“Female!”

That shout ends my life as I know it.

I came to the market this morning dressed as a man in order to sell three oranges, stolen from a tree behind a walled garden in the gold zone. Each of the oranges is a potential lifeline. I could eat them and quench my desire for something sweet and liquidy, but if I sell them here in Mosquito Market, these three oranges can be traded for so much more. Water purification tablets. Meat. Batteries for the radio and the flashlight, both of which are dead and leave me in dark, silent nights when the drizzle makes it impossible to build a fire. All I can do is lie underneath the sheet iron roof and hope that the old plastic bags I glued to it keep the rain from corroding through.

The risk of sneaking into the market was worth it—until it wasn’t.

I wear heavy men’s clothes, a big overcoat with shoulder pads that make me look broader. I have a broad-brimmed hat that I can pull down to cover most of my face. I put on a deep voice, and a beard.

The beard just gave me away. I should have taken my supplies and left, but I had a few shell casings in my pocket, enough to trade for some meat stew. That smell called to me and called to me until I gave in and sat shoulder to shoulder with the men who frequent the market, slurping down my stew. I didn’t notice that it was soaking the fibers of my fake beard. I didn’t notice the heat and the sweat working away at the glue either, not until the patch of hair that kept the men thinking I was male dropped off my face and into my stew, right in front of several dozen traders, soldiers, and mercenaries. Men.

“It’s a woman!”

The cry goes up and is carried across the crowds. There must be at least five thousand men here today. Five thousand men, most of whom are stuck with a virginity they don’t want because these days, no man has a woman.

Wommmaaaaaaaaaaaannn! The shouting is a visceral, hungry, brutal sound that makes my blood run cold. How do they know? A fake beard does not a woman make.

These men are starved for sex. Post-Event, women are impossibly rare. People are rare in general, and women are prized. Kept in great harems and breeding programs. A woman in the wild is almost unheard of. That’s why I’ve been so careful to make sure nobody has ever heard of me.

Until now.

All it takes is one man to say it and suddenly every man in the market is looking at me. Their gazes are not friendly. They are predatory and aggressive. Danger surrounds me. These are men who have not had straight sex in their entire lives—and now they think there is a woman with the kind of hole their bodies are made to crave.

“Woman?” I let out my most booming laugh. “I am no woman!”

My hat is ripped off my head from behind. The cascade of golden hair I’ve never been able to bring myself to cut flows down my back. There is a collective gasp, followed by a growl.

Hands, so many hands come toward me. Dozens upon dozens of them, tearing at my overcoat, pulling me off my feet and yanking the clothing from my body.

The thin veneer of civilization the guards maintain is gone. They are part of the frenzy, pushing and shoving and firing shots to get to me. The chaos is loud and terrifying. I always knew if I got caught, it would be bad. I had no idea that it would be this bad. I never knew it would be a wave of masculine aggression rising over me, so large, so powerful there is no way I can fight it.

Men are trampling one another to get to me as I dart beneath the bar I was just eating at, and take refuge behind the casks. The weapon at my side is out of its holster. The energy clip has maybe thirty shots in it. Not nearly enough to shoot my way out of here. Maybe just enough to keep them back. Maybe.

My view is now a mass of hands and eyes, as they follow me around and try to get into the little space where I have pushed myself, my small female frame now protected by two big barrels of fermented beer.

They’re reaching for me, big dirty hands clawing for me. If they catch a bit of my clothing, they will drag me out.

I fire into the very small space between the grasping males. I don’t want to hurt anybody, but I don’t want to be hurt either. The shot ricochets off a bottle, breaks it in the process, and zooms off over the crowd.

That gives them pause for a second or two. Some of the less enthusiastic men back off, but it doesn’t dissuade all of them. These men would die for the chance at sex. I’m going to have to start shooting them for real.

“Get the fuck away from me!” I scream, pointing the muzzle at the next set of eyes that appears in front of me. They don’t look human anymore. I can tell they belong to a man, but the expression in them is the same one a coyote wears when he finds a rabbit.

Boom!

An explosion echoes across the crowd. It is much louder than anything my gun can produce, and unlike my single shooter, it gets a respectful response from the lust-crazed men. They fall to the ground, covering their heads as the sheriff makes his entrance.

This man rolls deep. There are twelve armed guards, not shitty market guards. Real ones with real armor and real mating privileges. They have access to the state harem. They won’t go feral just looking at me. The vicious rabble clears for them as they move through the market toward me.

“You find a woman, she belongs to the state! You know that!” The sheriff speaks in a booming voice translated through the microphone of his mech suit, an external skeleton that gives him the power of a hundred men, and the weaponry of a small army. I’ve seen a man in one of those things rip through a bandit camp in two minutes. In the end, there were just bits of criminals scattered everywhere. The land claimed them within hours. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a small hive of marching ants trying to drag an ear into their burrow.

This is not a rescue.

I could have shot my way out of the crowd, given enough courage and enough time. I could have maybe gotten free. But there’s no chance of that with the sheriff and his soldiers. My weapons will glance off their armor, and they’ll catch me.

My only chance is to run, now, through the chaos created by a hundred men all abandoning their goods and wares at once. While the sheriff yells at his unruly citizenry, I try to sneak from my hiding place, out around the bar.

“She’s getting away!”

Some dickhead asshole motherfucker tells on me before I even have a chance to try to escape. The sheriff’s soldiers come for me. Bigger, faster, fucking terrifying.

They swing me off my feet and carry me back to the sheriff, my slim body dangling between them. My toes don’t even touch the ground. In their grasp, I am weak and vulnerable. The remnants of my clothing don’t give me much in the way of modesty. My underwear is still on, and the wrap I put around my breasts to complete the male illusion is still there—until it isn’t.

The sheriff reaches out, grabs the wrap, and yanks it. It unwinds like a mummy’s cloth, revealing my breasts to the world. Blood rushes back into the compressed tissue, making me ache and swear.

There is a rumble of male desire all around me. The sheriff is doing the equivalent of dangling a fresh lamb over a pack of starving wolves. This is going to end badly for me. I can feel it.

The fear and adrenaline that kept me clear headed and enabled me to get the hell out of the way when I was under mass attack, now leaves me trembling and weak in the arms of these men who own women.

The sheriff looks me over. He is not a good man. He is not a kind man. In this post-Event United States, you don’t become a law man by playing by the rules. You get there by being brutal and vicious and rich enough to enforce your will and call it law.

When he looks at me, he doesn’t see me. He sees pieces and parts. He sees potential profit. “Good flesh,” he says. “Put her up for sale.”

“No! I just came into the market to sell some oranges! Let me go!”

My words mean nothing, and my struggles mean even less. The sheriff’s face quirks behind the shield of his mask. I can’t really see it, he is like a shadow behind the thick radiation-resistant protection, but I can hear his voice rattling through the microphone.

“I know what you came here to do. I saw you taking them from my private orchard, you little orange-stealing whore. I came here to catch you and hang you for the theft. But you’re female, and young. That would be a waste. You’ll be sold to the highest bidder, girl. And you’ll be grateful you’re not swinging from a rope.”

“I’d rather swing!”

“Take her to the cut men,” he says, talking to his soldiers, ignoring me. “Have them prepare her for sale. And get a collar on her.”

As I writhe, the soldiers do his bidding. They press a thin, light piece of metallic substance around my neck. I immediately try to pull it off, but I can’t. Whatever it is, it’s strong. And while I’m distracted with trying to remove it, they’re bundling me into a cage that obviously has one purpose: human transport.

I am caught. And this is all my fault.