The Youngest Girl in the Tribe by Thomas Trang
from Dystopia: a PUNK NOIR Magazine series
She grew up in the shadows of a forgotten world.
Rusted oil derricks and abandoned wind turbines in the Permian—nothing but desertscape in all directions. Her mother died giving birth. She never knew her father. An isolated commune of doomsday zealots. When she could walk, they put her to work. Years of tending to greenhouse crops, food prep in the kitchen, then later manning the airwaves for signs of others. The youngest girl in the tribe. She taught herself to read at night with faded Time magazines. Stories of a dying planet and the men who did nothing to stop it. Her dreams were for anything but this.
They came for her when she turned fifteen. A woman now, they said. She had a responsibility. Their death cult had to keep on living. The first one grabbed her arm and she slit his throat. A warm jet-spray of blood painted the inside of the canvas tent. The other two were easier. They froze and she didn’t. Her screams mixed with theirs.
Then she ran and kept on running. Out into darkness, with a fire of hatred inside her for the old world lighting the path toward a new one.
This story appears as part of Dystopia, a PUNK NOIR Magazine series.
Bio
Thomas Trang is a French/Vietnamese writer currently living in the UK after stints in Australia, New York, and Singapore. His stories have previously appeared in FutureQuake, Full House Literaryand the Revolutions 2 anthology. He is currently working on a SF trilogy which mixes cyberpunk with the gritty realpolitik of The Wire and Cold War spy fiction.
PUNK NOIR, the online literary and arts magazine that looks at the world at its most askew, casting a bloodshot eye over the written word, film, music, television and more.
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