Chapter 1

After my normal morning activities of working out and hunting, my excitement grew as I drew closer to the house; today was my sixteenth birthday. Today I was old enough to “officially” date. Our family’s rule is that nobody is allowed to date until they are sixteen. Despite that, Sally and I have been seeing enough of each other, that about the only thing we haven’t done is date.

Sally has been a neighbor since we were kids and long before our hormones began to flow and she began filling out, she was my best friend. She spends so much time at our house that she’s practically considered family, and much of that time is spent with my sister and stepsisters because I’m hunting or working out.

Maneuvering my grav sled past the house, I noted that all of our family vehicles were in the carport, which meant everyone was home from school. Even Uncle Don’s little helicopter was on its pad. I guess that I should point out that Uncle Don is my stepfather.

Still, I had a job to finish. Stopping at the shed where we processed the game I bring home, I hung the four feral pig carcasses. Uncle Don had built a pair of large cinderblock smokehouses with a meat processing shed right in front of them.

We use the shed for cleaning fish or dressing and butchering the game I catch. I usually hunt or fish six days a week, hanging the game carcasses from the sturdy overhead beams. My stepsisters and sister skin and butcher the animals. That’s their job, leaving me time to shower and do my schoolwork.

The day I sometimes miss hunting is the one day each week that I’m required to attend classes. The rest of the week, I watch the recorded lectures online and then do the reading and complete my homework at home, usually in the afternoon and evenings. Once my homework is complete, I send it to my teachers to be graded.

On the day I attend class, I usually take our fanboat (or airboat, the ones with the big fan to propel them through shallow water) to school. On the days that I take the airboat, I sometimes manage to catch a few fish or shoot some small game or fowl in the nearby woods or swamp after school.

Our house and carport are built atop a fifteen-meter-high manmade hill. The center of the hill is the two-story basement beneath the house and compound.

When the house was built, the underside of the slab and the outside of the concrete-filled cinderblock walls were extensively waterproofed for when it floods here, averaging twice every five years.

Dirt was mounded around the basement, extending out at least thirty meters from the building in every direction. Large rocks, each weighing twenty-five to fifty kilos were cemented together to cover the entire slope of the manmade hill. More dirt covered those rocks, and then deep-rooted sod was transplanted to keep the dirt from washing away. The entire structure looks like someone bulldozed the top off a T-shaped hill and built a house and outbuildings on top of it.

Extensive storage shelving was built into the cellar. We store canned, bottled, and dried food down there. New and used clothing, as well as linens and paper goods fill more shelves. I’m sure that we have more stuff stored down there than the small grocer in town keeps in stock.

The tail of the “T”, the part of the hill extending out behind the house is where the smokehouses and meat processing areas are. In addition, our barn, chicken coop, and greenhouses are there.

Underground and heading towards the barn compound, the upper floor of the cellars holds two, four-meter-by-six-meter refrigerators and two walk-in freezers, along with more dry storage. Some of the storage is in round, pre-cast concrete pipes set on end with the base sealed with concrete. The pipes act as small grain silos for corn, wheat, rice, and other grains. There is still enough open space in the cellar to function as our storm shelter. Several nearby families without an emergency shelter join us when the weather threatens.

Beneath our barn, and accessible only through a secure hidden doorway, is our special armory. Once through the door, and once the door closes and locks, an elaborate series of security checks begins. A biometric scanner activates, performing a facial recognition scan of everyone in the hall. Each person is required to repeat a randomly chosen word from among two hundred stored in the memory for a voice recognition. Retinal scans are then performed. Only after passing these hurdles, a scan of a single fingerprint from the correct finger without a prompt as to which finger to use is performed. A DNA check is taken during the fingerprint scan.

Only Uncle Don and I are authorized to enter the armory, although Uncle Don has included biometric data for each family member in case he wants to allow them access in the future. Unless Uncle Don instructs the computer to add a new person to the approved list, if someone is inside besides Uncle Don or I, even with the two of us present, the armory would gas everyone in the room with KJ-163, an odorless, fast-acting knockout gas. The computer would target the closest person to the scanner who had passed the biometric scan and fire an auto-injectable syringe of atropine into their leg as gas filled the room. Should someone circumvent the system using brute force, the entire armory would be destroyed in a THa-M (military-grade thermate) fueled inferno, which would cause the ammo to start cooking off and exploding.

My father and Uncle Don were both involved in the fighting in Myanmar from the beginning of the third major war in just over forty years. It started even as the MEW had barely ended, and the second war raged on. Due to his lifetime of experience hunting in the woods and swamps here in southern Louisiana, Uncle Don had expertise in camouflage, stealth, and tracking. He was accurate with several different rifles and handguns, as well as knives, bows, and crossbows.

With that expertise, he was assigned to Force Recon when he was drafted. After a handful of successful missions, he graduated to the newly resurrected Marine Raiders. Dad, who had almost no hunting experience, ended up in the Marines.

Uncle Don quickly proved his worth. Unbeknownst to him at the time he entered training for Force Recon, the average life expectancy for troops in any of the Elite Forces was considerably less than the five-year conscription period. Once the brass noticed his ability to complete missions, the missions his team were assigned became increasingly more difficult. He survived his five-year stint with only three minor wounds while completing every mission.

On a mission at the end of his second year, he saved Kamala, a sixteen-year-old Myanma girl. She was the sole survivor of a village the Chinese had destroyed as they retreated northward, leaving nothing usable for U.S. forces. The Chinese had already conscripted every able-bodied male age twelve and up, forcing them to fight in Vietnam or Laos. Women who were old enough were sent to China to breed the next generation of Chinese soldiers and to repopulate China. Small children were taken to be raised as either soldiers or breeders. Kamala had been away from her village filling water buckets at the nearby stream when the Chinese attacked.

Due to the high number of casualties in the first two wars, by the time Dad and Uncle Don had been drafted, there was already a noticeable disparity between the number of men and women in the U.S., as well as worldwide. A man who survived his tour of duty was encouraged to marry more than one woman if they could afford it. Hoping to encourage a population explosion to ensure the next generation of Americans, the government provided free health care for all family members of veterans, even the concubines and additional wives.

Once Kamala was pregnant, the military had recognized her as a dependent concubine and sent her to the states where she joined his wife, Peggy, waiting anxiously, hoping he would return alive.

One year later, Uncle Don’s team did a nighttime HALO jump from the latest iteration of stealth bombers. The bomber was on the way north to attack a new, well-hidden munitions plant that a Navy SEAL team had located in southern China. While the planes had the coordinates of the plant, they would still use microburst radio transmissions to activate homing beacons planted by the SEALs to guide the bombs to within centimeters of the target.

Uncle Don’s team had been assigned to locate a hidden oil pipeline rumored to have begun carrying oil to a new refinery which was hidden in the dense, mountainous jungle near the Chinese border with Laos. Intelligence reports indicated that the pipeline and the refinery were both built underground to avoid detection. The pipeline, made from composite plastics, was virtually undetectable and the dense jungle canopy provided protection from air and satellite sensors. The exterior of the refinery had been covered with the same composite and built in a tight mountain ravine beneath camouflage netting, so it wasn’t visible from above.

After a careful search, they found both objectives, marking them with homing beacons to guide bombs to their target. Uncle Don was always their point man because of his uncanny ability to spot or sense trouble. As they headed for their extraction point, he noticed two sets of barely discernible footprints through the jungle. Following them, they found two half-starved sisters hiding in a cave. The girls’ village didn’t have enough food for everyone, so they had banished several “unwanted” young women, a slow death sentence for those young women.

The girls were extremely emaciated after three months of surviving only on edible plants and small animals they managed to trap. They occasionally caught a fish in a crude fish trap, and even resorted to eating insects. Despite protests from his team, Uncle Don took the girls with him, feeding them from his own rations and supplementing those with small game he killed with his crossbow.

The Elite Forces were encouraged to take any valuable items they found at their targets. The items were sent home to their family to help provide for them, after the military took a 25% cut. Regular troops got to keep a quarter of what they captured.

This arrangement encouraged troops to seek out valuables and provided the military with a much-needed source of funding.

On the way to the extraction point, the girls, Qing, and Ling, had told Uncle Don that a Chinese general was living in the village that had banished them. The General had retired to the village of his birth after being severely injured in a U.S. bombing strike. Supposedly, he had brought back a huge cache of valuables stolen during the invasion and subsequent looting of Myanmar.

Since they had completed their mission and transmitted the coordinates of the refinery, Don decided to raid the General’s compound as it was only three klicks out of their way. His team infiltrated at night and killed the General and his servants. They found a veritable king’s ransom hidden in the house. The treasure included coins and ingots of precious metals, gems, and foreign and U.S. currency.

They also found enough food stockpiled to feed the entire village for at least a year. Don’s team members split the booty and began packing all the gold and platinum they could safely carry. The diamonds were split as evenly as they could without knowing the value of individual stones. Uncle Don was surprised that the others eschewed the colored gems, thinking that the diamonds were more valuable.

He traded his share of the diamonds for the rubies, emeralds, and sapphires, dividing the gems evenly into two bags and had each girl carry a bag tied to a leather thong around her neck. Each bag weighed about a kilogram. Aside from his share of the precious metals, he also stuffed numerous bundles of Euros and U.S. currency into the empty satchel he had used to carry the homing beacons they already left behind at their target.

The two girls were given small backpacks they found in the house and carried more currency since it was reasonably light. After the previous two days of having enough food and water, the girls were more energetic and could carry a light load like that. They even took dried and fresh food from the house and stuffed it in the top of the backpacks.

Once the two girls had regained their health and were pregnant, Qing and Ling were shipped stateside where they joined Aunt Peggy and Kamala.

The military had a system in place to transport loot home to the families of soldiers. Before this haul, most of what the team confiscated had been the nearly worthless local currency, and some silver. Uncle Don had used his share to buy valuable items in the local marketplaces. People were selling anything that wasn’t necessary for survival, hoping to get enough money to buy food and clothing to survive another year. He figured that he bought things at a tenth of their actual value, thereby multiplying the value of what he had recovered. What he paid for the goods also gave the locals a better chance of surviving.

He gave Aunt Peggy a number to contact a company in Europe that sold valuable Asian items. The economy in Europe was a bit more stable than elsewhere in the world. Once she had an agreement in place with the company, each time Uncle Don had enough to fill a small shipping container, he had the military transship the container to Europe. The company picked it up from whatever airport or airbase the military took it to and then sold everything for him.

With everything that Uncle Don collected and sent home during his enlistment, our family was extremely wealthy. He also sent home a small arsenal of captured weapons, mainly Chinese or Russian manufactured, and even RPGs and crew served machine guns. The military kept the weapons for him until he had been released and then passed an extensive battery of tests to determine that his mental condition would not lead to him being a threat to others. He also had to show them that he had a secure location to store everything.

Dad didn’t fare as well as Uncle Don. During the final stages of pushing the Chinese out of Myanmar, the Chinese suddenly and unexpectedly withdrew from their mountain stronghold, retreating into China. The general in charge of U.S. forces in Myanmar rushed troops into the stronghold to capture and hold it. Two days later, thousands of kilograms of explosives buried by the Chinese with long-delay timers exploded. Dad was among nearly a thousand U.S. troops that died from the explosion and resulting avalanches and cave-ins.

Mom talked to Lacey and me right before she became Uncle Don’s second wife. It turned out that Uncle Don and Dad had made a pact that, if only one of them survived the war, the other brother would take his wife as their second wife and would raise the kids as his own. She even showed us the written agreement they both signed and dated before reporting for boot camp.

Many war widows had a difficult time making ends meet on the small pension they received. Uncle Don says that’s designed to encourage them to remarry and have more children. Besides, the successful example of Lucky Jim II led to more and more plural marriages until the government couldn’t ignore the issue any longer and finally legalized multiple marriages. However, the family had to prove they were capable of supporting each woman, any children she already had, and potential future children.

Uncle Don sat down with Lacey and me. He explained that he was sad that our father, his brother, had died, and promised that he would treat Mom the same way he treated Aunt Peggy. He would also treat the two of us the same way he treated his children.

He told us that we could choose how we addressed him. He wasn’t trying to detract from Dad’s memory, but we could call him Dad, Uncle Don, or just Don if we preferred.

I started to laugh, and then explained that Mom would have our heads if we called him Don. She felt it didn’t show enough respect if we called an adult by their first name. I chose to stick with Uncle Don because it was already familiar. Calling him Dad would feel weird. Of course, watching Mom join Uncle Don and Aunt Peggy, and the three concubines, in the master bedroom each night was weird, too, at least for a while.

I also explained to him that “Uncle Don” already held a special place in my life as the man who had taught me everything I knew about tracking, hunting, fishing, trapping, and the outdoors in general.

Dad and Uncle Don were polar opposites in that respect. Dad only went hunting with us a few times. Uncle Don told me that Dad had felt as if he didn’t really know a large part of who I was because he didn’t understand what I did when I hunted and didn’t understand the allure of hunting and fishing.

The appeal was easy, meat for the table and the knowledge that you put it there. There was also the daily contest between you and Nature.

As with the rest of the country, the only jobs available to the brothers had been low paying ones. Before the war, Uncle Don had worked as a day laborer doing everything from digging ditches to construction work. He even acted as a guide for people who wanted to hunt “gators.” When he didn’t have work, he hunted.

Dad found a job as a clerk at a fuel station. The station sold gasoline and diesel, as well as propane and methane clathrate. They even sold fuel alcohol and firewood. The business also had a small garage where the owner worked on vehicles. Dad parlayed that experience into a job at the local family-owned grocery store. There, he showed an aptitude for management and was promoted to night manager, responsible for supervising the two or three employees on the evening shift. The owner had been talking to Dad about training him for more responsibility when Dad was drafted.

Shortly after Uncle Don returned home after his military service, Aunt Peggy and my mother made it clear that they intended to collect even more war widow wives for him. At that point, Uncle Don decided to build the hill and everything on it to have enough storage room and land to be able to raise enough food for everyone. The construction began just before my 12th birthday and was finished three years ago.

Three days ago, workers finished building a new, three-story addition to the house. The ground floor is an extension of the dining room. The upper two floors each look like a large bedroom with a large, attached bathroom. The rooms are the same size as the master bedroom except the master bedroom has another bedroom on either side of it with an archway through the walls connecting the rooms. I figured that the two new bedrooms were for the older girls, Kristen, Ashley, and Wendy, who were all seventeen now and would soon be seeking husbands if they didn’t already have their eyes on someone.

Once I finished hanging the pigs and washing up, I headed for the house. Four of my stepsisters came bounding out of the house, headed out to begin dealing with the game. They grinned knowingly at me, probably because they’d seen my birthday presents. I wasn’t surprised when each of the girls stopped and kissed me. They did it frequently to thank me for doing the hunting. The last few months, however, the kisses on the cheek have turned to kisses on the lips, and not necessarily innocent kisses.

Because I hunt, and especially because I’m a proficient hunter, our family is one of the lucky ones that has meat on the table every day, despite having so many people in the family. I think we’re up to forty-one family members at last count with more babies due soon. In addition to what I bring home, the chickens and small herd of cattle we raise also help to provide meat.

The surprise today was both the intensity of the kiss. As quickly as it started, however, the four were gone, leaving me standing there wondering what had just happened.

The girls have always been friendly towards me, seeking me out at least once a day for a quick kiss and/or a hug.

Within six months of Uncle Don marrying Mom, Aunt Peggy and Mom (Belinda, but Uncle Don calls her Belle) started introducing Uncle Don to other war widows they knew. When they told him they wanted him to marry them, too, he just replied, “Yes, Dear,” and did it. They brought home five war widows, so I now have seven mothers, ten counting the three concubines. I still call Aunt Peggy just that. The others I call Mother Trudy, Mother Chloe, Mother Vicky, and Mother Yvette. To her face, I call mother number seven Mother Stephanie. Behind her back and when nobody else can hear me, it’s either Bitch or The Bitch.

The seven women are all pretty. They range in height from just over 1.7 meters to nearly two meters. The only one of the seven women with extraordinary looks is The Bitch. The first few times that I saw her, I’ll admit to drooling over her tall, Nordic features. She has the undisputed largest bust among the women, and an even bigger attitude.

For some reason, she always wants to give me hell, even for doing things I’m supposed to do. I can’t even glance at her without her reading me the riot act about ogling her. And she’d better never catch me looking at her daughters that way! If I look at her, it’s just to make sure that I’m as far away from her as possible. The next Parish is too close.

As for her daughters, they seem to be of a much different opinion. Fifteen-year-old Audrey and the aforementioned seventeen-year-old Wendy seem intent on capturing my attention.

As soon as I entered the house, I was hit by Typhoon Sally as she grabbed me, kissed me with a lip lock, and wasn’t letting go. I wondered if she was staking her claim in front of everyone. It was our first serious kiss in front of others, not counting my sister Lacey. Sally finally released me when Uncle Don cleared his throat.

“Our parents say that I can be your girlfriend now,” she exclaimed excitedly. When I looked over her shoulder, all the women in the family, as well as the remainder of my teenage sisters were standing in a loose semi-circle around us, smiling. Sally was beaming. I was blushing.

“I think we should all get ready for dinner. You girls make sure the table is set and help your mothers with anything that needs to be finished. I’m sure that our family’s hunter will be excited with his birthday presents so let’s not delay him,” Uncle Don directed.

Dinner was ready just after the four girls made it back inside and cleaned up after skinning, dressing, and hanging the pigs I’d brought home. After showering and changing, I was seating women at the dinner table when I realized that Sally’s mother Annette was here, too. She looked at me nervously as I seated her. “I can’t begin to tell you how much it means to me that you’ve agreed to let Sally date me,” I whispered in her ear.

She shivered slightly and looked at me oddly. I wanted to say something about her finally coming over to meet my family, but there was a nervousness visible in her eyes, so I didn’t push my luck. Before tonight, she would let Sally go with me anywhere Sally wanted to go, and Sally had spent many an afternoon, evening, and weekend day at our old house before Dad died. When we moved in with Uncle Don, Sally started coming here, too. My sister and stepsisters all got along with her.

Speaking of which, I know that Mom got along well with Sally’s mother, who was also a war widow and have wondered why Mom and Aunt Peggy hadn’t “suggested” her as another wife for Uncle Don. When Sally and her mother got word that Sally’s father had died, I started taking them game, too. It was usually fish or small game since it was just the two of them.

When I first started taking them game, I felt a bit guilty since I hunted for our family. Uncle Don came up to me about a week after I started and told me, “I’m proud of you for stepping up and helping the Phillips family. Your dad may not have been able to teach you to hunt, but he taught you to be a good man.”

With forty-one people now in the family, our dinner table is actually a series of five large tables. I imagine that it will get even noisier than it usually is in a few years when the eight kids born since Uncle Don returned get a little older. Tonight still seemed even more boisterous than usual and everyone kept smiling at Sally and me.

As dinner wound down and Uncle Don stood to address us, all talk ceased. “As everyone is aware, today is Jim’s sixteenth birthday. We will proceed with opening the usual presents in a few minutes. After that, Belle, Peggy, and I have a few special gifts for him,” he said mysteriously. Both Mom and Aunt Peggy smiled at him and then smiled proudly at me.

“Aside from that, my wives and I have decided that Jim is old enough and responsible enough to date now.” As he said that, he practically glared at The Bitch, almost daring her to say something. When she didn’t, he continued.

“Of course, we all know that Jim and Sally have been seeing each other as often as possible for several years now. I told Jim quite some time ago, and I’ll tell everyone else now, that I was proud of him when he stepped up to help the Phillips family by providing them with fish and game to help stretch the meager survivor’s pension the military provides them.

“That he was willing to step up and help provide for the family of the young woman he cared about told me that he was mature enough to date, even then. However, since Jim didn’t tell anyone else about it, neither did I. What a man does to help others in less fortunate circumstances is his business. That he chose not to tell others further convinced me of his maturity.

“While I was in the service, Jim hunted for both his family and mine, something I appreciated a great deal. Even though I was half a world away, I slept better at night just knowing that he was helping to provide for my family. When I got back, I learned from a friend that Jim had also protected my family in my absence. One of the locals who knew I was gone tried to take advantage of Kristen, something she’s never told anyone.

“Jim saved her before anything happened and cut the rope from her wrists. By the time she had removed the blindfold, Jim had slipped back into the trees, taking the man as his captive so she never knew who saved her. The next morning, the man’s family found a note tacked to their front door explaining what had happened, and that their oldest son wouldn’t be coming back. The only reason that we know who did it is that Jim’s fingerprints were all over the note.

“The sheriff knew Jim well enough that he didn’t feel the need to traumatize Kristen again by questioning her. He just dropped the case, making sure that the note and the fingerprint match disappeared. Evidently, the sheriff had two previous complaints about the man but could never prove anything.

“When the body finally turned up, it was naked and the front of the body, especially the genitals, was covered with honey locust thorns as if he had run headlong into a very wide honey locust tree. We all know that honey locust trees don’t grow that wide,” he chuckled. “After a brief conversation with the Sheriff, the coroner ruled that he probably ran into a tree when he was drunk or on drugs and then accidentally shot himself.”

[Author’s note: Honey locust thorns were sometimes used as nails in colonial times because iron nails were too expensive.]

“Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy,” Kristen growled, and then turned to me and fluttered her eyelashes. “My hero,” she sighed dramatically.

I was embarrassed with the acknowledgement of what I’d done, as well as by the fact that I hadn’t even thought about fingerprints when I left the note.

Kristen was looking at me the same way Sally does. Even Sally’s mom Annette was staring at me as if she’d never really seen me before. Sally just clung to my arm and rested her head on my shoulder.

“After Jim receives his presents, and then the special presents, we have one more surprise for him, but I’ll wait until the little ones are in bed to announce that surprise,” he chuckled. That comment brought chuckles from everyone in the family age fourteen (my sister Lacey) and up, all female.

My three oldest brothers are eleven, and the fourth one age ten. I take each one of them hunting with me at least once a week to teach them what Uncle Don taught me.

Finished with his comments, Uncle Don led the way to the family room where the guys sat and waited for the women to finish cleaning up dinner. The teenage girls brought the infants and younger children in and watched them. Sally was carrying Winston, the newest addition to our family. She handed him to me.

Despite being gone much of the day training and hunting, and then studying once I was home, I was around the rest of the family enough that I had learned how to hold and bottle-feed an infant, and even how to tend to the less pleasant tasks of dealing with infants, such as changing dirty diapers and cleaning up vomit. The women all thought it was hilarious the first (and only) time one of the baby boys peed all over me when I tried to change his diaper.

I quickly rocked Winston to sleep while he sucked on the tip of my finger. “You are so good with a baby,” Sally cooed in my ear.

“And I hope to get a lot more experience with them before having any of my own,” I replied. She sighed happily and rested her head on my shoulder. “I love our huge family, and hope we have a lot of kids of our own,” I added. That earned me a kiss.