In the year 2020, Vampires took control of society and ordered all humans placed in vampire custody. The people who were not captured formed a Resistance movement, headed by the Human Council, who began to plan the Insurgence.

I am, of course, indebted to Stephenie Meyer for this world we all play in, and these characters we all adore. Additionally, I am indebted to hitntr01, who has graciously allowed me to use certain concepts from her wonderful story "In Need of Rescue", which constitute much of the background of my own story. These include: the language Vampiri, the Rules, the machines used to draw blood from humans, Manners Training, and the plot theme of Edward working as a guard at a facility holding humans. Thank you, hitntr01.

The Insurgency, Chapter 7 – Hangin' Out in the Tunnels

Day 6937 (June 29, 2039)

(Bella's POV)

I can hear someone out there.

I had found a hiding place, out of the forty degree Chicago weather. The storm came in before it was forecast, but this subbasement is working well as a shelter hidden from vampires. Or was working well, as someone is out there.

I had stopped in Chicago to pick up supplies for a Resistance doctor, the one who treated the humans I had been able to liberate. The only one with enough guts to treat the badly injured girls, the brothel girls. But now the Human Council has ordered me to stand down, as my activities were feared to draw attention from the vampires to the Resistance. The Council planned to try to negotiate with the Volturi for human freedoms and a reinstatement of human law. Yeah, right. Aro is so going to listen to them

Almost twenty years since the Event. Twenty years since the Vampires took control and ordered all humans to vampire custody. Those who survived were in the Living Death Camps, the human term for the Human Containment Facilities; were Blood Slaves, what the Vampires called Pets; or were sex workers in the vampire brothels. The brothel girls only lasted four to six weeks before dying of their injuries, so there was a continuous need for replacements. Naturally, being a teen-aged girl, the trackers always think of me for the job. Thanks, guys. Love you too…

I had been born on a living death camp, on day 731, day 730 of my mother's captivity. She had spoken wistfully of life before the living death camps, of places where there was a blue sky overhead, houses with multiple rooms to live in, clothes in many colors to wear, schools and toys for children, gardens with flowers and vegetables to tend, and stores with fresh food. Now our lives on the living death camps were confined to a 30 x 40 foot cell block, with the bi-weekly trips to those infernal machines for exsanguination. We were just food for Vampires and were never to leave these concrete prisons.

But I did leave, as part of a group of five that managed to escape. I was the only one to survive. But I did survive, and I found the human colonies and I joined the human resistance. Until the Council ordered me to stand down. Which is why I am here, today, trying to decide where to go next. The order was to stand down, desist all human liberation activity, most gallingly, find a home. That was the difficult order. My status as Wanderer had been denied. The Human Council refused to accept my petition to be a Wanderer. Many of us were Wanderers during this Diaspora, looking for a home that could not exist. Our parents' homes were either in occupied territories or had been destroyed. No one would feel nostalgic about returning to the Living Death Camps, what the vampires called the Human Containment Facilities. I had tried living in the colonies, but kept getting into "disagreements" with the colony leaders. In one case, the Colony Leader had executed another colony member because of me. I was spared because I was a "breeding age female". Whether it was the colonies or the vampires, my status was the same: breeding age female. Protect the Womb, the Future Mothers.

That kind of crack was the type of thing that got me in trouble with the Colony Leaders – how could I draw a parallel between their efforts to save the human race, and the vampires' efforts to breed humans for blood? As far as I was concerned, both sides only saw me as a walking womb, not an individual.

But who is out there? Isaiah had prepared me well for life in the post-Event wilderness, training me in survival skills that involved understanding vampire hunting and tracking methods, how to find food in the wild, plus how to use the remnants of human civilization left behind by the vampires. Lots of things could be used by turning them into weapons – car bombs could be made, guns converted, or soldering torches turned to weapons. After I learned to read, I spent nights reading technology manuals and chemistry books, coming up with new ways to fry those suckers.

We, the human race, didn't have a good showing right after the Event. We were just herded by the hunters like Jasper Whitlock's groups into the Containment Centers, to be turned into breeders in the Human Containment Facilities, or sold to Brothels for sex, or sold to individual vampires as blood slaves. No one in the old days, before the Event, even believed that vampires existed. But we believe now.

After the announcement of the Event, teams of Vampires such as those lead by Major Jasper Whitlock went door-to-door and took in the humans that had been left unchanged by vampires. Whitock's group was one of four that was recognized and given awards by Aro in the months after the Event. They were credited for making the Event transition a smooth success, rounding up enough humans to stock the Farms and Pet Stores for the general Vampire population during the transition. Of the twenty vampires so recognized, nineteen are dead. Some due to the generally violent nature of vampire society (really, have these guys heard of alternative dispute resolution, or must they just rip one another's heads off for anything), and some at the hands of the Resistance. I had the honor of taking out Victor Swerdlow, the Butcher, myself. Wonder if Whitlock feels lonely?

Whoever is out there has put food at the entrance to one of the pipes I am hiding in. The smell is wonderful, but I'm not going to just go out. Isaiah said that since the Event, life was so much easier for the vampires they had almost become "prissy", not wanting to get dirty just to find a human. If you just managed to get muddy or smelly, they often wouldn't follow. Generally. What's a little dirt if you don't get bit? He even helped with finding weeds with strong smells that would help mask my human smell. My human smell – that was a big problem. I really smell good to them, drawing them in. I needed to put bits of weed into my hair and rub mud over my body to partially mask my smell. Didn't work completely, but it helped. Survival in the wild is the name of the game. And I'm a winner at this game, having survived for two and a half years on my own.

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