Jaycee Woods

While drafting Boudica and The Butcher, the story was getting so big that I had to take a break to do some world building as the relationship story had developed. During that break, I developed more than a dozen short stories with other characters also struggling during the civil war. These were created as potentially teaser stories for this future story setting of a Second American Civil War.

One of those short stories became Harvest of Blood, the novel’s first chapter.

Many of these teaser shorts had similar plots varied by introducing different characters. So, I challenged myself to come up with characters who would drive different plots. One of those was Comrade Thumper.

She is a political officer in the rebel army who enforces ideological discipline. Before the war, she was just another radical Anifa protestor, but the rebellion gave her real power and authority.

In her short story, she interrogates a young female rebel soldier who had been sent into the rubble of Pilgerruh to search for food by her hungry squad. After determining that the young rebel soldier is no ideological threat, Thumper harangues her about politically correct attitudes and the evil of the male Union soldiers besieging and raiding the city. In the end, Thumper directs the starving rebel soldier to where Thumper had seen a dead rat that the soldier could bring back to her squad for dinner.

Comrade Thumper was partly inspired by Comrade Sonia in Ayn Rand’s novel We the Living about life in 1920’s Soviet Petrograd.

Copilot created the below image of how Comrade Thumper might look.