kurt was an Amazone, one of the few male members of the tribe and the only one not working in the pleasure house. Lauren had taken one look at Kurt when he came to her begging to get a place in her tribe and told him no. "What am I gonna use you for," she had told him, "you're a boy, and a small one at that. I'd have to feed you for years before you can be of any use to me and with those matchstick arms I can't put you to work at the farms." Kurt had sniffed a little but refused to cry. Instead he had looked out over the chaotic warehouse where Lauren kept court. There were so much stuff in there, valuable stuff that the Amazones guarded fiercely. All the food and other remnants of Before was what gave the Amazones their power. They had been the first to get organised and before the other kids had known it they had taken control over the docks and the farms outside the city. They had also drawn up an agreement for passage and mutual benefits with one of the other tribes, the Dragons, who had been living in the area between the harbour and the farms the Amazones didn't control. Back then Kurt had looked out over the riches and got an idea. "I can work here," he had said with an eager smile. "I can help you organise and keep control over the stock. I can make sure that the stuff that will expire first gets sold first and I can keep count so nothing goes missing without you knowing about it." He stood up straight and looked up at Lauren who was watching him with a thoughtful expression.

It had taken him a couple of more weeks of badgering Lauren about his idea but she had eventually caved.

So now Kurt was Lauren's right hand man, and everyone knew who he was. He was notorious, he was the weird boy who hadn't turned into a man. Sure, Kurt had grown up, he knew he had, it was just that at fifteen he still had the high voice and smooth skin of a much younger boy. Most kids were kind of freaked out by him, but not Lauren. So Kurt was the only male member of the Amazones that worked with his head and not his muscles, and it suited him fine. He loved to organise the warehouses and he managed to keep track of everything with very little effort. It was the lack of effort that had made him venture out in the city today. Recently he had been bored out of his mind, not even rearranging the meagre supply of clothes they had at the warehouses had managed to get him out of his funk. Now as he made his way through the rubble in streets he silently wished he had kept to what he knew and done his job instead of getting it into his head that he wanted to go exploring. This wasn't him, no he belonged in the warehouses.

The city kids came to the warehouses to barter for things like food, batteries or clothing. They had to have something to barter with of course, something of value and Kurt had developed hard skin from having to turn down little kids with grubby fists that held a yoyo or a toy figurine, those things had no value. Instead he sent them over to the employment line so that they could earn themselves some credits.

Lauren's empire employed between ten and twenty kids on a day basis, to clean or sweep the streets, those kinds of things. The Amazones themselves took care of things like security and transportation, but none of the girls in the tribe cleaned. The food they sold was transported in from the farms outside the city that were under Amazone control.

Then there was the pleasure house, where kids came to unwind, play games and drink. Alcoholism was a growing problem in the city, but Lauren said that she couldn't control what people chose to do with their bodies, she just supplied what everyone wanted. That was another thing the pleasure house was notorious for, men.

Sure, Before none of them would have been more than teenage boys, now, they were so few and Lauren had some of the best looking ones dancing in her club. Most of them did more than dancing, but Kurt chose not to think about that. He tried not to think about the men at all, but it was beyond difficult when he bumped into them at the club when Lauren demanded his presence, or at the Amazone compound, an old high school. Always scantily clad, blond Sam, dark haired Mike or the newest, Jake, were distractions on two legs. Kurt knew they were off limits, but it was hard not to look at their abs or their arms or any other part of them really.

Kurt knew that he was gay, a homosexual, but there really wasn't any room for homosexuality in this world. It wasn't that it was frowned upon or that people thought it was wrong. It was just that if you were a guy and wanted status, you needed to be into girls. The girls had the power, made the laws and controlled the tribes. Boys had only one thing to contribute to society, their bodies. Of course there were individuals such as Kurt, who managed to create a place for themselves in spite of everything, but they were few and far apart, and they were also always working for a woman. Boys were fewer and had shorter live spans. Even now years after the last adult had died, boys would fall ill when they were around nineteen or twenty and after a painful month in bed they would grow weak and die. The girls didn't, at least not yet anyway. Lauren had told Kurt that she knew of women who were twenty-four now. Twenty-four, it was so unfair, Kurt thought. He wanted to live too, instead he had this ticking clock hanging over his head counting down to his nineteenth year. Maybe that was why he was so restless? He wanted to live, to experience as much of life as he could before he would die. Recently there was something else he wanted as well, there was a yearning inside him that kept on growing. He would look at Sam in his tiny shorts or Mike as he danced and there was this hunger inside him that was almost painful. He kept waking up in the middle of the night, painfully hard or sticky after a release. The want kept itching under his skin, and Kurt desperately wanted to share himself with someone. He would watch Lauren and her man Puck when they thought no one were watching, and Kurt would ache with the longing to touch someone with such familiarity, to communicate like those two did, without words.

Kurt caught a whiff of the salty tanginess of the sea and soon he started to see the black woman's head, the mark of the Amazones, on the buildings around him. The rubble in the street was gone now, the Amazones part of the city was cleaned and cleared, instead the rubbish was gathered to make barricades effectively fencing in their part of the city, keeping the ways in to a minimum and therefore the rabble easier to control. Kurt would have passed a guard-post as he entered Amazone territory, but sometimes they were cleverly hidden and did not make themselves known unless you were unknown to them, and Kurt was most definitely known.

When Kurt stepped into the warehouse he was immediately flanked by Puck. "She is not pleased with your disappearance," he said quietly and Kurt sighed. The butch teenage boy looked frazzled and it was obvious who had been on the receiving end of Lauren's anger in his absence. Kurt followed the older boy through the large room filled with shelves and into the tiny back room where Lauren presided whenever she was in the warehouse.

"Where the fuck have you been, Hummel!" Lauren roared. Getting up from the chair she was sitting in and got right up in his face. "You are my guy, and you do as I tell you. Did I tell you to go gallivanting around the city?"

Kurt shook his head.

Lauren cast a glance at Puck. "Get out Puck."

The boy with the Mohawk scrambled to get out the door and it shut with a bang, making the glass in the little window rattle.

"What the hell were you thinking of Kurt? I know you're a big boy now, but it's dangerous out there." Lauren's voice had softened some now that they were alone.

"I just wanted to go scavenge for myself for once. I haven't gone in months and I miss it." Kurt lied, meeting Laurens eyes defiantly.

"There's a reason for that you nitwit. You are needed here; nobody can keep the warehouses going like you. You are too valuable to me to go running around town. Where were you anyway?"

Kurt couldn't keep looking at her when he said; "Out past Dragon territory."

"You idiot!" Lauren smacked him over the head. "Nobody patrols that part, what if someone had attacked you?"

Kurt didn't tell her about the two feral little kids, he just nodded his head leaving his eyes downcast.

"I'm sorry that I worried you and it won't happen again."

"Hah," Lauren laughed, "make me a promise you can actually keep."