Fight, Flight, or Freeze: The Healer's Story
Chapter 98: Just Ignore It

Chapter 98: Just Ignore It

"Good bitch." The creature in front of me stood up and walked away, and I could hear a crowd of people thanking him as he dropped their food on the ground.

A while later, the gate rattled again, and there was silence.

"You need to eat that," said Ming Zhu as she pointed to the puddle in front of my cage. She was no longer licking it off of the ground but instead sticking her arm through the bars and scooping it up in her hand before bringing it to her mouth.

When she saw me staring at her, she shrugged her shoulders. "They prefer us to lick it off the ground, but once they leave, we can do it this way."

"There is no way I can eat that," I replied, pointing to the now pink mixture of some type of grain, twigs, rocks, dirt, spit, and blood. It was a disease waiting to happen, and I would rather starve than have a single speck in my mouth.

"You will," snapped the second voice, the pure venom in it shocking me. "You will eat every last drop of it."

I clenched my jaw. I couldn’t turn around to speak to her face to face, but I wouldn’t lower myself to eating it off the ground like a dog.

"Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall," smiled Ming Zhu. "Proverbs 16:18 of the King James Version of the Bible," she continued with a shrug of her shoulders as she scooped up another handful of gruel. I think there was even an ant in that one.

"Extra protein," she continued as she licked the entire thing up, ant and all.

"If you don’t eat everything in front of you, then you won’t have to worry about a customer killing you; I’ll do it myself," sneered the second voice. How she knew I wasn’t eating was beyond me, but no one else said anything.

"If one of us doesn’t eat what has been given to us, none of us will be able to eat for a week," said Ming Zhu as if it was just a fact of life. Seeing that she was all done, she wiped her hand in the dirt, making sure that nothing was left behind.

She then looked at me and raised an eyebrow. "I can’t," I said simply. If I thought salad with dressing on top of my meal was the worst thing to ever happen to me, I was experiencing a rude awakening.

Once again, Ming Zhu shrugged her shoulders and reached through the bars until she was able to grab some of my ’food’ and brought it to her mouth. "You will learn, or you won’t survive," she said softly.

I nodded my head and closed my eyes as she ate everything in front of me.

"Lucky bitch, getting two meals," said voice two, and I could hear the laughter in her voice this time.

"What can I say? It’s the benefit of having a newbie beside me. No one ever eats the first time. But they will learn," answered Ming Zhu, like it was all a bit of a joke.

This couldn’t be my life... Please, guys, I need you here. I’ll never complain again about you having to come and save me. Please, Bai Long Qiang... please come and save me.

I sent my prayer out into the universe, hoping that God would be willing to deliver it to the guys.

I just needed to bide my time. That was all. I just needed to survive until they came and rescued me. A few days... a week at most.

I could do it.

Right?

---

After the ’meal,’ and I used that term lightly, the sun started to set, and I could feel the women around me tense up.

"Normally, there are three to four hours of fights, depending on how many men are around for it," whispered Ming Zhu as I stared at her.

There was nothing else to look at unless I wanted to roll over and see who the second voice was, and my ribs protested that idea vehemently. I nodded my head like I understood what she was saying, but to be honest, her words were going right over top of my head.

My stomach growled, not liking the fact that it had been a full day since I last ate, but I was beginning to understand that that was going to be my new normal.

"Once the fighting is done, the customers are going to want to be entertained in a different way. The VIPs will be able to pick their girl from a catalog in the VIP cabins, and one of the Reavers will come to get us. Then we service the customers however they want, and if they don’t kill us, when day breaks, we will be sent back to our cages for sleep before it starts all over again."

I nodded my head, but my brain couldn’t wrap itself around what she was saying.

"What is a Reaver?" I asked her, my brain focusing on that one word and not the context of what she was trying to tell me.

"I think it is like their gang name or something," answered Ming Zhu. "It is what the head dude, Alpha, calls his men."

I nodded my head again, feeling like one of those dumb dolls on the dashboard of a car.

Honestly, when I heard the word, Reaver, I was thinking of the zombie things from a movie I liked... maybe this Alpha had watched the same movie or something. Maybe that was why the guy delivering food was cut to hell. Maybe he was self-mutilating or something.

He must be on some kind of drugs to be able to withstand that level of pain. There was no way a human body could take that abuse and still be able to function.

Darkness came, and with it, a blanket of silence. Nothing made a sound... until the screaming started and the cheers began.

"That is the fights," said Ming Zhu. Her eyes were closed, and she didn’t bother to open them to talk to me. "The one screaming is probably losing. Just ignore it."

Ignore it? There was no way I would be able to do that.