Untamable Resolve: The Witheridge Witches

Ch. 1 - Harvest

I hum to myself as I tend to my garden and snip sprigs of rosemary, thyme, lemongrass, and mint. I smile as the almost evergreen citrus scent of the rosemary sprigs I've freshly cut hit my nose before I store them in the folds of my apron.

Rosemary was my mother's favorite. As I take a deep breath, I feel the crisp chill creeping into my lungs. I find a sense of peace here with my hands caked in dirt.

The colder months are quickly approaching, and I know I must begin to prepare myself for winter. These herbs must be hung to dry out for teas and seasonings. I glance over at the last of my fall crops: sweet potatoes, tomatoes, and pumpkins. The season's final harvest will come in the next week or two. My neighbors warned me that it would be a long winter, and I don't have much of value to barter for food beyond one or two family keepsakes. My parents gifted them to me before the war. Last winter, we traded most of our extra furniture to survive, as it was our first year without my mother and her medical skills we had been using as currency. My happy mood falters at the thought.

I was a junior in college, just beginning nursing school, when life as I knew it changed forever. I'm not sure, even now, what the werewolves' ultimate goal was beyond their mantra: We Will Conquer, or We Will Die. They would accept nothing but unconditional surrender. The werewolves were nothing but selfish fascist fucks in my mind. I couldn't afford to think any other way for now. A world war is one thing, but when you added a supernatural presence to the mix... I thought it was some kind of sick April Fool's joke when werewolves came out on the world stage. My friends at college laughed about it at first, and then things got serious within an hour or two. Werewolves turned into our worst nightmares - super soldiers with the same technological capabilities as us, even more so because they had weaseled into owning every major defense contracting company. The war got bad fast, and it wasn't just on one continent it was everywhere. There was no escaping it. The last I could read before the internet cut off was that it was calculated that at least one-fourth of the human population would die from this conflict, and from what I could see, the statistics were correct.

I was luckier than most. I didn't have to fight. Not that I wouldn't have. I just didn't get the chance. I was sheltered from the carnage of the last four years of the war until recently staying at the cottage that my quickly aging grandfather owns. It had been in his family for generations, and he still had the original deed. Many were not so lucky. He is all the family I have left, as my parents were taken from us abruptly in the night to the camps a a year and a half ago. We still haven't been given a reason. It was on that night that more people than I could count had disappeared if they, in any way, were seen as a threat. And my mother was a threat. She tried to hide it, but I wasn't stupid. She kept a radio hidden and tons of maps in the cellar, and I could tell her and my father were keeping secrets from me. Probably for plausible deniability reasons.

My grandfather's ill health keeps me from being conscripted to work in the factories that the werewolves instituted on the outskirts of the city. They still allow male humans to own property, but no new property may be bought or transferred. Soon enough, werewolves will own everything. That was them being reasonable. With the elderly being the primary property owners that met those qualifications it didn't apply to the majority of the population. When my grandfather dies, I will be moved to the city nearby with the rest of the human population, under the control of the wolves. By keeping my grandfather alive, I hope to buy myself a year.

It hadn't been hard for the werewolves to take over; people had not been paying attention. I couldn't blame them. We were all struggling to survive. With the pandemic and the sharp drop in the economy, most had just been trying to hold jobs and put food on the table. We were vulnerable, and the wolves had been infiltrating our government and our businesses for years already. They had only to reveal themselves and take out those who opposed them, fatally crippling us. They had been planning this for decades. They abolished state governments in North America and introduced five districts, instead, to structure the land.