Chapter 25. The Seed Corn
Training in the Army of Darkness was work, work, work.
Aster remembered many years ago, caring for the animals in the Zoo has also been work, especially for a small-for-her-age little girl. There had been water and food to bring to the animals, shit to take away, females to be bred, and hard decisions to make about which animals to keep and which to be culled, either to leave enough food and room for the rest, or (more often) to provide something for the Maestro's insatiable appetite.
It had been pointless, Aster had come to realize. There weren't enough animals in the Zoo to avoid inevitable inbreeding and extinction, no matter how many charts her father kept. Still, it had kept her family alive and fairly well off (as the Maestro often wanted exotic creatures for his table) and the little girl she had been had found it fun. And perhaps a few of the smaller animals, some of the small snakes or bats that had escaped or been released by her father, before the Maestro had been destroyed, might breed their numbers back up fast enough to make it.
There were worse legacies to a life than to leaving a population of bats behind in Dystopia. And like the chores in the Zoo, the thought of frantic bats flying into the Maestro's long, dirty hair or biting and scratching him in the dark when he couldn't see them (not that the tiny creatures could actually hurt the green bastard) was fun.
Fun, fun, fun. Not work, work, work, like training in General Monroe's army. The Army of Darkness. Aster liked the name. It was like something from a storybook, and Aster wondered how General Monroe had come up with it. And it seemed her stories were not quite as 'irrelevant' as General Monroe had original said. Because after she had been in the Army a few days, he actually had her come up before everyone else, and tell them about the story she had read 'Ozma of Oz', and how Ozma had had a chariot pulled by the Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger, and how the Maestro had done exactly the same thing. He even got his pet sketch artist, Trask, to draw pictures of Ozma and her chariot, from Aster's description of the cover of the book.
"Let them see how that Green Bastard is acting like a vain little girl." General Monroe said, glancing at Aster, then turning away. "It'll give them courage, and they need every bit they can get."
He also had Aster talk about how Ozma had a magic carpet, that let her and the Army of Oz cross the deadly desert, that killed anything that touched it.
"We'll cross the wastelands." General Monroe assured everyone. "We don't have a magic carpet, but we have the trucks, and plenty of metal to keep out the radiation. Especially from our Seed Corn."
The 'Seed Corn' was something General Monroe talked about often. It referred to anyone under age 30, especially (as in ONLY) women and girls. Aster understood. Women were born with all the eggs they would ever have, and if they were damaged by radiation, they would have mutated children. Or no children. Men were always making sperm. If some were damaged… well, there would be new sperm in a few weeks. And one of general Monroe's laws was NO SEX. Now, or until a month after they got to Wisconsin. Radiation could harm an embryo as well. They weren't sure how old an embryo or fetus had to be before radiation would no longer cause mutation, and decided that the less risk, the better. And they were the Army of Darkness. Seeds grew in the darkness, not in the light, and radiation was a form of light, Aster assured everyone. Or at least energy. She had read it in books. It was just a sort of light that your eyes couldn't see, but it was still there. And everyone hated radiation. Not only had the War made a dangerous amount of it, almost everywhere, but it had been radiation that created the Maestro himself. The darkness was far better.
"Bugger your wife. Or another man. Or have her suck you off. Or wank off. I don't fucking well care. But I'll hang the man who gets a woman knocked up before we get through the radiation."
Aster laughed a little at this, but was careful to hide it. She had read a few stories about armies, back when she had been little, and this was probably the first, last, and only army she had ever heard of where homosexuality had actually been actively encouraged. A pity the Maestro hadn't been gay, then he would have left her alone, and none of the horrible things that had happened, would have happened.
No… she shook her head. They just would have happened to someone else. A boy, somewhere, instead of her. And probably the zoo would be gone anyways, and she wouldn't know the things about the Maestro and the Palace that she did, that made her so useful to General Monroe. Nobody is ever told what would have happened. That was a line from a book, too. About a magical land called Narnia, that had talking animals just like the Oz books. She had no way of knowing what would have happened if the Maestro hadn't taken her as a slave. It could be that her father and sister would still be alive and the Zoo would still be there. Or it could be that it all would be dead and gone as it was now, and she would be dead as well.
General Monroe's threat to hang someone was not mere talk. He hung a man three days after Aster had joined the Army. It happened before breakfast, even before their pre-breakfast training. They had all got woken up and brought out to the muddy ground where they did there training. There was a man there, with a noose around his neck, and the other end of the rope slung across the top of a rusty semi-truck trailer. General Monroe was absolutely furious. Apparently the man had some sort of 'old, pre-war, camera' that 'used film, but not batteries', had taken a number of pictures with it, and had been caught five miles down the dirt road trying to sneak off, back to Dystopia. He had been a spy, for the Maestro.
That made Aster angry. Everyone else, too. They all had reasons to hate the Maestro, and the fact that they couldn't kill him, but could only try - if they could - to run away from him, simply made their hatred worse.
The man had a number of used cylinders of film in his pocket, and General Monroe called Aster up towards him, where he stood next to the condemned man.
"HE -" The general pointed one angry finger at the spy, "Won't talk. Can you develop these… find out what they are pictures of?"
Aster looked at the spy, then looked away. There were burn marks on his face and all his fingernails were missing. She resolved never to betray General Monroe. Or at least not to be caught alive after doing so. He was every bit as bad as the Maestro. Down to bringing everyone out to witness the execution. It was only the fact that he was weaker that restrained him from stepping right into the Maestro's shoes. She looked at the film, her stomach roiling. She hated seeing people or animals in pain, especial un-natural pain. "I don't know… maybe someday. I've read books that talked a little about the old film cameras. You need a special room with only red lights, and some sort of chemical liquids to dip the film in. But I don't know what sort of chemicals they are, or where to get them. There was a photography studio in Dystopia, me and my family had a few pictures taken there, so there must be a way to do it, even now. But I don't really know what it is."
"Bugger it all." He glared at Aster as if it was somehow her fault that she didn't have a photography studio stowed away in her meager luggage, then tossed the cannisters of used film to Daniel Wolfkiller, who was standing nearby, a grim expression on his face. "Burn those."
Aster took a note of Wolfkiller's set face. When she had stolen a bottle, so long ago, from the little love-nest he had made in a shed at the Zoo, Wolfkiller had looked angry. But he hadn't been ready to kill her. In fact he had tried to help her, in his own way. Perhaps he was much like an animal, in that regard. In animals, visible anger was often only a warning, meant to avoid trouble before it got to the point of killing. When it did get to the point of actual killing, then it was all business. And in times like these, human beings were turning into little more than animals. She remembered the scramble for loaves of moldy, stale bread a few mornings ago, and felt ashamed. That what she and other human beings had become. Animals scrambling and clawing for food and territory.
No, not what we've become. Aster tried to make herself feel better. What the Maestro has made of us. If it hadn't been for HIM, keeping us down and terrorizing us, we probably would have rebuilt things by now. Made a decent world for ourselves, not a rotten world like this one where we have to choose between two different torturing socipaths to keep ourselves safe. And perhaps we will make a decent world yet. In Wisconsin. If we can figure out just what guilty secret the people there are keeping in time to save ourselves from it.
"I'm sorry… my…my Lord." The condemned man was actually crying. "I didn't want to betray you. I didn't want to be here at all. You don't understand. The Maestro… he has my wife and kids."
This last comment threatened to bring forth sympathy from most of the audience, until General Monroe simply said: "We've all got wives and kids. Most of us." He glanced at the female members of the army, then at Aster. "Or husbands and kids. Or something we care about."
He didn't wait for the man to say anything more, and simply turned to the men holding the rope. "Hang him."
The men on the other side of the rusty trailer pulled, hauling the end of the rope and the condemned man up in the air. It was not a good way to hang someone. Dropping someone from a gallows, or even off a stool at least snapped their neck instantly. Pulling them upwards with the noose killed them slowly by strangulation.
Aster hated watching it. She had hated the man when she heard he was a dirty spy, then when he mentioned his wife and children in the hands of the Maestro, she felt sorry for him. He reminded her of the starving tiger in the cage at the Maestro's palace. A once noble animal in a trap it never deserved. She felt ashamed of herself. A good person, like the heroes that had died trying to defeat the Maestro would have done something. Saved the man. Or spoken up at least.
But Aster was no hero. She couldn't save the man, she wasn't strong enough to fight General Monroe, and no words she had would have changed his mind. All she would have done is maybe gotten herself hung, too. And for what? If the man had gotten away with his spying, he would have brought the Maestro straight to the Underworld. She would undoubtedly be either raped to death or burned alive, along with everyone else there. Even the little kids, younger than Aster had been when the Maestro had taken her for the first time.
As the rope tightened, the man's face turned red and he kicked violently, drumming uselessly against the metal sides of the semi trailer with a hollow, metallic noise, and she could smell it as he emptied himself into his pants. The drumming sound gradually slowed, like a frantic heartbeat coming to a stop, and then there was eerie silence. The whole thing made her sick. 'General' Monroe was just like the Maestro, down to arbitrarily executing his 'enemies' and forcing other people to line up and bear witness to it. The condemned man had even called him 'My Lord' at the end, just like people had called the Maestro.
No, maybe not just like the Maestro. Aster tried to convince herself, needing to believe that she was in a GOOD army. The hanging took a few minutes, but it was more merciful than burning people to death. And we did it to protect ourselves and our children, not to just keep raping and stealing from people like the Maestro. And maybe General Monroe doesn't know there's a faster way to hang people. I'm probably the only one here who has read Robin Hood and the other old, old stories about the days when people build gallows and things.
But he did torture him first. The guilty voice in her insisted. Aster tried to justify it to herself, and couldn't. It was EVIL. She couldn't convince herself it was not. That made the self-appointed 'General' Monroe EVIL. Just like the Maestro.
But then… what did it make her? Because as lost in bookish thoughts as she often was, Aster still had far too wide a streak of honesty to deny her own truth to herself. That if she could have saved her father, and Thumb, and the animals and the Zoo by torturing someone who was going to betray them, she would have done so. General Monroe had implied that he had children that he had come to care about. He'd be a poor father, if he let the Maestro get his hands on them.
It was animal behavior, but in some ways animals were more honest and wiser than human beings. Aster remembered when she was a child, reading articles in tattered, yellowing, Pre-War magazines that were about cooking and fashions. The articles, mostly written by women, had simpered and sobbed endlessly about the evils of guns. From the exaggerated tone of fear of the authors, one would have thought that they were under the belief that guns ran down the street shooting themselves. What especially annoyed Aster was that the articles always claimed that guns should be made illegal for the children. That sort of comment got absolutely nothing but contempt from Aster, who had seen the behavior of mother animals both in the Zoo, and in the wild. There wasn't a single mother mammal or bird who wouldn't defend her young with every tooth and claw they had, and as viciously as they had to. Yet these human so-called 'mothers' from before the war went on endlessly about how disarming themselves would make their children 'safe'.
How? Aster had often wondered then, and wondered again now. How does a small, weak woman propose keeping her children 'safe' from a man three times as large and strong as herself, if NOT with a GUN? Or at least a hell of a big stick!?
Probably, Aster decided, they just hadn't had the stomach for violence, for either necessary evil or justice. No stomach for blood. Rather than act like adults and get the stomach for it, they had simpered and whined and claimed that rendering themselves completely unable to defend their own children somehow magically made their children 'safe'.
It was obvious nonsense in retrospect. Being helpless to defend themselves against the Maestro certainly hadn't made ordinary human beings, even children, safe from him. Quite the opposite, in fact.
General Monroe did not bother with a long speech of self-justification after the condemned man (much to Aster's relief) stopped kicking and went limp. He simply let the silence fill the air for a few seconds and said:
"If anyone else is spying for the Maestro, now would be a good time to turn yourselves in. I'll let you live, if you admit it. If you don't, and I find out, I'll hang you."
There was silence. Nobody else was spying for the Maestro. Or at least they weren't willing to admit doing so. General Monroe looked around for a few seconds, then said: "There's a new law. Cameras and film are no longer allowed here in the Underworld. If any of you have either, you have 24 hours to turn them in to be destroyed."
Aster thought about the new Law for a second. It was mostly a good idea, but only mostly. She had a better one, one that would give hope to the army and power to General Monroe. She raised her hand, which got an annoyed look on the part of General Monroe.
"What do you want, Zookeeper?"
"My… Sir… the cameras and film are dangerous if people take the wrong pictures and somehow get them to the Maestro. But I don't think you should destroy them. At least, not all of them. Keep a few cameras and all of the film."
The ex-bandit who now headed his own army looked even more annoyed. "May I ask what the hell for?"
"It's… well. I think we have a good chance of escaping from here, to Wisconsin. If we do, we'll have children and grandchildren someday. I know some people are keeping diaries of their lives, in hopes that their children can read it. I just thought… if you kept the cameras and film yourself, they would be safe. And it would be good to take pictures of everyone in the army. We can't develop the film now, but someday our children or grandchildren will be able to. I think it would be good to leave them our faces, along with our stories."
This was the first time General Monroe had looked even slightly pleased with anything Aster had to say. He stopped scowling, which was probably as close as he ever got to a smile, and nodded.
"Fair enough. I have a heavy box where they should be safe. I'll come up with a schedule for taking pictures later, when I've figured out how much film we actually have on our hands." He walked over to a metal and wooden crate, and took the top off. "Anyone who has cameras and film can put them in here, no questions asked, for the next 24 hours. After that, I'll hang anyone found with either."
He waited until the crowd wandered off, then went up to Aster. "Very good, Zookeeper. Keep feeding me power." He said under his breath, so that no-one else could hear. "Feed me so I can keep you, and everyone else here alive."
Aster did not feel particularly proud of herself for 'feeding' General Monroe power. He was as much of a monster as the Maestro, as much of a Vampire as Morbius, in his way. One who fed on power, rather than blood. He wanted to be a King, just like the Maestro, which was probably why he was so fixated on his Seed Corn. A King needed someone to rule over, to boss around and bully, or he was nothing. The only thing that consoled her was that feeding him kept other people, some of them little kids, alive as well as herself. Perhaps she, or they, would live long enough to someday rid themselves of those who thought they were Kings, to rule over them.
She hated herself for not being a hero, like the ones in the Hall of Fallen Heroes. A hero would have found a way to keep everyone alive without making lousy deals with a sociopath, a would be King like Erick Monroe. But she was not a hero, she was just a lousy, weak woman, not much older than a girl, who couldn't have children like other women, and couldn't climb over the high wall like a man. A freak whose only use was that she knew the layout of the Maestro's palace and had read more books than everyone else in the Army put together.
Other than giving more power to General Monroe in the form of the respect he got as the 'keeper' of cameras and film that would be a record of their faces, the main result of the new law was that the next day, the box was filled not only with cameras and film, but a number of other objects. Apparently some people were not entirely certain what a camera actually was, and had turned in an amazing variety of pre-war objects and devices, including empty deodorant sticks, toys, and something that General Monroe had no idea what it was, but Wolfkiller smirked at it and said it was a 'vibrator'. Aster didn't see what was so funny about the object, and if it had once 'vibrated', it didn't do so any more. Wolfkiller whispered something to General Monroe, which got the same sort of smirk from him.
The 'vibrator' and other objects which were not cameras were put out on a long table for the former owners to reclaim (although nobody reclaimed the 'vibrator' and after a few days it was consigned to the scrap heap as there was a small motor in it that could be salvaged for the metal). Even all of the cameras and film were not useful. Before the war, people had been using mostly a type of camera called 'digital', which nobody in the camp could get to work, and from what Aster recalled from a few magazine articles she had read about them, they could not be made to work without batteries (or another power source), as well as a computer. The nearest power source and computers were in Dystopia, and nobody was inclined to go there, to try to get the 'digital cameras' working. They were consigned to the scrap heap as well.
Some of the film had already been used. This made General Monroe scowl, despite both Wolfkiller and Aster pointing out that it could possibly have been used a long time ago, before the owners ever got to the Consolidated Iron Mines. For all they knew, it had been used before the War, and never developed. General Monroe ordered all the used film to be burned, regardless. Aster protested slightly at this, saying that pictures that might have been taken before the War might be of interest to their children or Grandchildren, when they learned how to develop the stuff. Then she dropped it, as General Monroe rightly pointed out that there were plenty of pictures in old books and magazines, and he was more interested in making sure that their children and grandchildren had a chance to survive, than leaving them a few more picture of 'the idiots who blew up their world'.
That the people who lived before the war were idiots was one thing Aster agreed with everyone else on. Or rather, they were fools. No doubt they were smart, they built all sorts of wonders which now existed only for a privileged few in Dystopia. They had hot and cold water with no more effort than turning a knob, rather than laboring at a pump or fetching it in buckets. Warm houses without having to chop and carry wood. All the fruit, vegetables, meat, and desserts they wanted any time of year for very cheaply. Instead of the cold stale bread, and gruel, and half-rotten squashes and onions, and maggoty walnuts, and bland boiled pork soup that everyone in the Army of Darkness was eating, and most of them more than grateful that there was even that much.
But were they satisfied with this paradise? Oh no! Rather than mind their own business and be grateful for the wonderful world they had, they had to obsessively poke their nose into everyone else's lives. It was amazing the completely trivial and pointless things that didn't even affect them at all, mostly having to do with sex, God, and money, that they worried about, until they finally blew themselves and their whole world up over it. Spoiled fools, all. All wanting to be Kings over everyone else, and bully them around.
Apparently the conclusion Aster had come to a long time ago, about leaving other people and their Gods alone so long as they and their Gods left you alone was too difficult for them to wrap their little minds around. Aster told some of the other people in the Army about articles she had read in Pre-War magazines, complaining about having to 'live in the same neighborhood as homosexuals'. There was little sympathy for the sort of spoilt, whining children who got upset over a little buggery a few doors down from people who had to worry about the Maestro taking the best of their daughters by force and raping them to death.
Well, the questions about sex, God, and money had been answered for them by General Monroe, at least so long as they were part of the Army of Darkness. He didn't have the time or inclination to cater to spoiled brats who wanted him to tell other people how to live their lives. You could have any sort of sex you wanted, so long as it wasn't the sort that could get a woman pregnant. You could worship whatever God or Gods you wanted. You could have whatever money or other sorts of wealth you earned. Not that there was much money, or much of anything else around.
Provided, of course, that it did not interfere with your duties in the army, and you left others alone to have whatever sort of sex, Gods, or money they wanted. If that wasn't to your liking, well, then General Monroe had plenty of rope. If poor little you just couldn't live with how other people lived their lives, it was faster and cheaper to hang you, than to try to control everyone else.
Nobody chose to be hung, at least not for that reason. There was something to be said for there being just one King, rather than a whole nation of everyone wanting to tell everyone else what to do. As much as having any King sucked, at least it was sometimes possible to please a single man. So long as he was at least half sane. Nobody could please a whole country full of would-be Kings, all of whom disagreed on what they wanted other people to do.
Eventually, the unused film was sorted out, and organized with the cameras. It turned out that that there was more than one size of film, and it each size had to go in a camera made to fit it, which Aster found stupid and redundant. There were a few obscene jokes about this circulating around the Army camp for a few days, having to do with men's and women's privates coming in different sizes, and the fact only being discovered after a couple was married. The jokes really weren't all that funny, but people laughed at them anyways. Discrepencies in sizes aside, it was determined that there was enough unused film (though how good a condition it was after nearly 100 years was unknown) to take one individual picture of everyone, and one 'family' picture. Everyone's name was written down, and the order of picture taking was determined by lottery, so that nobody got a better chance at the film that looked to be in better condition than anyone else. If a person wished, they could include pets (of which there were not very many) or special belongings in either or both pictures. So that possible future viewers would know the names to go with the faces, when they had their picture taken, there was a small paper sign with their name on it next to them. Aster had her 'individual' picture taken as well, but not a family picture. She had no family. She held her own pictures of her father and sister when she had her own picture taken, with their names written on the sign below hers.
It was the best she could do. It was the best they could do. They didn't even know if the pictures would ever be developed.
Everyone there was part of the Army of Darkness, although only those who were 13 years of age and older were required to train for fighting. The younger children still had duties, though. Anyone capable of walking and talking had to work. Some of them dismantled machines (such as the useless 'digital cameras') and sorted out their innards for re-use or melting down. Others chopped up what little food they had to eat. A few children balked at this. Generally a day or three without eating made them more cooperative. One boy however, threw a tantrum and pounded the ground with his fists and absolutely refused to chop onions 'because they made him cry'. General Monroe finally had to drag him bodily over to a large chamber in the mines where there were several pigs, and (according to rumor) threatened to 'cut off his little pink cock and feed it to the pigs'. Whatever it was that had happened, the boy worked after that. Sulkily, and often giving looks of mixed fear and anger whenever General Monroe, or Aster, or anyone else he perceived as having any sort of rank in the Army of Darkness (which to his mind was everyone but his parents) walked past him. But he worked.
For those over 13 (but not so old they were frail) there was training. Hard training. Mainly in the dark.
They were, after all, the Army of Darkness. Learning to fight in the dark was one of the few advantages they would have over the Maestro's guards. They ran around and around the icy, rutted ground where the trucks were parked, learning to tell where the ruts and holes were by the fact that they were slightly darker than the higher ground. Often they tripped, stumbled, and scraped themselves. They got up and kept running. They learned to feel the ground with their toes, and to keep their knees slightly bent, so as to take a fall better. Sometimes they were cut badly enough that Aster or a few other people who knew anything about medicine were called over to bandage, cauterize, or stitch their cuts. There seemed to be plenty of alcohol for disinfecting wounds, which Aster wondered about, but was thankful for.
It was cold, and Aster often shivered, and her lungs burned from the effort of running fast and hard and with barely a rest. When that happened, she thought about the heat of standing in front of the Maestro's giant fireplace, like standing before the gates of Hell, and how much she hated him. She thought about him killing all the children of the people in the Army, and dragging her off to be raped, this time to death. Then she bit her lip and ran faster.
There were other exercises, sit ups, push ups, pull ups. The latter two, Aster was not good at. Very few of the women were, but they were made to do them anyways. Then there were weapons. The women, and the younger children in the army (those between the ages of 13 and 16) were trained with bows and slings. The men with axes and spears and swords. They shot and hacked at dummies that were sometimes clothing filled with straw, and sometimes pieces of logs pegged together in the rough shape of a man. Usually there was little left of the cloth and straw dummies by the end of the night, and they were sewn back together and reshuffled by the youngest children during the day, only to be hacked apart again the following night. Eventually, once the women and younger children got fairly decent with their bows and slings, they were taught to hit light colored dummies by shooting over a few rows of dark colored dummies. Aster understood. General Monroe needed as many people as he could get in his army, even the Seed Corn, but he planned to put them in as protected a position as he could. If they won, most of the Seed Corn would survive. If they lost, they Maestro would hunt them down regardless of whether they had fought or not, and kill them. Unpleasantly.
All of them were initially trained with guns. General Monroe had a fairly large supply of guns and ammunition, stolen over the years. Fairly large… but not as large as he would have wanted. There was a target range in one tunnel of the mine, where the sound would not carry to the outside and be heard. Everyone in the army was allowed three sessions, where they shot 50 times each, only those who were best at shooting were allowed to continue training with the guns.
Aster, oddly enough, was one of the few women who was any good with the gun. This seemed to greatly please General Monroe, though Aster wasn't sure why.
"Wolfkiller said you used to hunt a lot with a bow." General Monroe said, when he saw the close groups of holes on Aster's target. "Perhaps that's why you're good with a gun."
"The gun isn't all that much like the bow." Aster disagreed with him, but the General still seemed pleased, and whispered something in Daniel Wolfkiller's ear, which seemed to upset him. At least he shook his head. Perhaps he didn't think the bow and gun had much to do with each other, either. Even the gun, though, they often had to train with in the dark. Aster and the other members of the Army of Darkness at first thought this to be impossible. Then they learned that guns not only made noise and death, but light as well. They would shoot together in groups, one of them would be chosen to shoot a single bullet, then the rest of them would aim during the brief flash of light. They hit their targets most of the time.
There was praise from General Monroe for those who were best at shooting or other parts of their training. At least, there was praise on rare occasions. More often, there were screams from him at those who did not meet whatever standards he had set. Often Aster wondered if his standards were realistic or not. Certainly not very many people met them very often. And there were various motivational speeches. Often, General Monroe would bring out some of the youngest children, lift them onto a rough table so everyone could easily see them, and remind them that if they didn't train hard enough, and failed in raiding the Maestro's palace for all the things they would need in order to get to and survive in Wisconsin, the Maestro would burn the men alive and rape the women to death have the youngest children on his dinner table. Whereas if they did succeed, there would be plenty of children, food, women and other good things for everyone in Wisconsin. The people there were no doubt strong and good looking and well off, what with all the plants and trees and water there, and would be fine wives for some of the boys and men and fine husbands for some of the girls and women.
Sometimes he even brought out a boy and a girl, "Evan" and "Gina", black haired twins, only 5 years old, that he said were his own, and that he wanted them and all the other children to have a 'decent life away from this hell'. Aster believed the fraternal siblings were his, but wasn't entirely sure whether as cruel a man as General Monroe actually cared about the 'gifts' he had given some woman he had likely raped, or whether he was just putting on an act to humanize himself to the members of the Army of Darkness. Then again, perhaps he did care about them. Even the Maestro had cared about his unborn son. And General Monroe obviously wanted to be King. And all mortal Kings wanted a dynasty. Aster was not too fond of the notion of a dynasty of sociopathic descendents of Erick Monroe, but said nothing. For the time being, she needed him. And the children were still young, so there would be plenty of time and opportunity once they got to Wisconsin, for her to undo whatever General Monroe's loathsome political ambitions might be.
In the meantime, seeing the children seemed to motivate the members of the army, and that was no easy task. It could not have been easy to find a way to motivate an army composed of both men and women. And General Monroe had to use the women. As well as the older children. He was fighting against dangerous odds, and needed every advantage he could get. Even putting the Seed Corn at risk (though he was training them to be in the safest position he could). But men and women were motivated by different things, and what motivated one gender was often meaningless or even repugnant to the other.
Aster had read enough about wars to be aware that one (usually) unspoken reward for men in a winning army was the right to rape women in a country they had just defeated. But General Monroe, though Aster was sure that he and his closest men were probably rapists and worse, could hardly promise the men in his army rape as a reward, without alienating the women in his army. Besides which they would have only a very short time to loot what they needed from the Maestro's palace. They wouldn't have time to waste on rape.
Fortunately, he had a few outs, as regarded motivating a mixed gender army. The Maestro's behavior was SO horrific, that it was easy for General Monroe to come up with numerous reasons for pretty much everyone to hate him. And although General Monroe would not promise the men in the army the right to rape the women in the palace, he did tell them that they could take any of the Maestro's women back with them, provided the women were 'willing to go', as they could 'always use more 'Seed Corn'. This seemed to satisfy everyone, except Aster, who felt that the Betty's from the palace would be soft and untrained and most likely a liability.
But she said nothing. They would either adapt, or die. It made no difference to her, either way. Although it had been less than a year since she had been one of them herself, it seemed a lifetime ago, to Aster. She had left so much behind, since then. Her family. The Zoo. Dystopia itself. Aster no longer felt like a Betty, not that she had ever really fit in with the rest of the Betties, anyways. They had never really accepted her, and had hated her as a murderer in the end. So she really didn't care if they stayed in the palace or joined the Army, or if they lived or died. She had herself, and those with a decent chance of survival to worry about. That, and revenge.
But the manner in which General Monroe trained and motivated the Army of Darkness, with combined rewards, punishments, and promises of future rewards was actually familiar to her. It reminded her of how she had trained Mr. Stubs, the Lynx, to jump through a hoop.
She said as much to General Monroe one day, when no-one else was near to listen.
"I know what you're doing with the way you're training us." She said.
"What are you talking about?" General Monroe seldom appreciated Aster's skewed observations on life.
"Rewarding us for doing what you want and punishing us for failing. It's Skinnerism."
"Skinner - what?" The man made a sour face like unsweetened lemonade was coming out of Aster's lips.
Aster spent a few minutes explaining how animals were conditioned by rewarding and punishing them, and was about to start on explaining the theory of random and intermittent reinforcement, when General Monroe cut her off with a slice of his hand.
"I don't want you talking about this Skinnery crap to the rest of my army. Or I'll skin you."
"I'm not going to talk about it to the rest of your army." Aster said, leaving General Monroe more than a little confused as to why Aster had even mentioned it to him. Or what motivated her, if it wasn't him. But he said nothing.
One of the parts of their training that neither Aster nor any other woman was good at was a tall, wooden wall. The men, for the most part, were able to leap up, grab the top of the wall with their hands, and pull themselves over it. But none of the women could. Aster tried it numerous times, thinking the fact that she was taller even than a lot of the men would help her. But it didn't. Tall she might be, but she lacked a man's strength. All she got were bruises and splinters for her efforts.
"You will not be able to get over that wall." General Monroe told her, after watching her try once. "No woman can. Or damned few. And you're not going to be one of them. Stick to what you're good at. Go practice some more with the gun."
Some of the men in the army, mainly older ones, were being taught to drive the trucks. It made training for the rest of them harder, because every day (the trucks ran only during the day) the wheels from the trucks had made hundreds of new ruts in the ground, and they had to relearn the terrain as they ran. Often, the trucks would get stuck in the mud, and another truck would have to pull it out with chains. The constant traffic not only made new ruts, but it made the mud softer, and it sucked at the feet of everyone in the Army of Darkness as they ran. The whole area around the mines stunk badly, with sweat, rotten food, pit toilets, and burned oil and rubber. A few people fell ill, and there were several injuries and two deaths from the training. The deaths made them hate the Maestro worse then ever, after all (as General Monroe was quick to point out), it was that Green Bastard's fault that any of them were in the current situation in the first place. They trained harder, and would often either piss on (if they were men) or stomp and spit on anything green that they happened to see.
Aster and almost everyone else were able to run for 15 minutes now, without stopping. The truck motors never seemed to stop either. The day time practice of those learning to drive the trucks kept them all awake for a few days, until they learned to sleep in spite of it. As soon as the sun went down, they were rousted out for training, whether they had managed to sleep or not. They ran around and around , in semi-exhaustion, listening to the motors of some of the trucks which were still running at night, either to draw power from the engines, or as mechanics worked at fixing any problems with them. They were old, and made grinding and popping noises, but they ran. This actually surprised Aster. Not that they were functional, but that there was fuel for them. She thought gasoline was only available in Dystopia. She asked General Monroe one day, when he came down into the mines to watch her shooting (she still did not understand why he was so interested in her shooting in particular) where he got the gas for the trucks.
"There isn't any gas" General Monroe shook his head. "Those trucks are all alcohol burners. Modified engines. They sound and run like shit, but they work. We've got plenty of alcohol from the distillery. And we don't need them to work all that long, compared to what they were designed for."
Aster said nothing (though she now understood why there was so much alcohol around for disinfecting injuries gotten in training). At least *some* of the trucks would probably make the trip. And there were a lot of them. If necessary, one truck could pull more than one trailer. They would get there. Maybe. They would definitely take a hit in radiation, but perhaps not too badly. There was a lot of iron from the mines, and thick sheets of metal lined the inside of the trailers. It wasn't as good as lead, but they didn't have much lead.
The big problem was the windows on the trucks. They could only be partly covered with metal. The drivers had to be able to see. And glass offered little protection from the radiation. Whoever drove the trucks was going to take a heavy hit in radiation. Which was why General Monroe was training mostly older men to drive them. They weren't likely to be fathers, any more. In fact, they didn't have that much longer to live, from the looks of some of them. Either way, they weren't part of their Seed Corn.
At least a few times a day, Aster tried to jump and reach over the high wall. The other women laughed at this, and a few called her insulting names that she didn't understand, like 'Puta'. General Monroe just shook his head when he saw it.
"You will not be able to get over that wall, Zookeeper." He told her every time he saw her fail. "No woman can. Or damned few. And you're not going to be one of them. Stick to what you're good at. Go practice some more with the gun."
Aster said nothing. It still seemed odd to her that General Monroe was so overly interested in her shooting ability in particular. He had plenty of other men, and a few other women, who could shoot just as well. Yet he focused on her, above all the others. She frowned as she walked down to the tunnel that served as a shooting gallery. General Monroe did not do things for no reason. He always had a reason, for everything he did. Often, Aster did not like or agree with what his reasons were, but there were still reasons.
Aster was not sure what his reason was for being so interested in her, in particular, being able to shoot well. But she was sure there was a reason, and increasingly fearful that whatever the reason was, she was not going to like it.